By Stephanie Kelly and Nathan Layne
(Reuters) – A U.S. government agency sent recommendations last week to President Donald Trump on which classified documents he should release to the public related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.
The plan comes after decades of fascination in the United States and beyond over the 1963 assassination of JFK, as the 35th U.S. president is known. Trump, who returned to the White House in January, had promised on the campaign trail to release classified intelligence and law enforcement files about the assassination.
Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, had been attributed to a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. The Justice Department and other federal government bodies reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans believe his death was a result of a wider conspiracy.
Trump signed an order during his first week in office related to the release and also promised to release documents concerning the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, both of whom were killed in 1968. Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for those releases.
King was fatally shot in Memphis by avowed segregationist James Earl Ray, and Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles by Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan.
“In accordance with the president’s executive order, ODNI submitted its plan to the White House,” a spokesperson with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told Reuters on Tuesday. Trump’s order had a deadline to send recommendations by last Friday.
Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, has said he believes the CIA was involved in his uncle’s death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.
Kennedy Jr. has also said he believes his father was killed by multiple gunmen, an assertion that contradicted official accounts.
Trump made a similar promise to release classified documents on John F. Kennedy’s assassination during his 2017 to 2021 term, and he did release some documents. But he ultimately bowed to pressure from the CIA and FBI, and kept a significant chunk of documents under wraps, citing national security concerns.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES CONTINUE
Documents may reveal details about a gripping moment in U.S. history, but historians say they are unlikely to bolster any of the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s 1963 shooting in Dallas.
“I suspect that we won’t get anything too dramatic in the releases, or anything that fundamentally overturns our understanding of what occurred in Dallas,” said Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor and one of four historians interviewed by Reuters.
One revelation the documents could contain is that the Central Intelligence Agency was more aware of Oswald than it has previously disclosed. Files revealing that the CIA failed to share intelligence on Oswald with the Federal Bureau of Investigation would be “a big story,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” which concludes that Oswald acted alone.
“The question for me is not whether the CIA was complicit, but whether the CIA was negligent,” Posner said.
Posner said questions remain about what the CIA knew about Oswald’s visits to Mexico City six weeks before the assassination. During that trip, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy.
Barbara Perry, co-director of the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center, an affiliate of the University of Virginia, said the CIA may have been following Oswald.
“Certainly the FBI was, but they didn’t connect the dots,” Perry said. “But it wasn’t a conspiracy on the part of the CIA or the FBI or any outside country.”
The release, however extensive, will likely leave some discrepancies in the body of knowledge regarding the assassination, said Alice L. George, author of “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Political Trauma and American Memory.” So conspiracy theories are expected to endure.
“I can’t imagine any document that would convince (conspiracy theorists) that Oswald acted alone,” George said. “Particularly among people who are really invested in that way of thinking. It’s going to probably leave them in the same place where they are now.”
(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly and Nathan Layne; editing by Donna Bryson and Rod Nickel)
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