President Trump released a cache of unredacted classified documents on Tuesday related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but experts say the documents are unlikely to put an end to speculation about the infamous killing.
Trump told reporters on Monday during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that the new release would be about 80,000 pages, but he did not give additional information about what the files would include.
“People have been waiting for decades for this,” Trump said Monday. “It’s going to be very interesting.”
The release was published on the National Archives website around 4 p.m. Pacific and consisted of 1,123 PDF documents, including handwritten and typed reports. Several of the documents are blurry and challenging to read, likely due to aging and the quality of photocopies.
A cursory review of the release did not immediately yield any major revelations or challenge the well-established facts that Kennedy was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald while traveling in an open-topped convertible through Dallas. However, the vast drove of documents will take significant time for historians and The Times to comb through.
Some of the interesting topics discussed in the documents included references to conspiracy theories that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 with the goal of killing Kennedy as well as a report asserting that Oswald was likely not a KGB agent, according to reporting from USA Today.
The records are just a sliver of the millions of pages of assassination-related documents held by the National Archives, most of which have already been made available to the public.
Even six decades after Kennedy’s death, researchers and the public remain fascinated by the assassination and the events surrounding it. And the possibility that the documents could reveal significant new information about one of the 20th century’s most shocking killings is enticing for scholars and conspiracy theorists alike.
“It’s almost a Shakespearean moment in American politics when you have this young, glamorous, charismatic president at the peak of his power — the top of his game — beautiful wife, wealthy family … whose life was terminated in an instant by a struggling, failed drifter,” said John Shaw, a JFK expert and the director of Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.
“The kind of implausibility of Kennedy’s life ending so abruptly and so seemingly senselessly is just one of those things that just stays with you. And it’s obviously stayed with the country for 60 plus years,” Shaw said.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was riding in an an open-topped convertible with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John B. Connally Jr. and Connally’s wife, Nellie, as their motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Crowds lined the streets and waved to the Kennedys as they drove by. As the motorcade was passing the Texas School Book Depository, gunfire rang out in the plaza.
Kennedy was struck in the neck and head and was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Connally was shot in the back but recovered.
Officials arrested a worker in the book depository building named Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and Marxist sympathizer who at one point tried to become a citizen of the Soviet Union. Oswald was killed two days later by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a perp walk broadcast on live television.
Although the government concluded that both men acted alone, theories about the deaths have proliferated for more than half a century. The killing gave birth to multiple conspiracy theories that included the involvement of the CIA, a second gunman on a nearby grassy knoll, or that the Cubans or even Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson played roles in the shooting.
A Gallup poll published in 2023 showed that a majority of Americans continue to believe that Oswald did not act alone but worked with others in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
One reason other theories have likely persisted is that the government’s narrative that Oswald acted alone is just an unsatisfying explanation and story for the public, Shaw said.
“These other alternative theses make the story at least more complicated and interesting,” Shaw said.
The widespread conspiracy theories prompted Congress to pass a 1992 law mandating that documents related to Kennedy’s assassination be released within 25 years except for those that had the potential to harm national security. Trump released some of the documents in 2017 but agreed to delay the disclosure of others. Former President Biden did the same during his term.
But after taking office for a second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all government records related to the Kennedy assassination. He also mandated records be released about the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Shaw said that, even with the release of the documents, debate over Kennedy’s death would endure.
“The story will not end,” he said. “The discussions will continue about who really was behind the murder of John F. Kennedy. There’s always going to be the sense that, OK, these are the official documents. What else might be out there?”
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