Retired Judge Burt Griffin was a 35-year-old Cleveland attorney when he got an urgent call from Washington: Would he join the staff of a blue-ribbon commission empaneled to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
Griffin, a Yale Law School graduate and former assistant U.S. attorney, leaped at the opportunity to assist Chief Justice Earl Warren and other commissioners probe the president’s murder on November 22, 1963, and still takes pride in Warren’s exhortation that “the truth” was their only client.
But the commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone was been the subject of controversy – not to mention hundreds of second-guessing books – since its report came out in 1964.
Interviewed by ideastream’s Joseph Frolik on the 50 th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, Griffin – who spent 30 years on the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court bench – vehemently defends the work of the commission and its conclusions.
Burt Griffin, Retired Cuyahoga County Common Please Court Judge
