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JFK, The Warren Commission, & 'A Cruel and Shocking Act'

Philip Shenon's book explores “the secret history of the Kennedy assassination.”

By Matthew KresalPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Part of the assassination recreated for Oliver Stone's 1991 film 'JFK'.

In the more than a half-century since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, questions have been raised time and again about it. How many shots? Who was involved? Did alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald act alone or was he even involved at all? The Warren Commission, set up in the aftermath of the assassination and whose report was issued to the public in 1964, was meant to answer those questions once and for all. Instead, it would merely add gasoline to the fire of conspiracy claims. How and why that came to be is covered in this volume from journalist Philip Shenon who explores (as the book is sub-titled) “the secret history of the Kennedy assassination.”

The members of the Warren Commission presenting their report to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the summer of 1964.

First and foremost, this isn't a book about those still controversial six seconds in Dallas' Dealey Plaza. Instead, Shenon focuses on the Warren Commission and its investigation into the assassination. The book becomes the tale of its tumultuous existence across 1963-64 in which it was charged with presenting the facts of the assassination. An investigation that, as the book lays out, was effectively compromised from the beginning.

The central characters (for lack of a better term) of A Cruel and Shocking Act are the lawyers who did much of the grunt work of the investigation. They can be interchangeable at times as many where young, Ivy League-educated and it sometimes makes the narrative strands hard to follow. Yet what's important is that many of those still living only spoke about the investigation for the first time in the years leading up to the book's publication. They share some intriguing stories from William Coleman being sent out covertly to interview Fidel Castro on board the Cuban dictator's yacht to efforts to track down those who could shed more light on Oswald's time in Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Shenon also takes readers at times step by step through the investigation such as how Arlen Specter would come up with what critics would later term “the Magic Bullet theory.” The results are intriguing, at times feeling more like a legal thriller or spy story than a tale out of recent American history.

CIA Counter-Intelligence chief James Angleton's withholding of evidence from the Warren Commission is one of the threads covered by Shenon's book.

What is also refreshing is that Shenon is willing to make the admission that the Warren Commission was essentially compromised even before it came into being. Its existence was owed to a wish to disprove a conspiracy, so much so that Lyndon Johnson (who has become something of a leading suspect in recent years again) would pressure Earl Warren to lead the commission by telling him that saying anyone but Oswald being involved could lead to a nuclear war. It reveals how Warren did everything in his power to keep vital medical evidence from being put before the commission, apparently to protect Kennedy family privacy but would indeed seem to have another motive altogether.

It also shows that the truth was hidden, both from the public and the Warren Commission. In fact, agencies such as the CIA actively tried to hide either what they knew about Oswald (in the least sinister interpretation of things) or indeed possible involvement. Or how the FBI and CIA, through the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and James Angleton, sought to keep things secret for years and even decades afterward. While Shenon never goes so far as to say there was a conspiracy, he is perfectly willing to admit a cover-up that ultimately turns the book into what he terms “an account of my discovery of how much of the truth about the Kennedy assassination has still not been told.”

Being such an account makes A Cruel and Shocking Act an important read. In dealing with the Warren Commission, it reveals how an investigation meant to silence fears of conspiracy would instead come to fan its flames through a botched investigation that was indeed the rush to judgment that critics have claimed it to be. For that reason alone, it might be among the most important books written on the assassination and its aftermath.

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About the Creator

Matthew Kresal

Matthew Kresal was born and raised in North Alabama though he never developed a Southern accent. His essays have been featured in numerous books and his first novel Our Man on the Hill was published by Sea Lion Press in 2021.

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