Warren Commission

I want to respond to Joseph Ball's letter (Dec. 17) regarding the findings of the Warren Commission and his statement that "After 30 years no one doubts that Oswald killed Kennedy and wounded Connally." I hate to burst his bubble, but I've had doubts for years. While I don't know who killed President Kennedy, I have every right to reject the Warren Commission's lone assassin theory and will continue to have doubts about it so long as evidence surrounding the case continues to be suppressed.

On Nov. 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy was shot, NBC News producer and director Frederic Rheinstein was in a remote broadcast truck outside Dallas' city hall with his crew. Suddenly, a stranger poked his head through an open window. "He caused me to look up because in putting his head through the window he put aside a curtain allowing light into the otherwise darkened truck," Rheinstein later said in testimony before the Warren Commission, which looked into the assassination.

As a member of the staff of the Warren Commission, I have concluded that there may have been a conspiracy. It was not to assassinate President Kennedy. Instead, it has been by publishers and the entertainment industry to distort history for profit. The Oliver Stone film "JFK" is the most recent example. The Times' review of "JFK" (Calendar, Dec. 20) recognizes that the film is short on accuracy. But reviewer Kenneth Turan did not know by how much.

Almost all of the readers who responded to Michael Shermer's Op-Ed article Tuesday didn't buy his idea that psychology helps to explain why JFK assassination theories persist. Reader Stephany Yablow of North Hollywood wrote: "J. Edgar Hoover came up with the lone-gunman scenario within 24 hours of the assassination as a coverup. Lyndon Johnson backed it, demanding that the case be closed quickly. "The Warren Commission was political window dressing. It failed to thoroughly investigate, interview witnesses and experts and conduct forensic studies.

Regarding Richard Mosk's Counterpunch, "The Plot to Assassinate the Warren Commission" (Dec. 30): It is predictable that Mosk would be defensive regarding the film's questioning of the single-bullet-theory conclusion drawn by the Warren Commission nearly 30 years ago, a commission on which he served. Mosk took the predictable route of attempting to reduce the intent of the film's political inquiries to the high jinks of media moguls who would misrepresent historical facts in order to make a fast buck.

Richard Mosk is wrong when he states that conspiracy theories have run their course (Commentary, Nov. 11). All interpretations of the evidence in the Kennedy assassination are theories, because the murder investigation and the autopsy of the president's body were so blotched that we will never know what really happened in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. The Warren Commission's theory is that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired three shots at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. One shot missed and two shots struck the president.

Around the time of this 30th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, as at every preceding five-year interval, there were a number of television programs about the assassination. In a recent Los Angeles Times review of one of the programs, a PBS report on Lee Harvey Oswald ("PBS' 'Oswald' a Riveting 'Frontline,' " Calendar, Nov.

Joseph A. Ball, one of the country's most respected trial lawyers who was probably best known for his role as senior counsel on the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Thursday at St. Mary's Hospital in Long Beach. He was 97. Ball, a longtime resident of Long Beach, had a courtroom career stretching more than half a century. During that time he defended such notorious clients as Watergate figure John D.

A dozen lawyers from the Warren Commission joined former President Gerald R. Ford on Thursday in calling for disclosure of CIA files and all other government records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The lawyers, in addition to a former commission staff member, urged "the broadest possible accessibility" to evidence in the probe of Kennedy's death, which has been the focus of renewed attention since the release in December of the movie "JFK."

On March 27, legislation was introduced in Congress to release government files relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I, along with other members of the staff of the Warren Commission--which investigated the Kennedy assassination--have supported such action.

It was the assassination that launched a thousand conspiracy theories. Soon after President John F. Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, the "who killed Kennedy?" debate began, and 50 years later, it continues. There have been books, movies and television shows devoted to the topic. Never mind the official ruling of the Warren Commission, that fact-finding committee established by the U.S. government. The majority of Americans -- 61% -- believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone . That contradicts the commission's conclusion that Oswald, and Oswald alone, planned and carried out the killing of the president.

For a few years after seeing Oliver Stone's 1991 political thriller "JFK," I was an assassination buff. I bought one of the books on which the film was based: “On the Trail of the Assassins” by Jim Garrison. I reread “Libra,” Don DeLillo's masterful 1988 novel, in which Lee Harvey Oswald, assorted New Orleans spies and underworld figures conspire to kill the president. The assassination is the greatest mystery of our times, and in those books I found clues that left me feeling tantalizingly close to solving it. But 20 years ago I was cured of my conspiracy-theory fever forever.

A majority of Americans still believe there's more to President John F. Kennedy's assassination than the government concluded. Fifty years after the shooting, 61% think that, at the very least, shooter Lee Harvey Oswald didn't work alone, according to a new Gallup poll. But that line of conspiratorial thought has been on the decline, according Gallup.  The 61% marks the lowest number of Americans distrusting the conclusions of the Warren Commission, the federal investigation into the shooting.

As one of the surviving members of the staff of the Warren Commission, which investigated and issued a report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I am not looking forward to the coming weeks: Nov. 22 will mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's death, and that means a new round of demonizing the Warren Commission and celebrating fallacious conspiracy theories. After Chief Justice Earl Warren hired me to work for the commission, he told me that "truth was our only client.

DALLAS - I hadn't been standing in Dealey Plaza more than five minutes when I watched a man dash out into the street to pose for a picture. He was heading straight for a white X in the pavement that marks the location of John F. Kennedy's limousine when the 35th president was fatally shot on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. The man stopped on the X, adjusted his feet and smiled. Then he looked nervously in the direction of oncoming traffic before running back to the safety of the sidewalk.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I learned about the paranoid style of American politics from the Kennedy assassination. Between seventh grade, when I discovered the Warren Commission report, and my junior year in high school, when I wrote a term paper "proving" that there had been three gunmen in Dealey Plaza, I was a kid obsessed. I read every book about the assassination I could get my hands on; I bought a bootleg Super 8 copy of the Zapruder film from the classifieds in Argosy magazine.

Sorry, conspiracy theorists, modern forensic science shows that John F. Kennedy was likely killed by "one guy with a grudge and a gun," said professor John McAdams during a panel for Nova's new "Cold Case: JFK" on Wednesday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills. McAdams, who wrote the book "JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy," was joined on the PBS panel by the show's director, Rush DeNooyer, as well as firearms experts Lucien and Michael Haag, who conducted much of the scientific research used in the show to prove that a single bullet, could, in fact, have killed JFK and wounded Texas Gov. John Connally.