Washington Post Still Selling Warren Report 50 Years Later

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Warren Commission report, the Washington Post published a slanted, confusing and needlessly complex retrospective in its Sept. 21 Sunday Outlook section.

The column Meet the respectable JFK conspiracy theorists by author Philip Shenon ignored many major revelations of the past half century regarding the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. Instead, it focused on minor matters to conclude, once again, that the Warren Commission correctly found that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to shoot the president with three shots from the rear.

Yet there are many well-credentialed experts who can explain in simple terms the serious questions remaining about the Warren report — if not flatly contradicting its conclusions.

The Assassination Archives and Research Center has organized an event from Sept. 26 to 28 at the Bethesda Hyatt Regency Hotel “The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination: A Half Century of Significant Disclosures.” It features nearly 50 speakers including me, plus professional actors re-enacting key parts of a long-hidden meeting of the commission.

In 1967, the late New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, shown at left, shocked the nation with his blunt, eloquent argument that the Warren Commission and the major media had misled the public about the cause of the killing.

Garrison ascribed the murder to a conspiracy of well-connected zealots determined to change American foreign policy by killing the president.     

“The conclusion of the Warren Report, that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, is a fairy tale,” Garrison said during an NBC News special in July 1967.

“This does not mean,” he continued, “that the men on the Warren Commission were aware at the time that their conclusion was totally untrue, nor does it mean necessarily that these men had any sinister motives. It does mean that the conclusion that no conspiracy existed, and that Lee Oswald was the lone assassin is a fiction, and a myth, and that it should be brought to an end.”

My column today shows the stark differences between the approaches of Garrison and the Post’s Shenon.

Those concerned about public affairs these days may find it beneficial to explore mysterious current events more in the spirit of Garrison, the only prosecutor who indicted anyone in JFK’s murder.