(This report is not about the personality of the 35th President of the US, John F. Kennedy, but about the progress made so far by the US government to unravel his assassination that reverberated around the globe – The event occurred 54 years ago, last Wednesday).
The US government has released tons of long-awaited documents on the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy, offering intriguing new insights into events surrounding one of the most touchy and emotional assassinations in history.
While many of the 2,891 records released by the National Archives were raw intelligence and uncorroborated, they were almost certain to reinvigorate rampant conspiracy theories about the killing of JFK in Dallas, Texas.
One of the documents included a transcript of a November 24, 1963 conversation with then FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who said his agency informed police of a threat against the life of President Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, the night before Oswald was murdered. But the police, however, failed to act on the information.
While many theories over the years have related to Oswald’s ties to Cuban or Soviet operatives, an FBI memo in 1963 showed that Kennedy’s death caused great mourning in the USSR. According to a source, “officials at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was a well-organized conspiracy on the part of ultra-conservatives in the United States to effect a change in the country’s leadership.
The Soviets feared the killing would be used as a pretext to achieve one or all of these – stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba, and thereafter spread the war. The Warren Commission, which investigated the shooting of the charismatic 46-year old President, determined that Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, carried out the Kennedy assassination acting alone.
The released files are vast in number and scope, covering everything from FBI directors’ memos to interviews with members of the public in Dallas who came forward trying to provide clues after that singularly unforgettable moment in US history.
President Donald Trump said in a memo that he agreed to hold back some records relating to the killing following pushback from intelligence agencies. “I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security,” he said. The President gave the relevant agencies six months — until April 26, 2018 — to make their case for why the remaining documents should not be made public. The 2,891 records approved for release in compliance with a 1992 Act of Congress are viewable on the National Archives website, in full form.
The Warren Commission’s formal conclusion that Oswald killed JFK has done little to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind the murder of the 35th US president. Experts studying the assassination have eagerly awaited the opportunity to look at the files. Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed,” which determined that Oswald did indeed act alone, said people who think the files will “have the solution to the case that everybody can settle on” are going to be disappointed.
The experts agreed, however, that the documents may shed some light on an intriguing chapter in Oswald’s life — including his trip to Mexico City about seven weeks before the shooting where he is known to have met with Cuban and Soviet spies.
A professor of politics at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Kennedy Half Century,” Larry Sabato, said the CIA and FBI may be blocking the release of certain documents to hide their own failings. “They had every indication that Oswald was a misfit and a sociopath,” he said. But neither agency informed the Secret Service, which is charged with protecting the president, he regretted. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but returned to the United States in 1962. Two days after killing President Kennedy he was fatally shot by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, as he was being transferred from the city jail.
