Dallas Police in police custody At the Dallas Police headquarters, officers interrogated Oswald about the shootings of Kennedy and Tippit; these intermittent interviews lasted for approximately 12 hours between 2:30 p.m. on November 22 and 11 a.m. on November 24. Throughout, Oswald denied any involvement and resorted to statements that were found to be false. Days later, Fritz wrote a report of the interrogation from notes he made afterwards. There were no stenographic or tape recordings. Representatives of other law enforcement agencies were also present, including the FBI and the Secret Service, and occasionally participated in the questioning. On the evening of November 22, Dallas Police performed
paraffin tests on Oswald's hands and right cheek in an effort to establish whether or not he had recently fired a weapon. The results were positive for the hands and negative for the right cheek. Such tests were unreliable, and the Warren Commission did not rely on these results. The Dallas police forced Oswald to host a press conference after midnight on November 23, and, early in the investigation, made many leaks to the media. Their conduct angered Johnson, who instructed the FBI to tell them to "stop talking about the assassination".
FBI investigation and President
John F. Kennedy are pictured speaking at the White House|FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover (pictured between
Robert and
John F. Kennedy in May 1963) wrote in a 1964 memo that "we left no stone unturned". On December 9, 1963, the Warren Commission received the FBI's report of its investigation, which concluded that three bullets had been firedthe first striking Kennedy in the upper back, the second striking Connally, and the third striking Kennedy in the head, killing him. The FBI continued to serve as the main investigative arm of the Warren Commission in the field. A total of 169 FBI agents worked on the case, conducting over 25,000 interviews and writing over 2,300 reports. The thoroughness of the FBI's investigation is contested. Bugliosi applauded its quality and cites conspiracy theorist Harrison Edward Livingstone's praise of the FBI's commitment to following all leads. In its 1979 report, the HSCA found that the FBI's investigation of pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, and any connections to Oswald or Ruby, was insufficient.
Warren Commission presents its report to President Johnson. From left to right:
John McCloy,
J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator
Richard Russell, Congressman
Gerald Ford, Chief Justice
Earl Warren, President
Lyndon B. Johnson,
Allen Dulles, Senator
John Sherman Cooper, and Congressman
Hale Boggs On November 29, President Johnson established by executive order "
The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" and selected Chief Justice
Earl Warren of the
U.S. Supreme Court to chair the investigation, commonly known as the Warren Commission. It concluded that
Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy and wounding Connally, and that
Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. It made no conclusions as to Oswald's motive, but noted his
Marxism,
anti-authoritarianism, violent tendencies, failure to form personal relationships, and his desire to be significant in history. Upon examining the Zapruder film, commission staffers realized that the FBI's gunshot theory was impossible. The reaction times of Kennedy and Connally were too close to have been caused by two bullets from Oswald: the reaction interval was less than the 2.3 seconds that it took to reload. This was one of the commission's most crucial findings: that a single shot caused the non-fatal wounds of Kennedy and Connally, known as the "single-bullet theory". In May 1964, staffer
Arlen Specter replicated the single bullet's trajectory via a reenactment in Dealey Plaza: the bullet's path was exactly consistent with Kennedy's and Connally's wounds. Out of the eight commission members, three—Representative
Hale Boggs and senators
John Cooper and
Richard Russell—found the theory "improbable"; their qualms were not mentioned in the final report. Conspiracy theorists labeled this theory the "magic bullet theory", partly due to the bullet's intact and purportedly pristine state. However, the HSCA's
Michael Baden noted that the bullet, despite its lack of fragmentation, was fundamentally deformed. As well as the Warren Report's 27 published volumes, the commission created hundreds of thousands of pages of investigative reports and documents.
Relman Morin stated that "Never in history was a crime probed as intensely"; Bugliosi concluded that the commission's basic findings have "held up remarkably well". According to
Gerald Posner, the Warren report is "universally derided" by the American public. Walter Cronkite noted that "Although the Warren Commission had full power to conduct its own independent investigation, it permitted the FBI and the CIA to investigate themselves—and so cast a permanent shadow on the answers." According to a 2014 report by CIA Chief Historian David Robarge, then-CIA director
John A. McCone was involved in a "benign cover-up" by withholding information from the commission.
Trial of Clay Shaw (pictured in 1951) was
acquitted by the New Orleans jury after less than an hour of deliberation. On March 22, 1967, New Orleans district attorney
Jim Garrison arrested and charged New Orleans businessman
Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of Oswald,
David Ferrie, and others. Both Shaw and the neurotic, avidly anti-Castro Ferrie were members of
New Orleans' gay community. Ferrie died, possibly by suicide, four days after news of the investigation broke. On
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1968, Garrison first publicly alleged that Shaw and Ferrie had been part of a
larger CIA scheme to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald. In the 34-day trial conducted in 1969, Garrison played the Zapruder film and argued that the backward motion of Kennedy's head after the fatal shot was indicative of a shooter in front of the Grassy Knoll. After a brief deliberation, the jury found Shaw not guilty. Lane's claims have been disputed by playwright
James Kirkwood—a personal friend of Clay Shaw—who said that he met several jurors who denied ever speaking to Lane. Kirkwood also questioned Lane's claim that the jury believed that there was a conspiracy: Jury foreman Sidney Hebert told Kirkwood, "I didn't think too much of the Warren Report either until the trial. Now I think a lot more of it than I did before." According to academic E. Jerald Ogg, the Shaw trial is widely regarded as a "travesty of justice"; Kirkwood likened the trial to a
Spanish Inquisition hearing. Other observers have characterized the proceedings as relying on homophobia. It remains the only trial to be brought for the Kennedy assassination. In 1979, former CIA director
Richard Helms testified that Shaw had been a part-time contact of the
Domestic Contact Service of the CIA, through which Shaw volunteered information from his travels abroad, mostly to Latin America. However, according to
Max Holland, some 150,000 Americans were contacts. In 1993, the PBS program
Frontline obtained a group photograph that featured Ferrie and Oswald together at a 1955 cookout for the
Civil Air Patrol: Ferrie had denied ever knowing Oswald.
Ramsey Clark Panel (pictured with President
Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968) found that two bullets struck Kennedy from behind. Excluding Chief Justice Warren, the members of the Warren Commission did not view the photographs or X-rays taken during Kennedy's autopsy. According to Warren, this was to avoid having to publicly release the explicit material to "sensation mongers". Due to persistent speculation, in February 1968, Attorney General
Ramsey Clark convened a panel of four medical experts to examine the photographs and X-rays from the Kennedy autopsy. Their findings concurred with the Warren Commission: Kennedy was struck by two bullets, both from behind. The commission received a mandate to determine if any domestic activities by the CIA were unlawful and to make appropriate recommendations; accordingly, it also re-examined the Kennedy assassination. first proposed that the backward motion of Kennedy following the fatal shot—which conspiracy theorists claim is indicative of a shot from the grassy knoll—was due to a "seizure-like neuromuscular reaction". After five months of investigation, the Rockefeller Commission submitted its report to President Ford. The report reviewed the medical evidence and agreed that Kennedy had been killed by two shots from behind. The later HSCA suggested that the "
propulsive effect resulting from brain matter" ejected from the exit wound may have been responsible. Pathologist
Vincent Di Maio testified before the HSCA that the notion of a "transfer of momentum" from a grassy knoll bullet was unfounded and something from "
Arnold Schwarzenegger pictures". The committee was to investigate all improper and unlawful actions by the CIA and FBI, both foreign and domestic. Due to persisting theories, the Church Committee organized a subcommittee (staffed by senators
Richard Schweiker and
Gary Hart) to examine CIA and FBI conduct about the assassination. In its final report, the Church Committee concluded that there was no evidence of a CIA- or FBI-led conspiracy. These revelations led to further public scrutiny of the assassination.
United States House Select Committee on Assassinations As a result of increasing public and congressional skepticism of the Warren Commission's findings and the transparency of government agencies, The HSCA conducted its inquiry until 1978 and issued its final report the following year, concluding that Kennedy was likely assassinated as a result of a
conspiracy. They concluded that there was a "high probability" that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll, but they stated that this shot missed Kennedy. Concerning the conclusions of "probable conspiracy", four of the twelve committee members wrote dissenting opinions. The HSCA also concluded that previous investigations into Oswald's responsibility were "thorough and reliable" but did not adequately investigate the possibility of a conspiracy, and that federal agencies performed with "varying degrees of competency". Specifically, the FBI and CIA were found to be deficient in sharing information with other agencies and the Warren Commission. Instead of furnishing all relevant information, the FBI and CIA only responded to specific requests and were still occasionally inadequate. Furthermore, the Secret Service did not properly analyze the information it possessed before the assassination and was inadequately prepared to protect Kennedy. In accordance with the recommendations of the HSCA, the Dictabelt recording and acoustic evidence of a second assassin were subsequently reexamined. In light of investigative reports from the FBI's Technical Services Division and a specially appointed
National Academy of Sciences Committee determining that "reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman", The act also mandated the creation of an independent office, the
Assassination Records Review Board, to review the submitted records for completeness and continued secrecy. From 1994 until 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board gathered and unsealed about 60,000 documents comprising over 4 million pages. A 1998 staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board contended that brain photographs in the Kennedy records may not be of Kennedy's brain, reportedly showing much less damage than Kennedy sustained. Dr. Boswell refuted these allegations. The board also found that, conflicting with the photographic images showing no such defect, several witnesses (at both Parkland hospital and the autopsy) remembered a large wound in the back of Kennedy's head. The board, and board member Jeremy Gunn, stressed the problems with witness testimony, urging people to weigh all of the evidence, with due concern for human error, rather than take single statements as "proof" for one theory or another. signing declassification orders in the
Oval Office, 2025 All remaining assassination-related records were scheduled to be released by October 2017, except documents certified for continued postponement by succeeding presidents due to "identifiable harm ... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations ... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure." but in April 2018—the deadline he set to release all JFK records—Trump blocked the release of some records until October 2021. President
Joe Biden, citing the
COVID-19 pandemic, delayed the release further, before releasing 13,173 unredacted documents in 2022. A second group of files were unsealed in June 2023, at which point 99 percent of documents had been made public. Three days after
entering office for the second time in January 2025, Trump signed
an executive order to declassify the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination within 15 days. More than 60,000 documents were released two months later on March 18. ==Conspiracy theories==