Assassination Records Review Board
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The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy
Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board as “a unique solution to the problem of [government] secrecy” relating to the murder of President Kennedy. [link] Normally, in the United States, after a person is shot to death, a homicide investigation will take place that often culminates in an arrest of a suspect and a public trial where the evidence will be subjected to the rigorous demands of a criminal trial.
If the murder suspect confesses to the crime, the confession is read publicly in court and the confessed murderer is sentenced in a public sentencing proceeding. If the suspect demands a public trial and is found not guilty, the criminal investigation will often actively continue since in most jurisdictions there is no statute of limitations for the crime of murder.
None of these public proceedings took place after President Kennedy was shot to death on November 22, 1963. A suspect, named, Lee Oswald, was arrested on the day of the murder and charged with the crime. Oswald denied any participation in the killing and claimed he was being set-up as a "patsy." But, within a day of being arrested, Lee Oswald himself was murdered which eliminated a public trial to review and test the evidence against him and review evidence presented by Oswald that he was not guilty of the murder. Moreover, the federal government immediately took possession of all the evidence collected by the local law enforcement agencies in Texas which then discontinued any further murder investigation of the President.
Lack of the normal autopsy of President Kennedy
When homicides occur in the United States, most states require the local medical examiner to perform an autopsy on the body to determine the cause of death and to aid in the investigation of who caused the death. The president was shot to death by a sniper in Dallas Texas, but the local medical examiner was not allowed to conduct an autopsy on the president's body as required by state law . Upon the death of President Kennedy, someone ordered federal agents to seize the President's corpse and remove it from the hospital where the president was pronounced dead.
The body was then flown to Washington for what would become a highly criticized autopsy conducted by military doctors.[link] This military autopsy was conducted in secret.
The series of secret investigations
In place of such public inquiries of an autopsy by the official medical examiner and a criminal trial to rigorously examine the evidence in an open forum, the federal government conducted what turned out to be a series of secret government investigations into who shot the president, and why it was done. The secret investigations came to conflicting conclusions and the second major investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations was especially critical of the first major investigation done by what is commonly called the Warren Commission.
In the end, the public did not fully accept the results published by the secret investigations. About 70% to 90% of the American public do not accept some of the basic conclusions of the Warren Commission,[link] and this skepticism was shared by some prominent government officials including those who served on the Warren Commission itself:
Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings.[link]
The creation of the Assassination Records Review Board
By the late 1990's the secrecy and mounting criticism of the investigations into and questions relating to President Kennedy's death caused Congress to pass legislation on the matter. Congress passed legislation entitled The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Congress believed the 30 years of government secrecy relating to the assassination of President Kennedy had “led the American public to believe that the government had something to hide.” Congress believed the solution was legislation requiring government disclosure of “whatever information it had concerning the assassination.”
To collect the evidence, the legislation created the Assassination Records Review Board ("ARRB"). The ARRB collected evidence over the period of several years and produced a final report in 1998.
The ARRB's starting point
In Chapter One of its Final Report, the ARRB first started with the basic facts of the murder. [link] Beyond these facts, most additional circumstances are disputed:- At approximately 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, as President Kennedy traveled in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas, he was shot and suffered a massive head wound. Doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas pronounced the President dead shortly thereafter at 1:00 p.m.
- Later that day, Dallas police officers arrested Lee Harvey Oswald as a suspect in the President's murder. Oswald was also a suspect in the murder of a Dallas patrolman that had occurred that afternoon. By 1:30 p.m. on November 23, the Dallas police had charged Oswald with assassinating the President.
- Less than 24 hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby during the Dallas Police Department's transfer of Oswald from the city jail to the county jail.
The Board's work
The ARRB was not enacted to determine who or why the murder was committed but to collect and preserve the evidence for public scrutiny. After the enactment of the federal law that created the ARRB, the Board collected a large amount of documents and took testimony of those who had relevant information of the events. The Committee finished its work in 1998 and in its final report, the ARRB outlined the problems that government secrecy created regarding the murder of President Kennedy. [link]
During the 1990’s it collected the assassination documents which have been slowly released for public scrutiny. [link]
Some of the information was gathered by way of testimony from witnesses that had eyewitness knowledge of the events. For example, the Board interviewed the physicians who treated the president's massive head wound at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.[link] This was a highly trained team of emergency care physicians, some of whom testified in secret before the Warren Commission. These transcripts have now also has been made public. [link] Other information consists of a large number of documents from the FBI and CIA that were required to cooperate with the turnover of relevant records held secret by these agencies.
One extended news program on PBS’s Frontline, discussed what "arguably" could be the “most startling” discovery to date from the documents the public can now review. These consist of CIA documents establishing that some one was impersonating Lee Oswald trying to contact a "hitman" within 60 days before the Kennedy assassination. This information was known by the CIA, FBI and Lyndon Johnson within hours after Kennedy was assassinated. According to Frontline this information “electrified” top federal officials and “dominated their discussion in the immediate weeks following the assassination. It also became during the next 40 years one of the CIA's most closely guarded secrets on the Oswald case.” [link]
Not all the documents have been turned over, and not all of those that were turned over have been made public. [link]
External links
- [Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board], September 1998
- ["Lessons Learned from 40 Years of Coverup"] - lecture by Rex Bradford, November 20, 2004
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