The Warren Commission

The argument

The argument that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy rests on the authority of the official inquiry rather than on a reconstruction of the events themselves. After the assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy and appointed Chief Justice Warren to lead the investigation. Proponents emphasise the standing of that appointment: the inquiry was not conducted by the agencies whose conduct might be in question, but headed by the most senior judicial figure in the country. The following year the investigation was completed and the entire report was made available to the public. Its conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and that he acted alone. Two features of that outcome carry the weight of the argument. The first is the scope claimed for the inquiry: the U.S. government thoroughly investigated and researched all possibilities and aspects of the case, rather than testing a single hypothesis and stopping. The second is publication. A report released in full is a report exposed to examination by anyone willing to read it, which is a different kind of claim from a finding announced without its supporting material. From these features proponents draw a conclusion about where the burden of proof lies. Since the official investigation was comprehensive, independently led and published in its entirety, and since it concluded that Oswald was the killer, citizens should believe this account in the absence of evidence that displaces it. The alternative, on this view, is not a rival explanation supported by a comparable body of work; it is the substitution of speculation for the only complete investigation that was actually carried out. The Commission's opinion should therefore be trusted, not because official findings are inherently reliable, but because this particular finding was produced by the most thorough process available and made open to the public that was asked to accept it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The conclusion from the Warren Commission cannot be trusted because the government excluded relevant information from the report. Warren denied other Commissioners access to Kennedy's autopsy photos because he believed them to be "too disturbing." There have also been members of the Kennedy family and other politicians who have spoken publically about disagreeing with the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] This does not necessarily mean that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, as the report left things out.