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KENNEDY ASSASSINATION. The commission dismissed recurring theories that the CIA was somehow involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy. The report rejects as "farfetched speculation" the claim that the agency had connections with either Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald or Nightclub Owner Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days after Kennedy's death. Similarly the commission dismantled the theory that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, a sometime CIA informer, had participated in the assassination. As evidence, proponents have cited newsmen's photographs of three men taken into custody by Dallas police after the assassination; two of the men, identified by police as derelicts, bear a faint resemblance to Hunt and Sturgis. At the commission's request, FBI Photoanalyst Lyndal Shaneyfelt studied the photographs and determined that they were not of Hunt or Sturgis. Moreover, the panel found no evidence that either man was in Dallas that day.
Nor could the commission find any evidence that Hunt and Sturgis had known each other before 1971. One unidentified witness asserted that Sturgis, born Frank Fiorini, had taken his name from the fictional character Hank Sturgis in Hunt's 1949 novel Bimini Run. But the commission found court records that Sturgis had changed his name in 1952 at the request of his mother, who had divorced his father and married a man named Ralph Sturgis.
Although it could not reassess all of the monumental Kennedy assassination evidence, the panel agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald had acted alone. Some critics have claimed that two bystanders' movies of the assassination recorded the indistinct images of other gunmen on a grassy knoll near where Kennedy was shot. But the Rockefeller commission found that the vague shapes were "merely the momentary image produced by sunlight, shadows and leaves."
One of the movies also recorded violent back-and-forth movements of Kennedy's head and body, leading some people to believe that he was struck by bullets from two directions: from the rear by Oswald and from the front by someone else. But medical witnesses told the Rockefeller panel that the movements were caused by a neuromuscular reaction to the bullet entering from behind and that there was no medical evidence that Kennedy was shot from any other direction. In fact, one witness said, the motions of Kennedy's body could not possibly have been caused by a frontal bullet's impact. The report said that the witness "attributed the popular misconception on this subject to the dramatic effects employed in television and motion picture productions."
RECOMMENDATIONS. To prevent future CIA abuses, the commission made 30 recommendations. The three most important:
1) Congress should establish a joint committee to supervise the CIA'S operations in place of the four subcommittees that have loosely and inadequately overseen the agency since 1947.
2) Congress should give "careful consideration" to making the CIA budget public "at least to some extent" to eliminate partly the pervading atmosphere of secrecy, which the commission considered to be "one of the underlying causes of the problems confronting the CIA."