The Warren Commission


The day after Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said, “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large; that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”  And thus began the government’s decision to lie to the American people about the true facts of the assassination, in order to protect the true killers.

            Formed under President Johnson’s executive order 11130 and Senate Joint Resolution 137, the Warren Commission was assigned the task of over seeing the investigation into the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. The Commission consisted of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Democrats Hale Boggs and Richard B. Russell, Republicans John Sherman Cooper and Gerald Ford, former CIA director Allen Dulles, former Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, and former Assistant Attorney General J. Lee Rankin. Known as the Warren Commission they would work with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies as well as assistant council which consisted mainly of private attorneys. After nine months of investigating the Commission published its final report, consisting of conclusions as to the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and biographies of the people involved, and a summary of the evidence supporting their conclusions. The Commission also published fifteen volumes of witness testimony and eleven volumes of exhibits.