A faithful reader in California on reflects on what you should know about the Warren Commission report.
“What you should know about the Warren Commission’s report is that it was constructed over the fault line between the post-war period and the Sixties.
“Therefore it could not have survived undamaged, regardless of the validity of its conclusions.
“The young staffers were smart lawyers but temperamentally not boat-rockers (the proto-hippie Liebeler being a consequential exception).
“Dulles’ expectation that nobody would read the volumes was an ‘old paradigm’ view, not anticipating the development of a research community and the decline of the traditional media.
“The WC had essentially no usable database or search capabilities – not even a Meagher index.
“Was the assassination itself the major seismic event creating the Sixties? Or was it the Vietnam War, or something else?
In any event, there were precursors and aftershocks — for me, I. F. Stone’s Weekly and the Free Speech Movement.”