As promised by Donald Trump, more than 63,000 pages of documents concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were made public yesterday.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has posted about 2,200 files on its website: however, Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Policy at the University of Virginia and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said it will take time to fully review the documents.
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said. Before Tuesday, researchers had estimated that between 3,000 and 3,500 files had not yet been made public, either in whole or in part. And just last month, the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new documents related to the assassination.
Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, said on X that the release of the documents is “an encouraging start.” However, Morley explained that the files released Tuesday did not include those recently discovered or the 500 Internal Revenue Service documents.
JFK’s assassination has fueled conspiracy theories for decades. The Democratic president was killed on November 22, 1963, in Dallas as his motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository, where 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald had positioned himself on the sixth floor with his firearm.
Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald during his transfer to prison. A year later, the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, a theory that has never quite convinced everyone.
Documents published in recent years have offered details about the way the Secret Service operated at the time. These include a CIA memo about Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.
Nevertheless, according to recently published documents, it seems quite unlikely that JFK’s killer was acting on behalf of the KGB.
