As promised, President Donald Trump oversaw the release of thousands of pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Available now on the National Archive website, interested parties can inspect papers, reports, and interviews. Whether there is a proverbial “smoking gun” is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Casting a Wide Net
The roughly 63,000 pages (spread across more than 2,000 PDFs) are mostly documents that have previously been made public but with many of the redactions withdrawn. Researchers will spend months – if not years – completing the wider picture of the events in Dallas, Texas, and the subsequent investigations that ran well into the 1970s.
Some of the more eye-catching documents include:
The President’s Intelligence Checklist: This is the first summation received by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on November 23, 1963, just one day after JFK was assassinated. As Just the News reports:
“The document marked ‘Top Secret’ and issued by the CIA is similar to what is now known as the Presidential Daily Briefing. The threats to the U.S. detailed by the CIA at the time related almost exclusively to the threat posed by the Soviet Union.”
Deposition of William C. Sturbitts: In 1975, speaking to the Rockefeller Commission, CIA operative Sturbitts claimed that in either October or November 1963, he had overheard agency discussions on plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The alleged plot involved a disgruntled Cuban military member.
He said, “I had overheard that discussions were going on with a member of Castro’s military but that he wanted … some Belgian rifles and a telescopic sight.” “I know that subsequent to that time [Desmond] Fitzgerald [head of the Cuban Operations Group] met with him again and as I recall as the personal representative of the Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy,” Sturbitts related.
The internet is currently filled with amateur (and some professional) researchers claiming to have unearthed something new. However, it turned out that many such “discoveries” had been released in prior batches. This does not mean yesterday’s tranche lacks value but that it will take time to ascertain whether something might add to the mosaic.
Transparency
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – who oversaw the release - wrote on her X account, “President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency. Today, per his direction, previously redacted JFK Assassination Files are being released to the public with no redactions. Promises made, promises kept.”
As cult punk band The Jam sang in 1980, “The public gets what the public wants.” Six decades in the making, and the new president has delivered on his promise of transparency. After four years of Joe Biden limiting his availability to the press, Trump’s willingness to take questions and engage with the media is more than refreshing. It is establishing a benchmark for the level of transparency the American public demands from their elected representatives.
The release of the JFK files seems in line with this “new dawn” effort of open governance. Back in 2021, speaking with The New York Times, Trump explained his rationale for a further release. He said he largely agreed with the Warren Commission's findings that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the assassination and that “when you have something that’s so sacredly secret, it really makes it sound very bad. I think they maybe got it right, probably got it right. Let people examine it.”
JFK and the Historical Pivot Point
Jefferson Morley, VP of the Mary Ferrell Foundation – named after a Dallas secretary who was one of the earliest researchers into the JFK assassination – said making the documents public was “an encouraging start.” The foundation’s president, Rex Bradford, explained:
“Every time they do this, people discover interesting things that fill out the story … 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.”
Indeed, the further revelations seem to add more layers to the event that many say destroyed the innocence of the nation. And yet, the subsequent obsession with truth-seeking has captivated generation after generation of Americans and, in many ways, has set the bar for skepticism in government.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, was a pivotal moment in the country’s history. No matter how much new information about the actors involved is revealed, nothing will change the tragic event’s importance to the American psyche.
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