Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

This research examines the controversy surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The research will set forth issue fronts that emerged at the time of the incident and that have persisted unresolved since that time, and then discuss how and why such dramatically divergent assessments of the assassination have formed, with a view toward identifying which assessment has the most credence.

The murder of JFK in Dallas fostered intense national desire to assign blame for the crime and bring those responsible to justice. One view of the assassination was articulated in detail in the 1964 Warren Commission Report (WCR) published pursuant to Executive Order No. 11130 of November 29, 1963, that "all the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin" be evaluated. Another view is that the WCR by no means answered the case, that an impartial review of the physical evidence dramatically contradicted the report's conclusions, and that, if Oswald was guilty of the murder at all, he was part of a conspiracy.

The essential facts of what came to be called the official story were that JFK was shot in downtown Dallas's Dealey Plaza from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository by an employee named Lee Harvey Oswald. Also shot was Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated in the front seat of JFK's motorcade convertible, with JFK in the rear seat. JFK and Connally were transpo

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lt to see how much more Garrison damaged the American psyche by his investigation than the CIA did by programmatically impeding it. In that regard, Lane says, "We cannot now determine if the verdict of the trial jury would have been different if the CIA had shared its information with the prosecutor in New Orleans." He characterizes the CIA's manipulation of the judicial record as obstruction of justice, itself a crime. Elsewhere, Lane says the WCR failed to sufficiently account for connections asserted by witnesses and documents between Oswald and the US intelligence community or between Ruby, anti-Castro Cubans in Dallas, organized crime, and the FBI (as an informant). Documenting the complexity of such connections, as Lane does, is beyond the scope of this report. One exemplar is a June 9, 1964, letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Warren Commission's general counsel describing a series of 1959 informant contacts between Ruby and the FBI's Dallas office. The letter, says Lane, resides as Commission Document 1052 in the National Archives but was not made part of the WCR. The whole effect is to raise more questions about the reliability of the WCR than it settles. Lane's evaluation of a key piece of physical evidenc

Category: History - A