US President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and Texas Governor John Connally ride in a motorcade from the Dallas airport into the city. Photo / Getty Images
US President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and Texas Governor John Connally ride in a motorcade from the Dallas airport into the city. Photo / Getty Images
The perpetual hunt for clues about the 20th century’s most dissected political assassination – the shooting of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas – took a turn today with the release of files from the United States National Archives.
The disseminationof the records is the latest in a string of disclosures since the 1990s that have tweaked how America and its historians view Kennedy’s killing.
The vast majority of the National Archives’ six million pages of records related to the murder has already been declassified, according to the agency’s website.
Most of the online records are available on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, named after a deceased Dallas legal secretary who became one of the earliest researchers into the assassination.
“Every time they do this, people discover interesting things that fill out the story,” said Rex Bradford, president of the foundation.
“The saga of the Kennedy assassination is one revelation after another revelation. It’s an unpeeling of history at the height of the Cold War and, for that reason alone, it’s interesting, even apart from the assassination.”
A White House spokesperson, in a recent interview with NewsNation, promoted the pending disclosure, saying: “The American people will have their hands on these documents, and there will be a story to tell”.
“I won’t preview you that story, but let me tell you: The American people are truly going to be shocked at what they see.”
Yesterday President Donald Trump told reporters at the Kennedy Centre that “all of the Kennedy files” would be released today.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact.’”
Trump’s declaration, according to ABC News, set off a “scramble” within the Justice Department. Lawyers throughout the agency’s national security division “were up throughout the night, into the early morning hours”, scouring hundreds of pages of documents, ABC reported.
The full release of unredacted Kennedy assassination files has been something of a pet interest of Trump’s, dating to his first administration and even earlier.
During his initial presidential campaign, he floated a conspiracy theory on Fox News that Senator Ted Cruz’s father consorted with Lee Harvey Oswald at some point before the assassination.
His first year in the White House also coincided with the mandate of the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act that all the files be released within 25 years or by October 2017. The law also allowed the President to withhold documents if he believes they will hurt national security.
Jefferson Morley, a leading Kennedy assassination historian, said that much of the new material has conflicted with the 1964 conclusion of the Warren Commission.
The seven-person body – led by Chief Justice Earl Warren – determined that Oswald, a former Marine and Marxist, acted as the lone gunman. It found no evidence that anyone helped him or that he acted as part of “any conspiracy, foreign or domestic” to kill Kennedy.
But, according to Morley, newly released records over the years suggest another narrative.
Lee Harvey Oswald. Photo / Getty Images
“The lone gunman theory is not accurate. It doesn’t describe the facts of what happened,” said Morley, vice-president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
“The doctors who tried to save Kennedy’s life say he was hit by gunfire from two different directions. So, what happened? We need a better explanation of what happened.”
According to a 2023 Washington Post essay by Morley, recent documents reveal how the CIA had been watching Oswald in the four years leading to the assassination.
They also show that key agency officials – director Allen Dulles and counter-intelligence chief James Angleton – worked to undermine the Warren Commission’s efforts to probe the shooting.
In an interview, Morley said today’s release should draw from more than 3500 documents – which amount to as many as 15,000 pages – that have already been technically released but remain partly or fully redacted.
A second batch of files at the National Archives, which recently came from the FBI, might also be released. That tranche constitutes about 2400 records and 14,000 pages.
Morley said he hopes that the release means he can finally read transcripts that have long been redacted. He is paying special attention to the closed-door testimonies of key CIA officials who spoke to congressional committees about their surveillance operations on Oswald in Mexico City before the assassination.
Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act, a history of the Kennedy assassination, said he hopes to focus on what the documents will say about Oswald’s time in Mexico City.
The records, he said, have already revealed that Oswald visited the Mexican capital shortly before the killing. He met Cuban and Russian spies and even spoke openly about killing Kennedy with employees of the Cuban Embassy there – intelligence that the US government was gathering in real time, Shenon said.
Perhaps, Shenon said, newly unredacted files will show additional contacts between Oswald and others in Mexico who wanted Kennedy dead – and wanted to help him accomplish the deed.
“That might not be the conspiracy that most people think of, but it could be a criminal conspiracy nonetheless if other people knew what Oswald was going to do or helped him,” Shenon said.
If new evidence surfaces that the CIA or FBI knew more about what Oswald was plotting or even considering in Mexico, then, Shenon said, the public would be even more justified in asking: “Why didn’t they raise alarms in Washington about the threat Oswald posed?”
