Why We Still Don’t Believe the Warren Commission

Abraham Zapruder’s movie camera was part of the evidence collected by the Warren Commission.

(NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

The Warren Commission released the official government report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in late September 1964—after an investigation of unprecedented scale, using the full resources of the Federal Government. The transcripts of all the testimony the Commission took weighed 54 pounds, and the supporting documentation swelled to thousands of pages. But the resulting report failed to gain the confidence of the American people, who persisted in believing that the November 22, 1963, murder of President Kennedy was part of a vast conspiracy. Why?

Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, organized the Commission to quell hysteria over a possible conspiracy and allay suspicions that Johnson had anything to do with the killing. The Commission was formed, in its own words, in “recognition of the rights of people everywhere to full and truthful knowledge.” Piloted by Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, it spent nearly a year in pursuit of that truth.

The report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald alone, had shot Kennedy, from the sixth-floor of the Texas Book Depository. It further found that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald as he was being led from the Dallas Police Department, had also acted alone. And it announced that there was “no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.”

The conclusion boggled the mind. Could a lone loser with a rifle just wander into a building a kill the President of the United States?

A cottage industry of anti-Warren Commission books sprang up almost immediately, and well-respected journalists (and some not so well-respected) started punching holes in the report. The Commission was accused of shoddy and cursory investigation, not following-up leads, and ignoring key evidence. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the London Sunday Times, called the report “slovenly.” He added that “the Commission, for whatever reasons, simply has not done its work … it has not established the facts; behind a smoke screen of irrelevant material it has accepted impermissible axioms, constructed invalid arguments and failed to asked elementary and essential questions.”

Trevor-Roper claimed the Commission had quashed dissenting opinions so it could rush its findings out as quickly as possible. The panel did work under intense political pressure to publish fast, and this could explain why it never fully investigated the possibility of a second gunman. When the famed Zapruder film of the shooting was analyzed, ballistic experts found that two shots could not have been fired as fast as Kennedy and Governor John B. Connally of Texas had been hit. Arlen Specter, then a young lawyer working with the Commission, proposed the much-maligned magic-bullet theory, that one bullet hit both men in a complex trajectory. People were skeptical that the pristine bullet found on Connally’s stretcher in the hospital could have done so much damage. (However, it was a military type shell with a metal jacket surrounding it, so it could arguably have withstood the impact.)

The autopsy proved to be another thorn in the Commission’s side. Rather than being autopsied in Texas, Kennedy, at his wife’s request, had been taken to the National Naval Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was autopsied by two doctors who did not specialize in forensics. When these doctors were brought to testify before the Commission, they did so without the benefit of their autopsy photographs, so their testimony could only be, as one reported, “to the best of my recollection.” The Commission instead relied on artist’s renderings that were taken “to a certain extent from memory and to a certain extent from the written record.” No photographs were included in the final report.

Harold Weisberg, the author of Whitewash, maintained that the Commission tried to persuade the doctors to change their statements by questioning them with maddening hypotheticals. In his review of Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane’s highly successful book attacking the Warren Commission, Norman Mailer gushed, “If one-tenth of [the facts in Lane’s book] should prove to be significant, then the work of the Warren Commission will be judged by history to be a scandal worse than the Teapot Dome.”

Charles Roberts, a respected Newsweek White House correspondent, was more skeptical. He claimed that if you read “17,815 pages, scraps of testimony and evidence—‘facts’—can be extracted to prove that almost anyone in Dallas that black Friday had a hand—or didn’t—in the Kennedy assassination.” Roberts claimed that the anti-Warren Commission books, with their own omissions and errors, led to a “worldwide seepage of confidence in the integrity of the U.S. government.” Lane and Weisberg were guilty, Roberts concluded, of the same crimes they accused the Commission of—selective reliance on the facts, shoddy reporting, refusing to follow-up on leads, and confusing their readers with a dizzying array of footnotes, appendixes, and technical jargon.

A flurry of anti-conspiracy books responded that the Commission had gotten the story right. These included Roberts’s own 1967 The Truth About the Assassination and Gerald Posner’s 1993 best-seller, Case Closed. In 2003, the fortieth anniversary of the assassination, ABC News conducted an exhaustive investigation of its own, using a computer-generated reconstruction of the crime. It too concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman. This had also been the finding of a CBS investigation ten years earlier.

But still to this day people stubbornly refuse to believe there wasn’t a conspiracy. An ABC poll conducted this year found that seven out of ten Americans believe Kennedy’s death was the result of a plot, and 68 percent believe there was some sort of official cover-up of the facts. These numbers have risen since 1967, when only 31 percent of Americans saw a conspiracy.

The Warren Commission Report was meant to put suspicions to rest about the Kennedy assassination. In that role it definitely failed. But could it have done otherwise? Only an impossibly flawless report could have comforted a nation that had just seen its leader gunned down. After all, the Commission was asking us to believe the unfathomable: that just one guy—someone not that different from you or me—was capable of bringing down a dynasty. A conspiracy would be almost less frightening.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.