Opinion | What’s Missing From the New JFK Document Release

Fifty-eight years after those gunshots rang out in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the National Archives is about to reveal some of the secrets the government still keeps about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

On the surface, this moment — the imminent release of long-secret documents from a JFK assassination library — looks like a victory for transparency. The release, scheduled for Wednesday, revives a decades-old declassification process that stalled in 2017, when President Donald Trump failed to comply with a legal deadline to make the entire library public. The CIA, FBI and other agencies had protested to Trump that the documents revealed national security secrets that, half a century after Kennedy’s murder, were still too sensitive to be public.

In October, President Joe Biden announced he was restarting the process of declassifying and releasing the documents under provisions of a 1992 law, the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. He scheduled this week’s release and another for next December — declaring the disclosures “critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency.”

But the announcement also contained an admission that should worry anyone who truly believes in transparency. Biden is the first president to come close to acknowledging what cynical conspiracy theorists have long assumed: There are assassination-related documents sealed away at the Archives that might never be made public, or at least not in the lifetime of anyone who remembers where they were when they heard the shocking news from Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

As the author of a 2013 history of the Warren Commission, the panel created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate Kennedy’s murder, I am among the researchers who have long called for all the JFK documents to be made public — and not just for the sake of transparency. So long as the government continues to keep some documents hidden, it will only further promote the idea that sinister conspiracies about Kennedy’s death have a basis in fact. Why else, the conspiracy theorists ask, would the government feel the need to hide from the American public important information about a turning point in U.S. history? As time goes on, this secrecy could fuel even more outrageous, and more dangerous, movements: Today, QAnon, which the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat, has embraced JFK conspiracy theories.

Biden’s acknowledgment came in the fine print of his October order. While conceding “the need to protect records concerning the assassination has only grown weaker with the passage of time,” the president set no deadline for the release of the full library. That suggests some documents — those that threaten “identifiable harm” to national security, according to Biden’s order — could be kept secret indefinitely. Even as he blocked the release of the full library four years ago, Trump said on Twitter at the time that he planned to release “ALL JFK files” someday, possibly if he was elected to a second term. There has been no similar assurance from Biden.

In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, the White House pushed back on the idea that Biden has not championed full disclosure of the files. The statement noted that Biden’s order in October required federal agencies seeking to continue to withhold JFK documents to set a specific date for when they can be declassified after next year, suggesting they will be made public someday. But the debate over these documents has proved, for decades, that supposedly solid deadlines are made to be broken, especially when it comes to federal agencies determined to hide secrets that, if exposed, could tarnish their legacies.

The 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act — passed by Congress to try to calm the public furor created by JFK, Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-soaked hit film released the year before — called for the release of all classified documents related to Kennedy’s murder within 25 years. That established a 2017 deadline — the one Trump set aside. The law’s authors said at the time of its passage that they assumed that few, if any, secret files would need to be kept hidden after a quarter-century. And the deadline was meant to be a strict one, with only a sitting president entitled to block the release of any of the documents after 2017 — a power that Biden, like Trump, has now exercised. (Before 2017, the White House was not required to be drawn deeply into the controversy over the documents, since the debate over whether to declassify files was conducted at the Archives and elsewhere. Presidents before Trump and Biden offered general statements of support for making the files public.)

The Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency created by the 1992 law, spent years gathering up and declassifying assassination-related documents from around the government — everything that might be even tangentially related to Kennedy’s murder. The vast majority of those documents were made public in the 1990s. But when the board shut down in 1998, tens of thousands of documents in its collection were still being kept hidden on national security grounds at the insistence of the CIA, FBI and other agencies. The board then turned over control of those documents to the National Archives.

Today, more than 15,000 assassination-related documents remain classified, in part or in full, in a secure library maintained by the Archives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. A bare-bones index shows most of the documents are CIA and FBI files; many involve intelligence operations from the 1960s and 1970s. The documents also are thought to identify some government informants who are still alive; their safety could be in jeopardy if they are named publicly, the CIA and FBI have argued in urging that information remain classified.

The Archives has not revealed how many documents or portions of documents it plans to make public this week. In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, the agency would only confirm that it plans to go forward with the release on Wednesday through its website. Earlier this year, the Archives warned the White House that the process of reviewing and declassifying the files had been hampered by the Covid pandemic, which suggests this week’s release likely will be limited.

While sworn to secrecy about the exact content of the still-classified files, members of the review board have said over the years that they are unaware of bombshells in the remaining secret library — files that might, for example, point away from the official historical account that Kennedy was murdered by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. But some board members, including a federal judge and several prominent historians, also have acknowledged in interviews that some documents could have significance they did not understand at the time.

Lawmakers, historians and assassination researchers have pressed for decades for full release of the assassination library in an effort to snuff out some of the wilder conspiracy theories that have emerged about the assassination. Opinion polls have shown for years that most Americans believe in one conspiracy or another about the event; a 2017 poll conducted by FiveThirtyEight.com found that 61 percent of Americans believed that others besides Oswald were involved in the assassination. The most widely circulated theories hold that Kennedy was killed on orders from the Mafia, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, or some cabal of right-wing billionaires and American intelligence operatives.

While conspiracies about a decades-old event might seem relatively harmless, many political scientists have argued that theories about Kennedy’s murder, which began circulating within hours of his assassination, gave birth to the modern era of evermore radical and sometimes dangerous conspiratorial thinking. Just last month, hundreds of QAnon supporters gathered at a rally in Dealey Plaza to promote their delusional belief that JFK and his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash, are in fact still alive and will help reinstate Trump to the White House. Trump has embraced the support of QAnon members, if not the movement’s more outlandish beliefs, while offering his own conspiracy theory about JFK’s murder: During the 2016 presidential campaign, he promoted an utterly unsupported theory that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, then a rival for the GOP nomination, was tied to the assassination.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who has campaigned on Capitol Hill for years for full release of the JFK documents, said in an interview that he was disappointed by Biden’s failure to release the entire library early in his presidency. “All of this information was supposed to have been shared with the public years ago,” Cohen said. “It belongs to the public.” He said he feared Biden had bowed to powerful bureaucrats at the CIA, FBI and elsewhere who are trying to keep the documents secret in order to protect the reputation of their agencies, even if that keeps the conspiracy theories alive. “I’m a big supporter of President Biden and think well of him,” Cohen added. “But he’s a company man on these sorts of things.”

The White House told me Biden is willing to overrule the CIA, FBI and other agencies and insist that some of the secret documents be made public. But for now, the administration said, the president believes there is legitimate concern that some documents reveal information that could do damage to national security if revealed, noting that that some of the still-classified documents in the JFK library refer to law-enforcement operations that occurred decades after the Kennedy assassination.

Cohen is not a conspiracy theorist. He said he suspects the still-secret documents will not undermine his belief that Oswald was the sole gunman in Dallas. Instead, Cohen said, he assumes the documents have been kept secret because they expose incompetence or wrongdoing by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Among the millions of pages of documents declassified in the 1990s, some files showed that the CIA and FBI had Oswald under aggressive surveillance before the assassination and missed opportunities to stop him.

From my own extensive review of the documents released in the 1990s, I likewise believe the CIA and FBI hid vital information from the Warren Commission (named for its chair, Chief Justice Earl Warren) to downplay the extent of their surveillance of Oswald. Declassified government documents show that both agencies knew in the fall of 1963 that Oswald, a self-declared Marxist, traveled to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination and met there with Cuban and Russian spies, including a KGB assassinations expert. An FBI document from 1964 suggests that Oswald, while under surveillance in the streets of Mexico, talked openly there about his plans to kill Kennedy.

It is intriguing, then, that the skeletal index of still-secret JFK documents at the Archives shows that some come from office files of CIA employees in the spy agency’s Mexico City station in the early 1960s. That suggests the possibility that the agency’s spies in Mexico knew something at the time of Kennedy’s assassination that was so explosive, or so embarrassing or incriminating, that the CIA has been determined to keep it secret almost six decades later.

The files declassified in the 1990s show the CIA also failed to notify the Warren Commission about the agency’s repeated efforts during Kennedy’s presidency to assassinate Castro. Years later, commission investigators were outraged to learn about the plots, since they suggested lines of investigation about Cuba that the commission did not know to pursue. CIA and FBI officials acknowledged decades later that their agencies failed to cooperate fully with the investigation.

In fact, the CIA’s in-house historian conceded in 2013 that the spy agency, in its dealings with the Warren Commission, engaged in a “cover-up” of what it knew about Oswald. The historian’s report, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the assassination, found that senior leaders of the CIA intentionally hid information from Warren’s investigation, including about the Castro murder plots, in an attempt to keep the commission “focused instead on what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’ — that Lee Harvey Oswald for as yet undetermined motives, acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”

Although it came half a century too late, the historian’s admission on behalf of the CIA was a shocking one. That concession alone should be proof of why, today, the public is entitled to know what else might be hidden away in the Archives.