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

The Protection of the President

Over the 100 years prior to 1963, four U.S. presidents were assassinated (Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy), and three other prominent political figures survived assassination attempts: Theodore Roosevelt during his 1912 campaign, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, and Harry S. Truman in 1950. This means one in five presidents since 1865 was assassinated, and one in three faced an assassination attempt. Prompted by these statistics, the Commission launched its inquiry into presidential protection practices at the time of Kennedy’s assassination to identify improvements that could reduce the risk of future attacks. The Commission’s review led to a 1964 Treasury Department planning document requesting additional personnel and resources for the Secret Service, which was submitted to the Bureau of the Budget for approval in August 1964.

THE NATURE OF THE PROTECTIVE ASSIGNMENT

The section outlines the inherently complex nature of the presidential protective assignment, rooted in the president’s four core roles: Head of State, Chief Executive, Commander in Chief, and leader of their political party, all of which require extensive public travel and engagement, a longstanding cornerstone of American democratic tradition. While absolute security for the president could theoretically be achieved through complete isolation from the public, this is incompatible with the demands of the presidency and core American values. Effective protection requires a deliberate compromise between security and the president’s need to interact with the public, relying on cooperation between the president, protective personnel, and the public, a framework outlined in a post-assassination memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

EVALUATION OF PRESIDENTIAL PROTECTION AT THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY

This section introduces the Commission’s structured evaluation of protective measures in place during Kennedy’s Dallas trip, organized around three core lines of inquiry: 1) the intelligence processes used to identify potential threats to the president in advance, including information available about Lee Harvey Oswald and failures to share that information with the Secret Service; 2) the adequacy of advance security preparations for the Dallas visit, largely led by the Secret Service; and 3) the performance of the protective team responsible for Kennedy’s safety on November 22, 1963.

Intelligence Functions Relating to Presidential Protection at the Time of the Dallas Trip

A foundational element of presidential protection is identifying and mitigating potential threats before they materialize, a function the Secret Service carried out via its Protective Research Section (PRS) and requests for information from other federal and local law enforcement agencies. The Commission concluded that the Secret Service’s threat identification systems were critically deficient at the time of the Kennedy assassination.

Adequacy of preventive intelligence operations of the Secret Service

At the time of the assassination, the Secret Service’s Protective Research Section (PRS) was a small unit of 12 specialists and 3 clerks, processing a rapidly growing volume of threat-related information (over 32,000 items in 1963, up from 9,000 in 1943). PRS maintained 50,000 manually indexed general case files (with no automated data processing) covering individuals flagged as potential threats, with 400 people subject to periodic status reviews, 100 classified as serious risks, and 12–15 considered highly dangerous mobile risks. The Service also had arrangements to be notified of the release or escape of roughly 1,000 incarcerated high-risk individuals. For the Dallas trip, PRS only reviewed geographically indexed files (the 100 serious risk cases and 400 under regular review), as the general unindexed files were not organized by location and could not be used for trip-specific advance planning. PRS’s criteria for accepting and retaining threat information were overly broad, inconsistently documented, and its limited staffing and manual systems undermined its ability to effectively track and respond to emerging threats ahead of presidential travel.

KAPITEL VIII.

Chapter VIII examines the intelligence-gathering and threat-assessment practices of the U.S. Secret Service and other federal agencies prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, with particular focus on the Protective Research Section (PRS), the FBI’s monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the systemic failures that allowed a dangerous individual to remain inadequately scrutinized before the Dallas visit.