The Warren Commission

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy
Formation	1963/11/29
Founder	Lyndon Johnson
Extinction	1964/09/24
Type	whitewash
The Warren Commission, officially referred to as "The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Official Narrative

The commission fulfilled its function of determining Kennedy's killer, which it concluded, based on the best available evidence was lone nut and communist sympathiser Lee Harvey Oswald. A later US government investigation with more evidence available, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reached a different conclusion.

Problems

The Warren Commission was designed to approve the already firm FBI conclusions, and with a bit of extra process, it did exactly that. The Warren Commission had no investigative resources of its own, and it relied completely upon FBI investigators. The Warren Commission did interview witnesses, but it cherry picked the witnesses to obtain testimony that favored its preordained conclusions. Warren Commission staff attorneys steered witnesses away from relevant insights and also falsified testimony in order to cover up inconvenient facts that happened to poke through. As the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated, "the Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President." Standard operating procedure was violated multiple times both before and after the assassination, and few questions were asked as to why.

Members

JFK’s bitter enemy Allen Dulles was the most active member of the Warren Commission. Key other commission members active in the cover-up were Council on Foreign Relations Chairman John McCloy, Gerald Ford and Earl Warren himself. Mark Gorton, whose Fifty Years of the Deep State is highly critical of the Warren Commission, singles out Commission member Senator Richard Russell for praise, stating that he "was a man of great integrity, and despite his being LBJ’s mentor in the Senate, he insisted on issuing a dissenting report. However, Senator Russell’s report was suppressed and only surfaced decades later in his private papers."

Findings

The Commission concluded that Kennedy's assassin was "lone nut" Lee Harvey Oswald, himself killed by a "lone nut", Jack Ruby. The Commission also indicated that Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State; Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense; C. Douglas Dillon, the Secretary of the Treasury; Robert F Kennedy, the Attorney General; J Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI; John A. McCone, the Director of the CIA; and James J. Rowley, the Chief of the Secret Service, each independently reached the same conclusion on the basis of information available to them.