Warren Report

Warren Report, 1964 report and conclusions of a seven-member commission that was headed by Earl Warren, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The commission investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and the murder, two days later, of Kennedy's accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by a nightclub operator, Jack Ruby. The 296,000-word report is based on a variety of sources, including physical evidence and the testimony of 552 witnesses taken over a period of several months following the assassination.

The commission was named by President Lyndon B. Johnson seven days after the assassination. In addition to Justice Warren, the commission included U.S. senator Richard B. Russell, a Democrat from Georgia; Senator John Sherman Cooper, a Republican from Kentucky; U.S. representative Hale Boggs, a Democrat from Louisiana; U.S. representative (and future U.S. president) Gerald R. Ford, a Republican from Michigan; Allen W. Dulles, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank. The commission carried out an exhaustive investigation and submitted its report the following year, on September 24, 1964.

The report’s main conclusions were that Oswald, self-styled Marxist and a former private in the U.S. Marine Corps, “acting alone and without advice or assistance,” had fired the shots that killed President Kennedy and that no evidence indicated that either Oswald or Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate the president. Despite the commission’s findings, speculation persisted that others had been involved in the assassination and that Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy by the Soviet Union, Cuba, organized crime figures, disgruntled CIA agents, or Cuban exiles in the United States angered over the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In 1979 a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, after reexamining the evidence, dissented from the Warren Report, concluding that there probably had been two gunmen and that a conspiracy was “likely.”