The Warren Commission Decided 2: Building a Commission

As promised, we are digging into the surprising story of the formation of the Warren Commission over the week succeeding Lee Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. Most observers assume that the idea originated with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose name was on the Executive Order creating the Commission on November 29, but that is far from the case. In fact, Johnson - and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover - initially opposed the creation of a presidential commission, preferring to leave the investigation up to the FBI in collaboration with Texas state and local authorities. So what changed? As it were, there was a plot of sorts. Indeed, a conspiracy. Individuals close to the CIA and the patrician Georgetown Set, with its swashbuckling imperialist cohort of OSS veterans, launched an intense pincer movement before Oswald's blood had stopped flowing. They swarmed LBJ and his closest aides and pressured them into creating a commission independent from Hoover's FBI. First, Eugene V. Debs Rostow - Yale Law dean and brother of JFK's hawkish advisor (and CIA asset) Walt Whitman Rostow - placed a flurry of calls to the trustworthy blue-blooded Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbch, who promptly hit the phones in favor of a commission in turn. Rostow also connected with LBJ advisor Bill Moyers to ensure the message reached the new President. Meanwhile, CIA-linked American aristocrat Joe Alsop made the pitch to Johnson directly, issuing veiled threats about forthcoming Washington Post OpEds and promising that the media Mockingbird would sing for LBJ if he followed Alsop's lead. The fix was in, and the coverup was underway. By November 25, Katzenbach submitted a now infamous memo calling for a report designed to achieve a very discrete goal, rather removed from solving the case of the Kennedy assassination: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial." Buckle up!