Background
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he traveled in an open-top car in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas on Friday at 12:30 pm,CST (1:30 pm EST) November 22, 1963; Texas Governor John Connally was also injured. Within two hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit and arraigned that evening. At 1:35 am Saturday, Oswald was arraigned for murdering the President. At 11:21 am, Sunday, November 24, 1963, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail.
Immediately after the shooting, many people suspected that the assassination was part of a larger plot. Ruby's shooting of Oswald compounded initial suspicions. Mark Lane has been described as writing "the first literary shot" among conspiracy theorists with his article in the December 19, 1963 edition of the National Guardian, "Defense Brief for Oswald". Published in May 1964, Thomas Buchanan's Who Killed Kennedy? has been credited as the first book alleging a conspiracy.
In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and that no credible evidence supported the contention that he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president. The Commission also indicated that Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State; Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense; C. Douglas Dillon, the Secretary of the Treasury; Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General; J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI; John A. McCone, the Director of the CIA; and James J. Rowley, the Chief of the Secret Service, each independently reached the same conclusion on the basis of information available to them.
In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but concluded that the Commission's report and the original FBI investigation were seriously flawed. The HSCA concluded that at least four shots were fired with a "high probability" that two gunmen fired at the President, and that a conspiracy was probable. The HSCA stated that "the Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President."
The Ramsey Clark Panel and the Rockefeller Commission both supported the Warren Commission's conclusions, while New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison unsuccessfully prosecuted Clay Shaw for conspiring to assassinate Kennedy.
Read more about this topic: John F. Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories
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