Warren Commission

Been a lot of talk on TV about the Kennedy assassination, new evidence, second gunmen, all good Oliver Stone material.
  I clearly remember the day Kennedy was killed.  Word reached us on the Franklin & Marshall campus.  It was just before my afternoon class in Civil War, taught by good old Frederick Klein.  We gathered in the classroom, Fred was clearly shaken.  He said a few words about now he understood how the country felt after Lincoln's assassination.  Then he dismissed the class.  Nobody said much, we settled in front of the dorm TV set to watch the news.  We got to see Ruby waste Oswald live.  And the state funeral.  Those were sad days. 
   Back then, the entire thing seemed fishy.    There was fear in the air.  1963 was the coldest part of the cold war.  Oswald's Soviet Russian connections were in the press, his Russian wife, his stay in the Soviet Union.  Every one still remembered Joe McCarthy.  If the citizens ever got the idea that the Soviets were behind Oswald, all hell would break loose, including a demand for revenge, leading to WWIII.
    They appointed the bluest of blue ribbon committee of investigation available to investigate and report what really happened.  Earl Warren, chairman, was chief justice of the Supreme Court.  You don't get more respectable than that.  The rest of the members were all household names.  They had full and enthusiastic cooperation of  FBI, CIA, the armed services, the Congress, the Dallas authorities, everybody.  All the witnesses (except Oswald) were still alive for questioning.  Events were still fresh in everyone's memory.
   We were disappointed in the contents of the Warren report.  Nobody liked the idea that JFK had perished at the hands of a lone nutcase.  But we accepted it, largely 'cause we figured the commission members were too honest and too patriotic to lie to us. 
    I still feel that way.  The fifty years of conspiracy theories of history from that time to this don't impress me.  I think the Warren Commission, had all the time, all the expertise, all the pressure to produce, that were possible.  I doubt that latter day revisionists will get it more right than the Warren Commission did right after the fact.   
   But they keep trying.  It sells movies.