Cover-Up

Earl Warren handing the completed Warren Report to President Johnson, 24 Sep 1964. Photo by Cecil Stoughton.
Earl Warren handing the completed Warren Report to President Johnson, 24 Sep 1964. Photo by Cecil Stoughton.

Much of the literature on the Kennedy assassination concerns itself not with who killed JFK, but why the government failed to investigate the crime properly. The failures of the Warren Commission, and the FBI and CIA on which it relied, were laid out in some detail by the late 1960s, mostly by individual researchers working alone.

In the mid 1970s, the Church Committee conducted an investigation into the performance of the intelligence agencies in informing the Warren Commission. Senator Richard Schweiker then had this to say on national television:

"I think the [Warren] report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards.....the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up."

What evidence is there that there was such a cover-up? Who was involved in it? Why did it happen?

Katzenbach Memo focuses on a high-level memo written the day of the Kennedy funeral, asserting that the "public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin."

Destruction of the Oswald Note tells the story of one piece of destroyed evidence, a note Oswald dropped off at the Dallas FBI office in November 1963.

Destruction of Records discusses the destruction of files on Oswald and on other assassination attempts against JFK.

RESOURCES:

Essays

How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, by Gerald McKnight.

The Creation of the Warren Commission, by Donald Gibson.

Lessons Learned from 40 Years of Coverup, by Rex Bradford.

The Art of Misrepresenting Evidence, by Stewart Galanor.

JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story, by Robert Hennelly and Jerry Policoff.

Proof the FBI Changed Documents, and Vincent Bugliosi Was Wrong, by Pat Speer.

The Design of the Warren Report, to Fall to Pieces, by Vincent J. Salandria.

The Three Oswald Deceptions: The Operation, the Cover-Up and the Conspiracy, by Peter Dale Scott.

Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again, by Michael Green.

The Fourteen Minute Gap, by Rex Bradford.

Traces of Witness Tampering, by Milicent Cranor.

The Tale of the Tapes, by Vincent J. Salandria.

 

Documents

Transcript of Face the Nation, 27 Jun 1976, with Richard Schweiker. This interview includes Schweiker's statement quoted above, that the Warren Report had "collapsed like a house of cards."

Church Committee, Book V, Section III: The United States Government Response to the Assassination: November 22, 1963 to January 1, 1964. Page 6 of this volume states that the Committee has "developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission."

ARRB Final Report, Section A: The Problem of Secrecy and the Solution of the JFK Act.

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