Tag: Release

“The assassination of President Kennedy is a sore spot in American history … and I don’t know how that gets resolved, to be honest,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation in Ipswich, Mass., the largest electronic archive of documents on the assassinations of the 1960s. “The best the government can do is what they’ve been partially doing and maybe will complete, which is say, ‘OK, we’ve gone through all our files. Here’s what we have. It’s up to history to decide now.’”

But the release of those records, which were supposed to all have been made public by 2017, should go a long way to removing doubts in the minds of many people, said John R. Tunheim, a Minnesota federal judge who chaired the federal Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s that Congress created to help find and release all the Kennedy files.

“I don’t think it’ll end it completely because Americans, and indeed citizens around the world, love to dig into conspiracies,” Tunheim told the Globe. “But I think it will eliminate a major reason in people’s minds why they still have doubts about what the Warren Commission concluded or what the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded. It’ll remove, for a lot of people, that last lingering doubt.”

A 2023 Gallup Poll found just 29 percent of adults thought Kennedy was killed by a single assassin, while 65 percent thought others were involved in a conspiracy.

The high-level Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and there was no conspiracy. Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine veteran who had returned to the US after defecting to the Soviet Union, was fatally shot two days later while in police custody by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The House committee agreed that Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy, dismissing speculation of a second gunman, but also concluded the murder probably was the result of a conspiracy possibly involving organized crime.

The records behind both of those investigations were classified in the midst of the deep tensions of the Cold War. The secrecy at a time when Americans began distrusting the federal government amid the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, spurred conspiracy theories that the Mafia and/or the CIA were behind the assassination, with Oswald killed so he wouldn’t reveal the plot. Those fears were amplified by Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK,” which portrayed a complex conspiracy and ended by noting the House committee’s records were “locked away until the year 2029.”

“I think the fact that so many records were sealed right after the Warren Commission finished its work was very detrimental to learning the truth and to satisfying the American people that everything had been done to solve this mystery,” Tunheim told the Globe.

Congress reacted by passing the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. It ordered records throughout the federal government be located, transferred to the National Archives, and released no more than 25 years later, with an exception for documents with national security concerns. More than 4 million records were declassified and made available, but thousands more remained classified.

During his first term, Trump released 2,891 documents as the 2017 deadline hit, but agreed to withhold or redact parts of others for national security reasons.

“I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security,” Trump wrote in a memo at the time. The National Archives released about 47,000 documents in the following months. President Joe Biden continued that process, releasing about 17,000 more documents during his presidency.

Those records contained no smoking guns, said Gerald Posner, author of the 1993 book “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.”

“In the last few years under Trump and Biden, when the documents have been released, they’ve been a tremendous disappointment … for those who think that they were going to disclose some nefarious deep-state plot,” he said. Often the redacted information that was revealed was just a specific name or location that was unrelated to the assassination.

“At the heart of it what they’ve always lied about or delayed releasing is CIA operations around Lee Harvey Oswald,” said Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts blog, who says the government’s explanation of Oswald as the lone gunman isn’t supported by the facts.

“People are interested because we still don’t have a credible explanation about how the president was shot dead in broad daylight, and no one was ever brought to justice for the crime,” he said. “Now we’re going on eight years past the [2017] deadline. Of course people are suspicious. They should be suspicious.”

Among those who are more than suspicious is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services who is the son of the slain senator.

“In terms of my uncle’s death, the evidence is overwhelming the CIA was involved in the murder and then the coverup,” RFK Jr., said in a radio interview last May of the John Kennedy assassination. “The evidence of the CIA involvement in my father’s death is very convincing, but it’s circumstantial.”

Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was convicted of shooting Robert Kennedy, a leading presidential candidate, at a Los Angeles hotel in 1968 because of his support for Israel. Sirhan admitted to the crime in 1969 and is serving a life sentence. He later said he has no memory of the shooting and his lawyers have asserted a second person fired the fatal shots. Kennedy Jr. has said he doesn’t believe Sirhan was the killer and supported his unsuccessful parole effort in 2021.

After Kennedy Jr. abandoned his independent presidential campaign last year and endorsed Trump, the former president announced he would order the release all of the remaining documents about the 1963 presidential assassination “as a tribute to Bobby.”

Trump followed through on Thursday, ordering the director of national intelligence and other officials to come up with a plan within 15 days for “the full and complete release of records” relating to John Kennedy’s assassination. Officials have 45 days to do the same for records related to the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy.

A spokesperson for Kennedy Jr. did not respond to a request for comment. But the release of the documents has not been a high priority for other family members.

“I applaud the government’s efforts for full disclosure and I’m confident that it will reassure the public that the man who killed my father is in jail where he belongs,” Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of the slain senator, told the Globe, adding it will dredge up painful memories for her and her family. “I hope in some way the release of the documents will lead to a decrease in the conspiracy theories that are far more painful than the truth itself.”

And Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said on X that, “Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back.”

But Trump suggested it has been a long time coming in a country where many still believe the truth about the assassinations hasn’t been fully told.

“A lot of people are waiting for this for … years, for decades. And everything will be revealed,” Trump told reporters as he signed the order. Then he passed the pen he used to an an aide and said, “Give that to RFK Jr.”

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.