(6 of 6)
For all that, the Warren Commission was neither perfect in its procedure nor airtight in its presentation of evidence. There is some justice to the critics' contentions that staff lawyers felt rushed, that there were intense deadline pressures and that every loose-end lead was not neatly tied up. The commission might have prevented some of the current criticism if it had appointed a kind of devil's advocate to challenge evidence aggressively on behalf of the assassin. Many of the complaints against it, of course, concern the inevitable flaws that accompany any juridical proceeding: contradictions, loopholes, gaps of fact and, especially in the case of such a shattering episode as an assassination, some confusion and forgetfulness on the part of shocked witnesses.
Yet, for the time it took and the methods it used, the commission did an extraordinary job. Its use of trial-lawyer techniques in tandem with a historian's speculative interpretation of facts worked better than either method would have worked alone, even if it did not completely please the backers of either. Although its conclusions are being assailed, they have not yet been successfully contradicted by anyone. Despite all the critics' agonizing hours of research, not one has produced a single significant bit of evidence to show that anyone but Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer, or that he was involved in any way in a conspiracy with anyone else.