30 years ago today in 1963, JFK was fatally shot in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Within a few weeks, President Johnson signed executive order 11130 to create a Presidential Commission, popularly known as the “Warren Commission,” charged with investigating what happened, who did it, and why. They produced a report1 concluding that a single person, acting alone, committed the crime. By 1976 after people had a chance to read the and to digest the report, only 11% of Americans polled by Gallup believed this conclusion.
In 1978, Congress chartered another commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)2, to further sift the evidence. The HSCA concluded that while Lee Harvey Oswald fired shots that struck the President, others were involved who fired shots from in front of the motorcade, that there was a conspiracy, but that evidence was not adequate to demonstrate who the other people or organizations were (although organized crime figures were suspected).
The whole thing is strange. The materials supporting the Warren conclusion were declared to be secret and to this day, 60 years later, have not been fully revealed to the public.
I have a personal interest in this controversy because in 1979 I worked with G. Robert Blakey, the chief Counsel to the HSCA. I was working on a project under contract with a Federal Agency to explore the feasibility of associative data queries, which was an early technical precursor to what we now know as Google search (although unrelated to Google). My project with him was not about the Kennedy assassination, but we discussed it during our down times. He thought the Chicago mob did it, and that they had set up Oswald as a patsy. The mob did not want Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to go after them.
The other primary theory is that CIA, with help from some members of the FBI, was behind it because they did not want Kennedy to curtail our involvement in the Vietnam war. Allen Dulles, a key member of the Commission, was the head of the CIA at the time, and had tight control over what evidence was considered by the Warren Commission. The CIA was uniquely in a position to hide evidence. I am partial to this explanation today, but you can pick your favorite. All any of us know for sure is that the Warren Commission conclusion is not credible.
Grandpa Dave Reads the News 