Conspiracy theorists see the world like a bad Hollywood movie, shadowy puppet masters pulling strings in every institution, from police to press to courts. In their version, everyone is compromised, and anyone who resists is silenced, ruined, or dead.
Their characters are one-dimensional. Need a shooter on the grassy knoll? Just drop one in. Need planted evidence or a fake investigation? No problem. Real-world details—how people get paid, what happens to them afterward, whether they could actually keep quiet—don’t matter. It’s make believe, not history.
Take Earl Warren. Most true believers know almost nothing about the man whose name they attach to “the cover-up.”
Warren served in the U.S. during World War I, then came home to California and spent a decade as a district attorney prosecuting everything from murderers to corrupt officials. In one famous case, he exposed a ring of local politicians and Ku Klux Klan members conspiring to steal from taxpayers.
As California’s Attorney General, he professionalized law enforcement and took on organized crime. He also shared responsibility for a national mistake: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—something he later deeply regretted and learned from.
Voters elected him governor three times. His reputation for honesty made him one of the most respected leaders in the country. President Eisenhower nominated him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and under his leadership, the Court delivered landmark decisions on school desegregation, prayer in schools, and Miranda rights. It became one of the most independent and reform-minded courts in American history.
When President Johnson first asked Warren to head the investigation into President Kennedy’s murder, Warren refused. Only after Johnson personally appealed to him in the Oval Office—arguing the nation needed unity—did he agree, and only on the condition that the Commission operate completely independent of the White House and every executive agency. Johnson accepted those terms.
To believe that this lifelong public servant, true believer in the Constitution, veteran, experienced prosecutor, and respected political figure suddenly became a stooge for some vast conspiracy is to ignore everything about him.
Conspiracy pushers like to say LBJ pressured Warren by hinting the Soviets might be involved and that exposing it could spark World War III. Johnson did worry about that possibility—he saw communists everywhere, even behind domestic Vietnam War protests—but Warren never believed the Soviets were involved or that he had to hold back on anything to save us from nuclear war. Nor is it remotely credible that he would sabotage his own investigation to protect the murderers of a president, for any reason.
Warren wasn’t even in the same political party as Kennedy or Johnson. Yet he respected both men and the office they held. He and his wife occasionally socialized with the Kennedys at functions and got along well. Imagine those dinners after the assassination, if any of them believed the others were part of a plot. Life would not have carried on as normal.
Jackie Kennedy even asked Earl Warren to deliver one of the eulogies for her husband. That alone tells you what she thought of him.
In his 1977 memoir, Warren addressed the conspiracy claims directly:
“In the assassination of President Kennedy, there are no facts upon which to hypothesize a conspiracy… none of us could find any evidence of conspiracy. Every witness who could be found was examined… To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States… with not one person of high or low rank willing to come forward to expose the villainy…”
Those words are incomprehensible to conspiracy theorists because they don’t see real people, only cardboard cutouts moving through a script. The idea that a man like Earl Warren would betray his country and throw away his integrity to protect traitors makes perfect sense to CTers, because no one is a real person who needs to be understood; they are all just characters who play the roles the CTers need them to play.
And Warren wasn’t alone. The other six members of the Commission were accomplished, independent men with reputations they had no interest in destroying.
- Richard B. Russell, senator and former governor of Georgia, was no friend of Warren’s and had to be coaxed by Johnson to serve. He insisted only that the Commission not claim absolute certainty, but he agreed there was no credible evidence of anyone else involved.
- John Sherman Cooper, senator and former ambassador, enlisted in World War II at forty-one and helped liberate Buchenwald.
- Hale Boggs, congressman from Louisiana, served in the Navy during the war before returning to politics and becoming House Majority Leader.
- Gerald Ford, congressman and future president, was also a WW II combat veteran who once led men below deck for hours in the middle of a fire to save the ship from sinking. Hardly the temperament of a cowardly cover-up artist.
- John J. McCloy, banker and statesman, had been Assistant Secretary of War during WW II and later High Commissioner for occupied Germany. He advised five presidents from both parties and was personally picked by President Kennedy to help negotiate nuclear arms issues with the Soviets.
- Allen Dulles, former CIA Director under Eisenhower and Kennedy. CTers love to talk about how Dulles was fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs disaster, but they ignore the fact that JFK actually kept Dulles on for many months, allowing him to be the CIA Director who dedicated the new headquarters in Langley, VA. They also seem unaware of the fact that Jack and Jackie were friends with Dulles and sometimes even vacationed together. Furthermore, the evidence shows his appointment to the Commission was recommended by the office of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, not by Lyndon Johnson.
These were serious men, veterans and patriots, from different parts of the political spectrum, different parts of the government, and different parts of the country. To accuse them all of treason, along with the hundreds of staffers, analysts, and investigators beneath them, is to pretend the entire U.S. government was a single monolithic evil that somehow kept every last participant silent forever.
That’s not history. That’s fiction.
No one controlled Earl Warren. And no one controlled the other dedicated public servants who worked with him to find the truth. The only people still trying to cover up the truth are CTers, who never cared about the truth to begin with.
Leave a Reply