Few things loom quite as large in the American psyche as the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy — a moment of deep national trauma and mystery with ramifications still being felt today. Now, more than half a century after Kennedy’s death, President Donald Trump has released a tranche of declassified documents “for the American people to know the TRUTH!” But that truth may be harder to find than Trump’s enthusiasm suggests.
With tens of thousands of pages released this week and thousands more yet to be made public, the Kennedy assassination document dump is a bonanza for academics, armchair historians and conspiracy theorists alike. After decades of ambiguity and alleged obfuscation, the declassified materials may finally offer some clarity. Alternatively, they may add fuel to the conspiratorial fires that have burned steadily for years.
What are the documents Trump ordered to be released?
Just days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order to “release all records related to” the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., saying it was in the “national interest” for the public to receive “transparency and truth” regarding the trio of high profile political slayings. Although the JFK assassination records have been long slated for publication under Congress’ President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, Trump included the other two cases in his order as being “also in the public interest.”
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So far there have been “about 63,400 pages” of JFK-related documents released by the National Archives, said The New York Times. It’s “unclear” how much of the information released so far is “actually new,” or if some papers had “previously been released in part or in whole.” Of the “over 6 million pages of records” now public, the “vast majority” has in some form or another already been made available, said The Associated Press. Many are “scans of documents” that appear “blurred” or have “become faint or difficult to read” in the intervening decades, USA Today said. There are also various photographs and audio recordings “mostly from the 1960s.”
What have we learned?
The documents have a “story to tell,” and the American public will “truly be shocked,” said White House Spokesman Harrison Fields to NewsNation. Despite such a prediction, it’s “unclear how much light” the documents will shed on “one of the great turning points in American history,” said The Washington Post.
The published files describe Kennedy’s “mistrust of the CIA, the surveillance of [assassin Lee Harvey] Oswald in Mexico City, and propaganda operations involving Oswald before and after JFK was killed,” said Jefferson Morley, an investigative journalist who focuses on the Kennedy assassination, to CBS News. Despite adding further texture and context to Kennedy’s death and the events that followed, “there is no smoking gun” or evidence to dramatically reframe the assassination, said Kennedy assassination expert Tom Samoluk to CNN.
If the records contained “anything that cut to the core of the assassination,” the government’s Assassination Records Review Board (which Samoluk helped lead) “would have released it in the mid-’90s,” he said. Many of the documents were kept secret or partially redacted not for fear of revealing new details about the assassination itself, said Columbia University historian Tim Naftali to The New York Times. Rather, they were likely kept secret to “mask highly sensitive details about CIA intelligence-gathering.”
What does the Kennedy family say?
Trump’s decision to release the files is “in part due to his political alliance” with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former president’s nephew. The younger Kennedy has “long called for more transparency about the assassinations that killed his uncle and father,” said CBS News. Jack Schlossberg, the last surviving grandson of President Kennedy, accused the White House and his uncle of “stealing history from present and future generations” in a series of posts on X. The administration “did not give anyone in President Kennedy’s family a ‘heads up’ about the release,” Schlossberg claimed, adding that RFK Jr. “definitely knew.”
