When President Lyndon Johnson created the Warren commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy he gave it two goals. One was to clear Johnson of any involvement and one was to clear the Russians of any involvement (and thus prevent any potential war). The Warren commission was able to declare both of those goals in their final report. Along the way were many interesting occurrences. The FBI turned out to be uncooperative due to J Edgar Hoover worried about things being disclosed about them. One occurrence was that an FBI agent tore out a page from the diary of Oswald because it mentioned him and the FBI did not want anyone to know that they knew about Oswald. The CIA (under Robert Kennedy) was also uncooperative because they did not want to disclose their plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. There were several people on the commission who did not get along with Earl Warren so it was not always easy to get consensus. There were also early leaks about the report which more than a little annoyed Warren. One of the leaks came from a member of the commission named Gerald Ford who was paid $1 million for an article that appeared in ‘Vanity Fair’. When the final report was published and many questions about a ‘cover up’ were circulating Warren once quipped ‘What possible set of circumstances could get Jerry Ford and me to conspire on anything’.

(Book – Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren – Ed Cray)