JFK Files: Story of Kennedy assassination & what new docs have revealed

More than 60 years have passed since JFK was shot dead on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Yet the assassination continues to grab the attention of journalists, wonky conspiracy theorists, and the public alike.

This is in no small part due to JFK’s popularity, stemming from his personal style and charisma. A 2013 article in the BBC said, “Kennedy was the first superstar chief executive” who “wielded the techniques of the new age of television as no other politician ever had before him”.

Although his speeches were often light on specifics, JFK looked and sounded good while delivering them. His carefully crafted public image was both relatable and aspirational. Any potential embarrassments — like his seemingly insatiable sexual appetite and string of extra-marital affairs — were kept quiet.

Apart from JFK’s popularity, his death being captured on camera too has fuelled collective interest. The 26-odd seconds of silent 8mm footage recorded by amateur videographer Abraham Zapruder remains etched in collective memory.

After all, it is not easy to forget the image of Jackie Kennedy, dressed in bright pink, crawling to the back of the truck moments after her husband’s passing. “She was reaching for something. She was reaching for a piece of the president’s head,” wrote Secret Service agent Clint Hill in his memoir Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012).

No ‘satisfactory’ answer

The Warren Commission, setup President Lyndon B Johnson to investigate his predecessor’s assassination, submitted its findings in 1964.

It concluded that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the killing, and there was no larger conspiracy at play. Oswald had fired three bullets from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the road that JFK’s motorcade took. The second and third bullets hit the president, the Commission said.

Oswald was arrested on the day of the assassination. But he never went to trial — he was shot dead in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby on November 24, two days after the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission concluded that this killing was a “patriotic act” by Ruby.

But the public was not satisfied. After all, Oswald never admitted to the murder. “I didn’t shoot anybody… I’m just a patsy [fall guy],” he famously said to a crowd of reporters while being whisked away by the police.

“Part of the problem with the Kennedy assassination is that we never actually got to hear Oswald’s side of the story,” Peter Ling, author of the biography John F Kennedy (2013), told the BBC in 2023.

Alleged CIA involvement

A Gallup poll on the 60th anniversary of the assassination, in November 2023, found that two-thirds of Americans still believe that Oswald acted with accomplices. Who these accomplices were has been the subject of many a conspiracy theory.

The most popular one comes from Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 biopic titled JFK. The film pretty much blames the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the assassination and subsequent coverup. The intelligence agency allegedly wanted JFK dead because of the president’s keenness to de-escalate the war in Vietnam.

Stone was not the first to make such a claim — indeed similar allegations had been made since the 1960s — but his film’s popularity cemented this version of events in public consciousness. Ling argues that there’s a “psychological element” to this.

“We tend to remake our memories to make sense of how things have gone,” Ling said. “And so the Kennedy assassination becomes this moment when the hopefulness of the 60s starts to falter. By the time Oliver Stone comes out and basically says [Kennedy] is killed by the CIA to enable the Vietnam experiment to go forward, that’s what many Americans sort of want to believe — that it’s all been taken away from them by evil forces”

The CIA has of course dismissed such claims. But its reluctance to share information on the assassination with the public has not helped its case.

An Act of Congress

In 1992 — partly due to the impact of Stone’s film — the US Congress passed the John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.

The Act requires that each “assassination record” be publicly disclosed in full no later than 25 years after its enactment. But it contains an exception. The US President is allowed to withhold the publication of documents which she believes pose an “identifiable harm” to the military, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations in situations where such harm outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

The Act established the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) as an independent agency to consider and render decisions when a US government office sought to postpone the disclosure of assassination records. The board sat for four years (1994-98), in which time it released almost all documents surrounding the Warren Commission investigation.

In 2013, the ARRB’s former chairman John R Tunheim and former deputy director Thomas Samoluk wrote in the Boston Globe that after the agency had declassified 5 million documents. They added, however, that “there is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting”.

In 2017, during his first term, Trump authorised the release of some 2,800 files regarding JFK’s killing. According to various reports, pressure from the CIA and FBI kept him from doing more. In 2023, former President Joe Biden released about 17,000 more documents.

No great revelation

And now, another 2,182 PDF documents, comprising about 63,400 pages, have been uploaded to the US National Archives and Records Administration’s website. This comes after Trump on January 23 issued an executive order saying that documents pertaining to the deaths of JFK, his younger brother Senator Robert F Kennedy, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr would be declassified.

Although it might take months for the full cache of newly released documents to be comprehensively analysed, preliminary readings are yet to uncover any ground-breaking details about the assassination. What these documents do reveal, however, are the inner workings of the CIA during the height of the Cold War.

As The New York Times put it, “it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decades of secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unsavory practices of US intelligence operations”.

The JFK files are filled with details about the CIA’s agents and informants, covert actions, and budget lines. For instance, one document talks about a covert operation in which the CIA contaminated 80,000 bags of raw sugar on a cargo ship traveling from Cuba to the Soviet Union. According to the document, the contaminate was not dangerous but “so strong to the taste that it ruins the taste of the consumer for any food or drink for a considerable time”.

At least another 1,500 files still remain under the wraps, meaning that more revelations might come later. Moreover, the latest release does not include some 2,400 new records that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said it “discovered” only last month.