Previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released Tuesday evening following an order by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office.
The 1,123 files were posted on the website of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said he had a team that started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full significance becomes clear.
In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas.
| Photo Credit: JUSTIN NEWMAN
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.
Trump told reporters Monday that has administration will be releasing 80,000 files, though it’s not clear how many of those are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
Researchers have estimated that 3,000 or so files had not been released, either in whole or in part. And last month the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
Many who have studied what’s been released so far by the government say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
Trump’s January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records.
Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas. As his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security. And while files continued to be released during President Joe Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.
Sabato said that his team has a “long, long list” of sensitive documents it is looking for that previously had large redactions.
“There must be something really, really sensitive for them to redact a paragraph or a page or multiple pages in a document like that,” he said. “Some of it’s about Cuba, some of it’s about what the CIA did or didn’t do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald.”
