In January, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the release of thousands of files about former President John F. Kennedy’s death. On Tuesday, those files were made public.
President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Historians have written volumes on the tragedy. But for decades, many details remained classified. Public documents were heavily redacted, with details blacked out. Now the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration website boasts 63,000 new pages of info. Many documents have been unredacted.
But what exactly do the new details reveal?
The Death of a President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy became President of the United States in 1961. He was America’s first Catholic president and the youngest man to win the office.
On November 22, 1963, he and his wife arrived in Dallas, Texas, to campaign for reelection. While in a motorcade downtown, President Kennedy was shot and killed.
Police swiftly arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine. Two days later, Oswald himself was killed while being transferred to jail.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson became America’s new president. He established the Warren Commission to investigate President Kennedy’s death. The Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. Nothing pointed to a wider conspiracy. But that didn’t stop decades of guessing.
The Murky Details
Some details of the JFK assassination remained unclear. People came up with theories to fill the gaps. Was the Soviet Union involved? Was America’s government involved? Government secrecy fueled the speculation. Was there some sort of big coverup? Or were the files kept classified to protect national security?
When President Kennedy died, the United States was in the thick of the Cold War. U.S. forces didn’t meet Soviet Russia on the battlefield. The two sides fought a war of information. The assassination files contained info about CIA operations. They revealed details about covert projects in places like communist Cuba. If released back then, those files could have helped America’s enemies.
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush ordered that all documents related to the assassination be released within 25 years, unless the president believed doing so would harm government operations or foreign relations. Even in 2017, President Trump considered some of the info too sensitive for release.
The New Information
So far, the new files don’t reveal any juicy secrets. But they do provide new data for historians to explore.
Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, is writing a book about President Kennedy. He says we now know more about U.S. intelligence work under Kennedy than under any other president.
“You’re getting both a bird’s-eye view of U.S. foreign policy, and you’re also getting a snail’s eye view of covert action, right there on the ground,” says Naftali.
The new files will likely disappoint conspiracy theorists. But for historians like Naftali, they’re a treasure trove.
