JFK Files: The story of the Kennedy assassination and the discovery of new documents

On Tuesday, March 18, the Donald Trump administration declassified more than 2,000 documents related to the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy (JFK).

A disaster in the United States

More than 60 years ago, on November 22, 1963, JFK was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. However, the assassination continues to be of interest to journalists, the general public, and irrational conspiracy theorists.

This is mostly due to JFK's popularity, which was stoked by his charisma and individuality. According to a 2013 BBC report, Kennedy was "the first celebrity chief executive" who "wielded the skills of the new age of television as no other politician ever had before him."

JFK's fame has been bolstered by the fact that his death was captured on camera. Popular culture is still shaped by the 26-odd seconds of silent 8mm film that amateur filmmaker Abraham Zapruder shot.

The image of Jackie Kennedy, dressed in a bright pink outfit, running to the back of the truck shortly after her husband's death is hard to forget, after all. She was reaching for something. In his 2012 memoir Mrs. Kennedy and Me, Secret Service agent Clint Hill asserted that "she was groping for a portion of the president's head."

Nothing "satisfying"

64The Warren Commission was formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the death of his predecessor, and the commission submitted its findings in 1964.

It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only person responsible for the murder and that there was no larger conspiracy at play. Oswald had fired three shots from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, which looked out over the path taken by JFK's motorcade. The Commission claims that the second and third rounds hit the president.

Oswald was arrested on the day of the assassination. But he was never tried because he was shot dead in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby, the owner of a nightclub, on November 24, two days after the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission claimed that Ruby's murder was a "patriotic deed."

The most famous comes from Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 film JFK. The murder and subsequent cover-up are primarily attributed to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the film. Reports state that the president's desire to defuse the Vietnam War was the reason the intelligence community wanted JFK killed.

Stone was not the first to make such claims, though they had been made since the 1960s. But the public's perception of this version of events was cemented by the success of his film. Ling claims that there is a "psychological element" to this.

Ling claims that "we tend to rewrite our memories in order to make sense of how things have gone." Therefore, the Kennedy assassination represents the pivotal moment in the 1960s' optimism. By the time Oliver Stone comes out and basically says that [Kennedy] is killed by the CIA to allow the Vietnam experiment to proceed, many Americans kind of want to believe that everything has been taken away from them by terrible powers.

The CIA has, of course, refuted these claims. But its case has suffered because it was unwilling to notify the public about the assassination.

Within 25 years of the Act's passage, all "assassination records" must be fully accessible to the public. There is one exception, though. The US President may decide not to publish records that she considers to be of "identifiable harm" if the harm to the military, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or foreign policy action outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

The Act established the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) as an unbiased body to examine and decide cases where a US government agency sought to postpone the release of assassination records. The board published almost all of the documents pertaining to the Warren Commission investigation during its four-year tenure (1994–1998).

In 2013, former ARRB chairman John R. Tunheim and former deputy director Thomas Samoluk wrote in the Boston Globe about the declassification of five million records. However, they added, "the CIA is still preserving a body of documents."

Trump authorized the release of about 2,800 files related to JFK's murder in 2017, during his first term. According to a number of reports, pressure from the CIA and FBI kept him from doing more. In 2023, former President Joe Biden released an additional 17,000 records.

No noteworthy findings

Furthermore, 2,182 additional PDF documents with a combined page count of approximately 63,400 have been uploaded to the US National Archives and Records Administration's website. This comes after Trump announced in an executive order on January 23 that documents pertaining to the assassinations of JFK, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, his younger brother, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. would be declassified.

Although a comprehensive review of the entire set of recently released documents may take months, preliminary readings have not yet revealed any startling details about the assassination. However, these records do reveal the inner workings of the CIA at the height of the Cold War.

The JFK files contain information about budget lines, covert operations, and CIA agents and informants. For instance, one document details a covert operation where the CIA contaminated 80,000 bags of raw sugar on a cargo ship that was sailing from Cuba to the Soviet Union. Despite being "so intense to the taste that it damages the consumer's taste for any meal or drink for a lengthy time," the letter asserts that the contamination was safe.

Since at least 1,500 more files remain hidden, there might be more disclosures in the future. Additionally, the most recent release does not include the 2,400 new records that the FBI said it "found" just last month.