Excerpt
The following story ran in the Oct. 11, edition of the Dallas Morning News NeighborsGo. SMU’s Dedman School of Law and John G. Tower Center for Political Studies, along with The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, hosted the Warren Commission for a recent symposium on campus.
October 15, 2013
By Scott K. Parks
Five distinguished lawyers who worked for the Warren Commission, all gray-headed and amiably confident, sat in a row Friday and pledged allegiance to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed President John F. Kennedy.
“Truth was our only client,” declared Richard M. Mosk, a young California lawyer at the time of the assassination in 1963. “That was the motto of all of us.”
Mosk and his colleagues — Howard P. Willens, W. David Slawson, Burt W. Griffin and Stuart R. Pollak — took part in a symposium sponsored by Southern Methodist University and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.
Addressing an audience of nearly 150 at SMU, they reminisced about what it was like to spend nine months working almost 24/7 to produce, in Willens’ view, “the most extensive, thorough criminal investigation” in U.S. history.
In the end, the Warren Commission’s 889-page report named Oswald the lone assassin, making it an instant, and enduring, target for conspiracy theorists. The commission also concluded that Jack Ruby acted alone when he shot and killed Oswald.
Opinion polls have repeatedly found that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind JFK’s murder. But most in the audience Friday seemed to accept the lone gunman theory....