Warren Commission investigator reverses stance; now believes JFK assassination was a conspiracy

Fifty-one years ago this winter, working from a cramped, paper-strewn temporary office on Capitol Hill, a fresh-faced 33-year-old Denver lawyer named David Slawson was earning his place in modern American history.

It was President John F. Kennedy’s assassination that brought Slawson to Washington. In January 1964, two months after JFK’s murder in Dallas, Slawson was part of a small group of hotshot young lawyers recruited to the capital to join the hastily organized staff of the Warren Commission, the panel convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate his predecessor’s death.

The lawyers, most only a few years out of law school, would do the bulk of the commission’s detective work in determining how and why the president had been killed. And the Harvard-educated Slawson, in particular, had an extraordinary assignment on the staff. Although he had no background in foreign affairs or law enforcement, he was responsible—at times, single-handedly—for the search for evidence of a foreign conspiracy in the assassination. When the commission issued a final report, in September 1964, that identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin and effectively ruled out any conspiracy, foreign or domestic, Slawson was satisfied. “I was convinced—then—that we had it right,” he told me last year.

For most of the next five decades, Slawson, who went on to a distinguished teaching career at the law school at the University of Southern California, tried to put his work on the commission behind him, even as the national debate about the Kennedy assassination and the legacy of the Warren Commission continued to rage. He was content mostly to keep his silence, continuing to believe that nothing had undermined the commission’s essential finding that Oswald was, in Slawson’s words, a “true lone wolf” who had acted without the knowledge or encouragement of others—that there was no conspiracy.

Today, however, Slawson’s silence has ended once and for all. Half a century after the commission issued an 888-page final report that was supposed to convince the American people that the investigation had uncovered the truth about the president’s murder, Slawson has come to believe that the full truth is still not known. Now 83, he says he has been shocked by the recent, belated discovery of how much evidence was withheld from the commission—from him, specifically—by the CIA and other government agencies, and how that rewrites the history of the Kennedy assassination.

Slawson is now wrestling with questions he hoped he would never have to confront: Was the commission’s final report, in fundamental ways, wrong? And might the assassination threat have been thwarted? The commission, he believes, was the victim of a “massive cover-up” by government officials who wanted to hide the fact that, had they simply acted on the evidence in front of them in November 1963, the assassination might have been prevented. “It’s amazing—it’s terrible—to discover all of this 50 years late,” says Slawson, whose health is still good and whose memories of his work on the commission remain sharp.