One of Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office as President on Jan. 20 was signing an executive order to declassify any remaining files related to the assassinations of the most prominent American leaders of the 1960s: the 35th President John F. Kennedy in 1963, his brother, the presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in that same year.
The Jan. 23 executive order gives intelligence officials two weeks to come up with a plan to make the remaining JFK assassination files available to the public, and 45 days for the RFK and MLK assassination files.
“That’s a big one. A lot of people have been waiting for this for years,” Trump said as he signed the executive order. “Everything will be revealed.”
What exactly Trump hopes to find out from the files is unclear. RFK’s son Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has expressed skepticism about whether Sirhan Sirhan was his father’s killer and whether there was some larger conspiracy going on.
The “truth” in these files, however, will likely be anticlimactic, scholars tell TIME. The basic facts of these assassinations are unlikely to change: Lee Harvey Oswald fatally shot JFK; Sirhan Sirhan fatally shot Robert F. Kennedy; and James Earl Ray fatally shot MLK. Most of these documents have been released; for example, 99% of the JFK assassination files have been made public, after nine investigations and the definitive account of what happened the day of the assassination produced by the Warren Commission in 1964.
But the quicker files are made available, the quicker conspiracy theories could be quelled. There are conspiracy theorists who think that because the files haven’t been released yet, the government is hiding some evidence of larger conspiracies to kill these figures. “I actually think Trump did the right thing in opening these files,” says Burt Griffin, assistant counsel on the Warren Commission, arguing that it will hopefully dispel any notions that “something is being concealed.”
TIME talked to people who have researched these assassinations about what they hope to learn from the remaining files.
Sensitive personal details
Griffin, who is also the author of JFK, Oswald and Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth, believes that much of the information that’s been withheld about the JFK assassination are the names of investigators and details of the investigative process. “Some of the people were doing illegal things,” Griffin says, like wiretapping Mafia leaders. “We knew they were doing things that were illegal. We didn’t know the details of how they were doing it.”
At this point, the names of the people involved won’t do much good because they have since died, but that doesn’t mean Americans should think there was a missed opportunity to interview them. The Warren Commission took the testimony of more than 550 people.
Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Asassination of JFK, questions if Americans will finally learn more of First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s account of the fateful day, as she ordered the notes from her interview with historian William Manchester be sealed.
Posner, who also wrote Killing the Dream James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is expecting the remaining MLK assassination files to provide more proof of “how much the FBI tried to not protect King, but spy on him.” It’s well-known that the activist was under illegal FBI surveillance for years, as the agency’s infamous director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the preacher was part of some broader communist conspiracy while the U.S. was in the middle of a Cold War with the communist Soviet Union.
But Posner is more worried that incriminating information about King might be revealed. There have long been rumors about King’s infidelity, and there are even reports that he saw a mistress the night before he was killed.
“Those files would be just personally embarrassing, and there’s no reason to release them,” says Posner. King’s family issued a statement after Trump’s executive order, requesting to see any MLK files before they are released to the general public.
Debunking broader conspiracies
The Warren Commission already concluded six decades ago that there is “no evidence” Oswald was part of a domestic conspiracy or that a foreign government was behind JFK’s assassination. But to put conspiracy theories to rest, Griffin wonders if the tax returns of an acquaintance of Oswald’s, Ruth Paine, are in the remaining files because they have never been revealed. The question is whether they show that she was getting money from the federal government, and if they don’t, then that could put to rest a conspiracy theory that the federal government was behind the assassination of JFK in some way. Likewise, if the tax returns did not show that she was getting money from people with ties to communists or foreign governments, then it could further prove that a foreign government did not orchestrate the plot to kill JFK.
However, it’s possible the files could provide more insight into what was going on in Cuba at the time of JFK’s assassination. Posner wonders if there are files showing what the CIA really knew about Oswald’s erratic behavior during visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City six weeks before the assassination: “I’m hoping [the remaining files] will answer the question of whether the CIA could have potentially prevented the assassination by letting the FBI know how unhinged and unstable he was during this visit.”
Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy, is on the lookout for more information on U.S. policymakers’ deliberations about overthrowing the Castro regime: “There’s one document that is very intriguing, in which they’re discussing ways of embarrassing or dethroning Castro through damaging events that will be linked to him. There’s just one problem. We know they’re in there. We know that they discuss specifics, but every one of them is redacted…I think it’s interesting historically to show the extent to which the U.S. government was willing to go to rid itself of a communist government.”
But the big unsolved mystery—why Oswald shot JFK—is not likely to be answered by any of these remaining files. As Griffin puts it, “We saw all of the substantive things that were in the files.”
William Klaber, a researcher who has read through many files related to the RFK assassination for his book Shadow Play, says “I don’t think there are any bombshells” in the remaining files related to that tragedy because the FBI played a much smaller role in that investigation. Many of the most relevant records are in California. He explains: “RFK files were really released in 1988, and they were the police files because the police ran that investigation. The FBI helped a little, and those files have also been opened.”
He is also not convinced every file will be released because of Trump’s executive order. As he puts it, “My fear is that when we get closer to the date that these things are going to be released, national security concerns will be raised, and we’ll be back where we were. Those very files that we want won’t be the ones that are released.”
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