Tim Madigan on the philosophers who investigated the Kennedy assassination.
It has now been almost 45 years since John F.
Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, on
November 22, 1963. In September 1964, the Report
of the President's Commission on the
Assassination of President Kennedy was issued by
the United States Government. It is generally
known as the Warren Report after Earl Warren, the
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who
chaired the Commission. Constituting 26 volumes
of testimony and evidence, the Warren Report
concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who caused JFK's death.
From the start, questions were asked about the
validity of the report. While initially a
majority of people agreed with the Commission's
findings, today well over two-thirds of all
Americans do not accept that Oswald acted alone,
while a significant number doubt that he was
involved at all. How is it that in a relatively
short amount of time, a report issued by such
seemingly impeccable sources has come to be so
widely disparaged? One major cause was the
skeptical critique brought upon it by philosophers.
It is a remarkable fact that three of the
earliest and most influential critics of the
Warren Report were professional philosophers
Bertrand Russell, Richard Popkin and Josiah
Thompson. Russelll, who was 91 years old at the
time of the shooting, was one of the first
prominent individuals to raise serious questions
about the report, even before it was completed.
<http://www.philosophynow.org/issue66/66madigan.htm>Link
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