The promise of a “final” release of all government secrets relating to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy has whetted the appetite of many Americans, including the current occupant of the Oval Office.
But many historians are taking a more measured, wait-and-see approach to Tuesday’s release of documents by the National Archives.
“I doubt that these releases are going to overturn our understanding of what happened on that terrible day in Dallas,” Fredrik Logevall, a historian at Harvard who is working on a multivolume biography of President Kennedy, said before the release.
But still, he added, “we should prepare to be surprised.”
It could take months, if not longer, for scholars to parse and digest the pages. Previous Kennedy assassination documents that have been released were listed by serial number, according to the originating agency’s filing system.
Some will likely be full versions of documents previously available with only light redactions, adding a name or two to the record. And others, scholars say, are likely to be duplicates or variants of memos and reports that have long been available from other sources.
David J. Garrow, the author of “The F.B.I. and Martin Luther King” and numerous articles about the intelligence agencies, predicted that the release would likely be a “a big nothingburger” when it comes to the assassination itself.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t be interesting, particularly for scholars of the byzantine workings of the intelligence agencies, whose secret operations have sometimes spiraled into scenarios as bizarre as anything dreamed of by conspiracy theorists.
Mr. Garrow, a connoisseur of rabbit holes, said he was currently interested in previously released documents relating to a C.I.A. operative who reported on two F.B.I. informants who had set up a fake Maoist party, in an effort to disrupt the American Communist Party.
“If you’re studying interactions between F.B.I. and C.I.A., it’s very interesting,” he said. “But does it have any import in the world in 2025? No.”
In 1992, responding to a surge of interest in conspiracy theories following the Oliver Stone film “J.F.K.,” Congress passed a law directing the National Archives and Records Administration to gather all known U.S. government records relating to the Kennedy assassination in one place.
The law required that all documents be released within 25 years. In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump ordered the release of all outstanding documents, setting the stage for what became four document releases. After the last release, in 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a “final certification,” though roughly 5,000 remained unavailable, in part or in full.
Among the previously released documents that have drawn serious attention are those related to Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit in September 1963 to Mexico City, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies.
“We know he met with Cuban diplomats and with Soviet diplomats, and had a plan to defect,” Professor Logevall said. “If the documents include more concrete knowledge about what was said, to whom he said it, and what was said in response, that would be historically both interesting and important.”
It would also be helpful, he said, to know more about what the C.I.A. knew about Oswald — and how much of that information it shared, or failed to share, with the F.B.I.
“Was there is some interagency lack of communication?” Professor Logevall said.
Judging by past releases, much of the new information will likely be previously redacted names of low-level organized crime figures who served as informants or other bit players. (Among the revelations in 2018 was the previously hidden name of the C.I.A. employee who opened an intercepted letter between Oswald and his mother.)
“Most of what remains, and what agency and bureau have fought to keep closed, deals with human informants, most of whom will be random stray Cubans in Miami,” Mr. Garrow said.
But new documents could shed light on a broader question: why the intelligence agencies have been keen to keep many of these documents partly redacted, or entirely secret, for so long.
Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale and the author of a 2022 biography of the former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, said that redactions tend to involve agency “sources and methods” — basically the names of informants, and information about wiretaps and bugs. But the intelligence agencies also tend to redact any information about other agencies.
“The F.B.I.’s file on the C.I.A. includes redacted page after redacted page,” she said.
Still, past Kennedy assassination releases have opened useful keyholes into agency operations. The 2018 release, for example, contained some internal records of the Church Committee (which was set up by the Senate in 1975 to examine intelligence agency abuses) that had not been seen before, Professor Gage said.
Some of that material related to Cointelpro, the secret program that Hoover began in 1956 as an effort to undermine the domestic Communist Party and later expanded to include civil rights groups, anti-Vietnam War organizers and other “subversives.” (It ended in 1971 after it was publicly exposed.)
Some documents, Professor Gage said, suggested that presidents, starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower, and members of key congressional committees knew about the program and had seen parts of Hoover’s off-the-record testimony about it.
There’s also the possibility that the new Kennedy releases could yield more information on matters only tangentially related to the assassination but of great interest to scholars and the public, such as the F.B.I.’s infamous wiretapping of Dr. King.
A House committee established in 1976 to reinvestigate the Kennedy and King assassinations, Mr. Garrow said, didn’t want any material relating to those wiretaps, which were installed in King’s office, home and hotel rooms, and sometimes recorded him with lovers. And associates of Dr. King sued to have it kept private.
Today, material relating to those wiretaps — including the original recordings and full transcripts — are part of a separate collection at the National Archives, which is under a court seal until 2027.
But some material has seeped out through the Kennedy assassination records. In 2019, Mr. Garrow published an explosive article arguing that an F.B.I. memo included in the 2018 release contained a report, based on hotel room recordings, suggesting that Dr. King had stood by during a rape.
That article drew far more extensive news media coverage than anything in the release relating to the Kennedy assassination, sparking strong criticism from some civil rights scholars.
Professor Gage, who also read through many of those documents, said the 2018 release included useful new information about Dr. King’s personal life — “all sorts of details about who was where, when,” she said. If full transcripts or even tapes somehow came out early, as part of the Kennedy records release, she said, that could be “quite a huge deal.”
As for the assassination itself, it remains to be seen if this “final” release really contains everything the government knows about the assassination, complete and unredacted. And even if it does, that will hardly quell the conspiracy theorists.
“There’s something comforting about conspiracies,” Professor Logevall said. “We want to believe, as human beings, that great events have great causes.”
Professor Gage, like many scholars, speaks with some weariness of the obsession with alternate theories of the assassination. But she also had “a certain sympathy” with that kind of thinking.
“That we have so many frustrations and so many conspiracy theories is the product of historical circumstances, and the fact that we created this big secret government in the ’40s and ’50s,” she said.
“People were responding to the idea their government was keeping secrets from them,” she continued. “And it was.”
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