White House releases thousands of JFK files - Dispatch Weekly
December 16, 2022 - Reading time: 3 minutes
The White House has mandated the first-ever full disclosure of thousands of papers relating to the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.
More than 97% of the records in the collection are now accessible to the public, according to the White House, with the online publication of some 13,173 files.
The papers aren’t believed to reveal anything incredibly shocking, but historians want to discover more about the supposed assassin.
Kennedy was shot on 22 November 1963, while visiting Dallas, Texas.
By October 2017, the government was compelled by a 1992 statute to make all assassination-related records available.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Thursday approving the most recent disclosure.
However, he stated that some documents would be kept secret until June 2023 in order to guard against any “identifiable harm.”
According to the US National Archives, 2,545 papers would be partially concealed, while 515 would continue to be completely hidden.
The Warren Commission, a 1964 US investigation, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a US citizen who had previously resided in the Soviet Union, assassinated Kennedy alone. He was assassinated by nightclub owner Jack Rub in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days after his arrest.
Years of conspiracy rumours followed JFK’s death, but the CIA announced on Thursday that it had “never engaged” Oswald and had not withheld information about him from US investigators.
Academics and theorists who have studied JFK for a long time had hoped the most recent disclosure would provide further details concerning Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met a Soviet KGB operative in October 1963.
The CIA stated in its most recent statement that all material it possessed regarding his travel to Mexico City had already been made public, adding that “there is no new information on this topic in the 2022 release.”
The CIA was allegedly hiding material about Oswald’s time in Mexico, according to researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which filed a lawsuit demanding that the government release the papers.
The White House claimed that by making the materials public, the general public would have a better grasp of the assassination probe.
“Agencies have conducted a comprehensive effort to evaluate the full set of over 16,000 records that had previously been given in redacted form and determined that more than 70% of those records may now be shared in full,” President Biden said in the order.
