The Kennedy Half Century: The Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy III. The National Archives Archival Search for JFK’s Assassination Documents
Thousands of previously classified documents collected as part of the government review into JFK’s assassination have been released by the National Archives.
The cache of over 13,000 documents is the second of two JFK assassination-related document dumps that President Joe Biden ordered last year when the White House postponed a public release because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“[T]he profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day; meanwhile, the need to protect records concerning the assassination has weakened with the passage of time,” the White House said in a memorandum Thursday.
“If you are of a conspiratorial mind, you go, ‘Aha! There were important documents with key information in there and they’ve conveniently ‘lost’ them.’ Now it is possible that is true. The odds are huge that they just got lost. I mean, there’s so much paper,” he said.
Mr. Posner said that anyone who thought that the latest batches might change the conclusion reached by the Warren Commission in 1964 would be making a mistake. That commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that Oswald was acting alone when he fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository on Nov. 22, 1963, killing Kennedy and wounding Gov. John B. Connally Jr. of Texas as they rode in an open-topped limousine through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
There won’t be anything to change what happened on October 23, 1963, when John F. Kennedy died, according to Larry Sabato, the author of The Kennedy Halfcentury: The Presidency, assassination and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.
Oswald was not part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, according to him. The assassination could have been prevented and should have been prevented if the CIA and FBI were doing their jobs. Really, that is it. Now that’s serious, but you’re not going to find the names of other conspirators in here.”
And while there may not be any earth-shattering revelations about what happened on November 22, 1963, Sabato did note a document discussing Oswald’s time in Mexico City, which says the US was running a “highly secret” telephone tap center with the president of Mexico, not even known to Mexican law enforcement. A document he identified came from the National Archives and Records Administration and said as of this month, 28 records in the JFK collection are not located.
The act dictated that all assassination records should be publicly disclosed by October 2017, but former President Donald Trump and now Biden have allowed multiple postponements on the advice of the FBI, the CIA and other national security agencies. The majority of the documents that Trump released include at least some redactions.
But after intense lobbying by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., President Donald J. Trump agreed to hold back a batch pending an additional review to ensure that nothing released would damage national security. According to the agencies, Mr. Trump instructed them that redactions should be very rare.
According to the C.I.A., 95 percent of its documents in the collection have been released and no documents have been fully redacted or completely withheld. The collection of records from the C.I.A. includes approximately 87,000 documents, which have yet to be released in full.
Mr. Biden said that the United States government needs to ensure that transparency is maximized by making all information available in records pertaining to the assassination.