Good morning.
The work week ends with sunny skies and a high of seventy-eight. The moon’s a waning crescent with 45% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1964, the Warren Commission concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy:
Washington, Sept. 27–The assassination of President Kennedy was the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. There was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic.
That was the central finding in the Warren Commission report, made public this evening. Chief Justice Earl Warren and the six other members of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy were unanimous on this and all questions.
The commission found that Jack Ruby was on his own in killing Oswald. It rejected all theories that the two men were in some way connected. It said that neither rightists nor Communists bore responsibility for the murder of the President in Dallas last Nov. 22.
Why did Oswald to it? To this most important and most mysterious question the commission had no certain answer. It suggested that Oswald had no rational purpose, no motive adequate if “judged by the standards of reasonable men”….
Rather, the commission saw Oswald’s terrible act as the product of his entire life–a life “characterized by isolation, frustration and failure.” He was just 24 years old at the time of the assassination.
“Oswald was profoundly alienated from the world in which he lived,” the report said. “He had very few, if any, close relationships with other people and he appeared to have had great difficulty in finding a meaningful place in the world.
“He was never satisfied with anything.
“When he was in the United States, he resented the capitalist system. When he was in the Soviet Union, he apparently resented the Communist party members, who were accorded special privileges and who he thought were betraying Communism, and he spoke well of the United States.”
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about cells. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)