Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

The Commission’s seventh chapter examined Oswald’s political affiliations in detail. Arnold Johnson of the Communist Party USA, Louis Weinstock, James Tormey, and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party all testified that Oswald had made inquiries, distributed literature, or sought to contact their organizations. Oswald subscribed to the Worker and the Militant and read Soviet periodicals, but the Commission found that his interest in formal party affiliation was sporadic and that he was generally regarded as a nuisance or a curiosity by the established left. His attempt to establish a New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in summer 1963 culminated in the confrontation with Carlos Bringuier, the local DRE (anti-Castro) leader, on Canal Street, which led to his arrest and brief detention. William Stuckey, a young liberal who came to Oswald’s defense, testified about the scene, as did Lieutenant Francis Martello of the New Orleans Police Department, who had been monitoring Cuban exile activity. The episode illustrated the pattern the Commission identified throughout: Oswald sought out confrontation, distrusted established organizations of both left and right, and gravitated toward the margins of political life.

His journey to Mexico City in late September 1963, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban consulates seeking visas, is documented through the testimony of Silvia Durán, a Mexican employee at the Cuban consulate, and through Mexican government surveillance files. The Commission concluded that Oswald met with a Soviet consular official named Kostikov — reportedly a member of the KGB’s assassination department — but was rebuffed in his efforts to obtain a Cuban visa and returned to the United States frustrated. The Mexican surveillance photographs, circulated widely by the FBI after the assassination, are discussed in the appendix; the Commission found the man in the photographs was indeed Oswald.

The eighth chapter of the Report, beginning the section on the protective apparatus surrounding the President, surveys the history of assassination attempts on American presidents — from the assault on Andrew Jackson in 1835 through the wounds inflicted on Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and the deaths of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley — and the gradual development of presidential protection by the Secret Service. The statutory foundation of the Secret Service’s protective mission, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 3056, was traced through early appropriations acts of 1860 and 1902, the Secret Service Act of 1951, and the Presidential Protection Act of 1962. The chapter examined the relationship between the FBI, the Secret Service, and other agencies before Dallas, including the FBI’s pre-assassination handling of Lee Harvey Oswald. Agents James P. Hosty Jr. of the FBI’s Dallas office, John W. Fain, and John L. Quigley testified about the bureau’s contacts with Oswald from 1959 onward: his defection to the Soviet Union, his return, his distribution of Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets in Dallas, and the note he left at the Dallas FBI office shortly before the assassination, which Agent Hosty acknowledged receiving but which was later destroyed in the office after Oswald’s arrest.

The Commission’s examination of the Secret Service’s advance preparations for the President’s November 22, 1963 visit to Dallas drew on the testimony of agents Forrest V. Sorrels, Winston G. Lawson, and Chief James J. Rowley, as well as on the formal planning documents the agency provided. The motorcade route through downtown Dallas, the arrangements at Love Field, and the limited manpower available to cover the President’s exposure to crowds are discussed with attention to the absence of protective agents on the rear of the presidential limousine. The chapter further examines the legislative history of making assassination of the President a federal crime, tracing the failure of bills introduced in 1901 and 1902 after McKinley’s death, the inclusion of presidential assassination in 18 U.S.C. § 871 in 1913, and proposed legislation of the 1960s.

A substantial portion of the source material concerns Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub operator who shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters on November 24, 1963. Ruby’s background, his associations in the Dallas entertainment and Jewish communities, his finances, and his activities surrounding the assassination are documented through hundreds of citations to testimony, FBI reports, and physical exhibits. Witnesses who knew Ruby — Ralph Paul, Andrew Armstrong, Curtis LaVerne Crafard, Lawrence Meyers, Wanda Helmick, Helen Hulsey, Frank Bellochio, Rossi’s, Harry Olsen, and dozens of patrons and employees of the Carousel Club — testified to a volatile, generous, publicity-seeking man who cultivated ties to Dallas police officers and journalists, and who had been at Parkland Memorial Hospital and at police headquarters on the day of the assassination. Senator William A. R. “Bill” Senator, a close friend of Ruby’s, gave extensive testimony, as did Wilma May Tice, Seth Kantor of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, and Icarus Pappas, all of whom had encounters with Ruby in the hours before he shot Oswald. The Commission examined the allegation, raised by several witnesses, that Ruby had connections to organized crime, and concluded that while Ruby had been in contact with figures on the fringes of the underworld, there was no evidence he had acted at anyone’s direction. The polygraph test of Albert Guy Bogard, who claimed to have seen Ruby in a Dallas police car, was found unreliable.

The narrative running through all three chapters is the Commission’s effort to construct a comprehensive, evidence-based account of an event whose political and emotional reverberations have continued for decades. The Commission marshaled the testimony of more than five hundred witnesses, examined thousands of documents, and concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy and that Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. The footnotes compiled in this section — running from C6-1 through the C13 series and into Appendix X — represent the documentary scaffolding on which the Commission’s findings rest, and they remain the most extensive contemporaneous record of the events of November 1963 ever assembled.