White House Releasing Documents Of Kennedy Assassination
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – U.S. President Joe Biden has ordered the full release of thousands of documents on the murder of President John F Kennedy.
With the publication of some 13,173 files online, the White House said more than 97 percent of records in the collection were now publicly available.
“This significant disclosure reflects my Administration’s commitment to transparency and will provide the American public with greater insight and understanding of the Government’s investigation into this tragic event in American history,” Biden added in his order.
Experts said they were not expected to change the conclusion reached by the commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone.
However, the latest cache will be helpful for historians focusing on the events around the assassination for which Oswald was held responsible.
Kennedy was shot and killed while riding his motorcade through Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was 46 years old.
Thousands of books, articles, TV shows, and films explored the idea that Kennedy’s assassination was an elaborate conspiracy. None produced conclusive proof that Oswald – who was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after killing Kennedy – worked with anyone else, although questions remained.
CIA DOCUMENTS RELEASED
Many of the documents released on Thursday belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency, including several focused on Oswald’s movements and his contacts. Other papers focus on requests from the Warren Commission investigating the assassination.
The documents reveal that the US opened a so-called 201 file on Oswald in December 1960, nearly three years before Kennedy’s murder and after Oswald’s failed defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.
A December 1963 document described how CIA officials in Mexico City “intercepted a telephone call” Oswald made in October from that city to the Soviet Embassy there “using his own name” and speaking “broken Russian.” Oswald was hoping to travel through Cuba to Russia and was seeking a visa, documents show.
There were initial concerns that Ruby, Oswald’s killer, might have had some connection to Oswald. But a newly released September 1964 memo to the presidential commission investigating the assassination said, “the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated or might have been connected in any manner.”
The U.S. Congress in 1992 ordered that all remaining sealed files about the investigation into Kennedy’s death should be fully opened to the public through the National Archives 25 years by October 26, 2017, except for those the president authorized for further withholding.
In 2017, then-President Donald Trump released a cache of records but decided to release the remaining documents on a rolling basis.
The remaining JFK files were initially supposed to have been released in October 2021. President Biden postponed that planned release, citing delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and announced they would be instead disclosed in two batches: one on December 15, 2021, and another by December 15, 2022, after undergoing an intensive one-year review.
“The profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day,” Biden stressed in a memo.
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