The Commission - The BBC Documentary

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The Commission
The Documentary

President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas on 22nd November 1963. Shortly afterwards the 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, initially for the murder of a police officer. Within hours he was charged with assassinating the president. Two days later, although in police custody, Oswald was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

The new president Lyndon B. Johnson quickly set up a commission under US Chief Justice Earl Warren. Its job was to investigate the murder of the president and circumstances surrounding it. The Warren Commission presented its findings 10 months later. After the report came out in September 1964 critical voices soon emerged. The critics often asked if behind the scenes Earl Warren had been briefed to conclude that Oswald had been the assassin, that he had had no co-conspirators and that the murder had been the work of a deranged mind and was without political motivation.

It is 54 years since the report emerged and those who worked on it are mainly no longer alive. But Vincent Dowd speaks to three men who worked on the report, now in their 80s - Burt Griffin, Sam Stern and Howard P.Willens - who now openly consider its merits and whether it uncovered the truth.

Was their job to support a narrative which Lyndon Johnson wanted the American public to accept? Has anything which has emerged since the report’s writing changed their minds? And did the nature of the Commission mean it was always bound to deliver what was in effect a guilty verdict on a man who conveniently had taken to the grave anything he might have revealed had he lived.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csxgsf

Edited June 28, 2018 by Bart Kamp

[James DiEugenio]

I could barely listen to this, it was just so bad.

That whole thing about somehow the public cannot accept that a nobody like Oswald shot the president is so pathetic.

[Micah Mileto]

Posh British Lady: *narrarates smugly, despite having no grasp of the subject*

 

They did the same with both OKC and WTC.

Edited June 29, 2018 by Micah Mileto

[Joseph McBride]

There are certain BS mantras you hear over and over again in this case,

such as the one about a nobody etc., and it's hard to trace them back to their origins.

I think Manchester is responsible for some of these or at least for spreading

them so widely in his best-selling book. Another idiotic trope is for books

on JFK and his life (at least older ones) to leave out the name of Oswald entirely. They ostensibly did

so out of contempt for him and as a way of avoiding the topic, but I began to wonder if it was also a subconscious way

for the authors to admit that the truth lay elsewhere. You see the same trope in some

books on RFK that never mention Sirhan Sirhan. Such books often end before

their subject is killed, which is crazy.

Edited June 29, 2018 by Joseph McBride