JFK was killed 60 years ago. Why are his assassination records still sealed?
Multiple organizations and individuals have pressed for the documents to be released.
Sixty years have passed since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Despite the passage of time, records related to his assassination remain sealed by the government, fueling conspiracy theories that call the official version of events into question.
Several organizations and individuals have pushed for the documents’ release, including the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which is the largest online repository of JFK assassination records and is suing President Joe Biden to have them made public.
The files should also be released, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a presidential candidate and the former president’s nephew.
“What is so embarrassing that they’re afraid to show the American public 60 years later?” In a Nov. 20 statement, RFK Jr. announced a petition demanding that Biden release all remaining records.
A spokesperson for RFK Jr.’s campaign told McClatchy News that “Mr. Kennedy is not doing any interviews on the anniversary of his uncle’s death.”
What are the documents?
According to Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a number of government agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, created millions of pages of documents on the subject of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
They were eventually compiled by various investigative bodies, including the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination and wrote the Warren Report, the government’s official account of what happened in Dallas.
Following the release of Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” which popularized the notion that the government was involved in the assassination, Congress passed the JFK Records Act in 1992 in order to identify and release these documents.
“Huge amounts of this stuff was declassified over about a five-year period,” Bradford said, though some documents were kept sealed or released with redactions.
The release of the volumes of records was “unprecedented” for the government, according to Kaeten Mistry, a professor of American history at the University of East Anglia in England. “Yet it will never satisfy everyone.”
According to the act, all remaining withheld documents were supposed to be released by 2017, but Presidents Donald Trump and Biden, using a provision in the law, ordered some of them to be kept secret, Bradford said.
In July, Biden ordered federal agencies to establish their own criteria and timelines for publishing the documents, according to Bradford.
“Those criteria translate to: not bloody soon,” Bradford said.
What documents remain sealed?
According to Bradford, approximately 3,500 documents, the majority of which are held by the CIA, remain unpublished or published with partial redactions.
“This information at this point, a lot of it is informant names, agent names, the location of CIA bases, some of it’s sensitive information, embarrassing information,” Bradford went on to say. “At this point there’s very little about Lee Harvey Oswald per say.”
“The vast majority of records that remain secret, or were recently released, will relate to national security matters,” he said. “The government is always more cautious when it comes to releasing those to the public.”
The bureaucratic process of releasing them is also time-consuming, according to Mistry.
Will they be released?
While a few documents may be made public in the coming years, “absent any changes or particular public will on this matter, I expect much of the rest of it to be unlikely to be released,” Bradford said.
Bradford, however, is skeptical that the withheld materials contain a smoking gun indicating that one specific group orchestrated Kennedy’s death.
According to Bradford, those who have researched the assassination have discovered circumstantial evidence indicating a “murderous milieu” of “Cuban exiles, organized crime, and the CIA” had ties to Oswald.
“It’s unlikely that they have a document somewhere in a CIA vault that says we did it,” Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who specializes in the study of conspiracy theories, told McClatchy News. “So, I’m not exactly sure what people think they’re going to get.”
Even if more documents were released, Uscinski believes the American public — the majority of whom believe there was a larger conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, according to a Gallup poll of 1,009 U.S. adults — would remain skeptical.
“If the government released all the documents today, are all the people who believe conspiracy theories about it going to suddenly change their mind?” According to Uscinski. “The answer is probably not.”
