The Warren Commission Report

President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Warren Commission on November 29, 1963 to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy that evoked stunned reactions nationwide. More than two thousand books have been written on this topic in which a number of scholars have criticized the investigation of the crime and the Warren Commission Report. The two sources that will be evaluated in this paper are Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner (1993) and Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why by Gerald McKnight (2005). The origin of Case Closed is 1993 and its author, Gerald Posner, is an American investigative journalist, author of twelve books, and former Wall Street lawyer.

The purpose of McKnight’s book is to provide profound substance to “view the most thorough and devastating dissection” of the Commission 's work to date echoing the sentiment that “the Warren Commission largely failed in its duty to our nation” (McKnight 8). He contends The Warren Report was “little more than the capstone to a deceptive and shoddily improvised exercise in public relations” designed to prove that Oswald had acted alone (McKnight 12). Furthermore, McKnight argues that the Warren Commission 's own documents and collected testimony as well as thousands of other items it refused to see, or actively suppressed, reveal two conspiracies: the murky one surrounding the assassination itself and the official one that covered it up. The value of this book is that it is based on more than a quarter-million pages of government documents and the fifty thousand file cards in the Dallas FBI 's "Special Index”, becoming the starting point for future debate on the assassination (McKnight 1). The limitations of this books is that McKnight restricted his discussion primarily to Warren Commission findings, sidestepping later research supporting the Oswald-acted-alone scenario, particularly Gerald Posner 's 1993 study Case Closed, which answered most

On September 24, 1964, an eight hundred and eighty-nine page report, titled The Warren Report, was presented to President Johnson and released to the public three days later. The report concluded that the bullets that killed Kennedy and injured Connally were fired in three shots by Lee Harvey Oswald from a rifle pointed out of a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository (Warren 61). Oswald’s life, including a visit he made to the Soviet Union, was described in detail, but the report made no attempt to analyze his motives (Russell 43). Additionally, the commission found that the Secret Service made poor preparations for Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, failing to sufficiently protect him, and established that Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald with no connection to Kennedy’s death (Willens 5). These conclusions that Oswald was a “lone gunman” failed to satisfy some who witnessed the attack and others whose research found conflicting details in the commission’s report. Numerous conspiracy theories arose, involving suspects from the Cuban and Soviet governments, organized crime, the FBI and CIA and even Johnson himself (Knight 7). I am doubtful a suspect from the FBI or CIA conducted the crime, for there is no concise evidence supporting these theories. However, out of all the developing theories, the possibility of a second gunman seems