Dallas Morning News : He had no doubts that Oswald acted alone

He had no doubts that Oswald acted alone

Warren Commission found no conspiracy proof, Ford insisted

Staff | December 28, 2006

Gerald Ford, who was the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, never changed his mind about who shot John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

"We made two fundamental decisions, and I agree with them today as I did before," Mr. Ford told USA Today in 2000. "No. 1, Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. And two, the commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. And in my judgment, there has been no new evidence that would undercut those two conclusions."

President Lyndon Johnson asked him to serve on the seven-member commission, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

"I tried my darnedest to say no, but you know how Lyndon was," Mr. Ford told USA Today. "He said it's your patriotic duty and all that stuff, and I finally said OK."

In his autobiography, A Time to Heal, Mr. Ford said he didn't know how he would juggle his duties in the House with the panel's responsibilities, including listening to hundreds of hours of testimony from 552 witnesses.

The investigation brought Mr. Ford and Justice Warren to Dallas in June 1964, where they interviewed Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Oswald. Ruby, whom Mr. Ford described as an "unstable person," rambled but told them little.

At the Texas School Book Depository Building, they stood where Oswald was believed to have fired the fatal shots.

"We had a rifle similar to the one he'd used; we picked it up and through the scope sighted the cars passing by on the expressway below. Kennedy had been my friend. The thought that we were reconstructing his assassination sent a chill down my spine," Mr. Ford wrote in his autobiography.

Panel members had heard rumors linking the FBI and CIA to the assassination but found no connection between those agencies and Oswald. "As regards to the possibility that the Soviets or the Cubans might have been involved, we checked every allegation to the best of our ability and came up with nothing tangible," he wrote.

The Warren Commission members and staff, however, disagreed over the conspiracy wording.

"The staff wanted us to say that there was no conspiracy, either foreign or domestic," Mr. Ford recalled in A Time to Heal. But he and two other members thought that was too strong and persuaded the others to change it.

"The final report read that the commission 'has found no evidence of a conspiracy.' That, in my opinion, was far more accurate. When the report came out, critics charged that it was a whitewash, that we had covered up government complicity in the president's death. ... Nonsense!" he wrote.

Mr. Ford said the controversy will never end. "They are still arguing about Abraham Lincoln's assassination, so they'll be doing this on Kennedy for the next 100 years as well," he told USA Today.