The Kennedy Assassination What The Warren Report

The Kennedy Assassination: What The Warren Report Did Not Tell America Essay, Research Paper

Matt Bogue

November 24, 1998

The Kennedy Assassination: What the Warren Report Did Not Tell America

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was travelling along a predetermined motorcade route in Dallas, Texas when he was fatally shot, receiving wounds to the chest, back, and head. Shortly after the assassination, Dallas police arrested former U.S. Marine Corps Private Lee Harvey Oswald. On November 24 of the same year, Jack Ruby, owner of a Dallas nightclub, shot Oswald. Less than a year after the two murders, on September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, released a report stating their verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy “alone and without advice or assistance” (Encarta). Now, thirty-five years after the assassination, many Americans still believe the commission’s claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of President Kennedy. However, all evidence points toward the more frightening reality that the United States government might have been involved in a conspiracy to kill the president and an ensuing cover-up. Thus, the question still remains: Who really killed J.F.K.? The day of President Kennedy’s assassination, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn into the office of president while flying back to Washington on Air Force One. Seven days later, Johnson appointed a commission of seven members,

headed by Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. After questioning 552 witnesses, the Warren Commission released their 296,000-word report on September 24, 1964 (Encarta).

The Warren Report stated that Lee Harvey Oswald fired all three of the shots that killed President Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository. This conclusion was accepted by the nation as proven fact until educated questions began to arise and the public became aware of a possible conspiracy. Could the Warren Report have been wrong? One of the many eyewitnesses that the commission leaned on heavily could not even pick Oswald out of a group of suspects. This was ironic because it was the same witness who supposedly saw Oswald actually shoot President Kennedy. Another piece of evidence that contradicted the Warren Report was a paraffin test taken of Oswald’s right cheek. This test was used to tell if he could have possibly fired the rifle. It was not until after the test came out negative that the commission called it unreliable (O’Toole 7). In a 1970 CBS-TV interview, President Lyndon B. Johnson stated that he doubted the commission’s “single assassin” theory. Before the interview was aired, he asked for that part to be deleted and withheld from the public for the sake of “national security.” Johnson also added in a 1971 interview with Leo Janos, “I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger. . . .we had been operating a . . .Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” (O’Toole 8). These testimonies are not all of the evidence indicating that Oswald was not the only assassin. Jesse Curry, chief of the Dallas Police Department at the time of the murder, adds:

I don’t have a strong feeling that there was someone there [the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza], but, on the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me at some point in history, that proof will show that there was somebody up there. (O’Toole 7)

Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell stated in January of 1970 that he had never believed that Oswald acted alone because there was too much evidence against that claim. His opinion is significant because he was part of the Warren Commission. He had supposedly attempted to persuade Warren to add his opinion to the report but Warren insisted on a “unanimous report” (O’Toole 8).

In addition to the extensive evidence that lay to rest the claim that Oswald was the only assassin, there exists evidence that implies that he had nothing to do with Kennedy’s assassination. The evening of the murder, Oswald denied killing President Kennedy. George O’Toole later processed these denials on the Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), which is more commonly called the “lie detector.” Oswald’s statement that he did not kill the president showed nearly no stress at all. When testing on the PSE, stress is a necessary part of lying, but can be caused by another distraction. This information put together leads one to believe that Oswald was telling the truth when he denied shooting President Kennedy. However, because of the simplicity of this discovery, O’Toole doubted the integrity of the PSE. To get rid of this doubt, he ran another copy of the same quote made by Oswald through the PSE. This copy was taken by a different microphone, but revealed identical stress to the first copy, thus

indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald must have been telling the truth (O’Toole 125). Another source of evidence that Oswald was innocent involved the alleged murder weapon and his ability to fire the rifle. In an experiment done by Howard Roffman, Oswald would have had to be a better shot than twelve out of fifteen expert FBI riflemen in order to fire all three shots in the allotted time period. This feat seems impossible given the fact that Oswald was considered a “poor shot” when he left the marines. This evidence is even more stunning considering the murder