The Trump administration on Tuesday released thousands of pages of files concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th president who was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963.
“So people have been waiting decades for this,” Donald Trump told reporters on Monday while visiting the Kennedy Center, “and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by [director of national intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow.”
Experts doubted the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a school book deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.
The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.
Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the cold war of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.
The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime”.
“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.
Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a post on X.
ABC News reported that Trump’s announcement prompted an all-night scramble at the justice department.
John F Kennedy was killed during a motorcade through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Oswald was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.
Ever since, Kennedy’s death has been the subject of immense scholarship, cultural commentary and spiraling conspiracy theories.
Files have been released before, including three releases in 2017, when Trump was first in power. One document released then was a 1975 CIA memo that said a thorough search of records showed Oswald was not in any way connected to the intelligence agency, as posited by numerous authors and hobbyists.
Trump’s latest JFK files release comes weeks after the death at 93 of Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent who leapt onto Kennedy’s car, a moment of history famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, a home movie enthusiast.
Trump survived an assassination attempt of his own in Pennsylvania last year, during a campaign event. In office, he has also promised to release files on the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, both in 1968.
Robert F Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary. He has voiced conspiracy theories, including saying he thinks his father was probably killed by the CIA and his uncle, the president, certainly was.
King’s family has expressed the fear that genuine FBI attempts to smear him will again be brought to the light.
Last month, directed by Trump, the US justice department released files about Jeffrey Epstein, the financier, convicted sex offender and Trump associate who killed himself in prison in New York in 2019. Aggressively touted and targeted to rightwing social media influencers, the release proved a damp squib.
On Monday, Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of a book on Kennedy, told Reuters: “People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed” by the new files release.
Reuters contributed reporting
