[2] The U.S. Congress passed Senate Joint Resolution 137 authorizing the Presidential appointed Commission to report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, mandating the attendance and testimony of witnesses and the production of evidence.

[9] The creation of the Warren Commission was a direct consequence of the murder by Jack Ruby of the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, carried live on national television in the basement of the Dallas police station.

Confronted with the results obtained by the Texas authorities, themselves seriously discredited and criticized, he decided after various consultations, including in particular that with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to create a presidential commission of inquiry by Executive Order 11130 of November 29, 1963.

[11] On November 25 he sent a memo to Johnson's White House aide Bill Moyers recommending the formation of a Presidential Commission to investigate the assassination.

"[12] Four days after Katzenbach's memo, Johnson appointed to the commission some of the nation's most prominent figures, including Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States.

It was only under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson, who spoke of international tensions and the risks of war resulting from the death of his predecessor, that he agreed to chair the commission.

[10] The other members of the commission were chosen from among the representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties, in both houses of Congress, and added diplomat John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank, and former CIA director Allen Dulles.

While the Commission noted that the prime responsibility was that of the police department, it also recommended the adoption of a new "code of conduct" for news professionals regarding the collecting and presenting of information to the public that would ensure "there [would] be no interference with pending criminal investigations, court proceedings, or the right of individuals to a fair trial.

[21] In November 1964, two months after the publication of its 888-page report, the commission published twenty-six volumes of supporting documents, including the testimony or depositions of 552 witnesses[22] and more than 3,100 exhibits[23] making a total of more than 16,000 pages.

The unpublished portion of those records was initially sealed for seventy-five years (to 2039) under a general National Archives policy that applied to all federal investigations by the executive branch of government,[25] a period "intended to serve as protection for innocent persons who could otherwise be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case.

The report concluded, "In the long term, the decision of John McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA's anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the Commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation.

[36] Many independent investigators, journalists, historians, jurists, and academics issued opinions opposing the conclusions of the Warren commission based on the same elements collected by its works.

In reality, the people present, including a dozen members of the security forces, in particular Sheriff Decker's team, who had given the order to investigate the area, all testified that they were running to search for one or more shooters posted on the grassy Knoll.

Thus the Warren Commission was not informed by the FBI of the discovery the day after the attack, on November 23, 1963, by a medical student, William Harper, of a piece of occiput located at the rear left in relation to at the position of the presidential limo during the fatal shot to the head.

[10] The revelation by Edward Jay Epstein, in his book Inquest published in 1966,[39] that as early as the beginning of 1964, the chief adviser, J. Lee Rankin, had given the outcome of the results of the work of the commission: guilt of Oswald, the latter having acted alone.

Even before the creation of the commission, on November 25, 1963, and a few hours after the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in the premises of the Dallas police, Nicolas Katzenbach, assistant attorney general, had indicated in a memorandum intended of Bill Moyers that: "The public must be convinced that Oswald was the killer; that he had no accomplices still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been found guilty at trial"[40] creating a political orientation of the results of the investigation, even before the start of the first official investigations and knowledge of the results.

[citation needed] Russell also particularly rejected Arlen Specter's "single bullet" theory, and he asked Earl Warren to indicate his disagreement in a footnote, which the chairman of the commission refused.

In 1975, the Church Committee was created per US Senate after the revelations about illegal actions of federal agency as the FBI, CIA and IRS on the territory of the United States of America and after the political Watergate scandal.

It focuses on the necessary actions and the support provided by the FBI and the CIA to the Warren Commission and raises the question of the possible connection between the plans to assassinate political leaders abroad, in particular in relation to Fidel Castro in Cuba, a huge point of international tension in the 1960s, and that of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

The Church Committee questioned the process of obtaining the information, blaming federal agencies for failing in their duties and responsibilities and concluding that the investigation into the assassination had been flawed.

The results of the Church Committee opened the way of the creation of the HSCA, with parallelly the March 6, 1975, first time diffusion on network television in the show Good Night America of the Zapruder film, which had been stored by Life magazine and never shown to the public during the preceding twenty years.

[46] The HSCA determined that the gradual change in policy of the Kennedy administration toward Cuba, first with the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, then more sustainably with the missile crisis of October 1962, in order to appease relations with the Cuban regime on a lasting basis and to open up new prospects, contributed to directing, if not slightly, within the many groups of paramilitary operations the most radical fringe of anti-Castro Cubans, American intelligence agents and Mafia criminals who continued their operations to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro despite requests for formal arrests from the White House.