Warren Commission founded by Lyndon B. Johnson
Formation
The creation of the Warren Commission was a direct consequence of the murder by Jack Ruby of the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on 24 Nov 1963, carried live on national television in the basement of the Dallas police station.
With the impossibility of a public process associated to the mistakes of the Dallas Police Forces, which concluded that the case was closed, the doubt progressed in the public opinion.The new president, Lyndon Johnson, himself from Texas, the state where the double assassination had taken place, faced with the risks of a weakening of his presidency and confronted with the results obtained by the Texas authorities, themselves seriously discredited and criticized, decided, after various consultations including in particular that of J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, to create a presidential commission of inquiry by decree (executive order no. 11 130) of November 29, 1963. This act allowed to avoid an independent investigation led by Congress and on the other hand not to entrust the case to the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, deeply affected by the assassination and whose federal jurisdiction would have been applied in the event of withdrawal of the share of the State of Texas for the benefit of the federal authorities in Washington.At the same time, Nicholas Katzenbach has been named as providing advice after the assassination of John F. Kennedy that led to the creation of the Warren Commission. 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. To combat speculation of a conspiracy, Katzenbach said that the results of the FBI's investigation should be made public. He wrote, in part: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large".Four days after Katzenbach's memo, Johnson appointed some of the nation's most prominent figures, including Earl Warren, the current Chief Justice of the United States, to the Commission. At first, Warren refused to take the head of the commission because he stated the principle of law that a member of the judicial power could not be at the service of the executive power. 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.The other members of the commission were chosen from among the representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties, in both chambers (Senate and House of Representatives). added diplomat John J. McCloy, former president of the World Bank and former CIA director, Allen Dulles, sacked by John F Kennedy in November 1961, following the resounding failure of the Bay Pigs Invasion in April 1961.