A tranche of documents tied in some way to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released late Tuesday. No major new details were found immediately, but scholars said it would take time to sift through them all.
Adam Nagourney
National political reporter
Jennifer Schuessler
Reporting on history and archives
Rick Rojas
Reporting on the South
Audra Burch
Writing about race and identity
Chris Cameron
Washington reporter
Robert Draper
Domestic politics reporter
Read the documents on the National Archives site, and scroll down to see how you can contribute to our examination of them.
A new trove of government files about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released to the public late Tuesday under an order from President Trump. Scholars hope the flood of papers will resolve — or at least shed light on — the final questions about an event that traumatized a nation and remains the subject of conspiracy theories six decades later.
The release, which came in the early evening, consisted of 1,123 PDF documents, according to the National Archives, including typewritten reports and handwritten notes. Most of them were shorter than 10 pages. Mr. Trump, in teasing the release on Monday, said there would be no redactions — but an early review found that some information appeared to have been blocked out.
Historians have said they do not expect major new revelations, and no information that would contradict the basic circumstances of the case: that Kennedy was killed as he traveled in an open-car motorcade through Dallas by a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, on Nov. 22, 1963.
Mr. Trump said on Monday that the documents would be released on Tuesday afternoon, apparently catching some archivists by surprise. Scholars said it would take time to go through all the documents in search of any new historical revelations.
“This dump is profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones,” said David J. Garrow, a historian who has written extensively about the intelligence agencies.
The documents were, in many cases, blurred and difficult to read, no doubt reflecting their age — many of them were typed or written a half-century ago — and because they are photocopies.
Tim Naftali, an adjunct professor at the school of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, said what he found on Tuesday night convinced him that the information had been kept secret all these decades not because it included inflammatory information about the assassination, but rather to mask highly sensitive details about C.I.A. intelligence-gathering.
“I’ve always been wary that there was a smoking gun in this collection because Trump would have released it in 2017,” he said. “What they were protecting was sources and methods.”
Here’s what to know:
Second time around: This is the second release of Kennedy papers under Mr. Trump, who wanted to put them all out during his first term. He ultimately agreed to some redactions to protect sensitive intelligence-gathering information. But Mr. Trump has said he no longer considers those redactions necessary.
Document dump: Unlike previous releases of records related to the Kennedy assassination, these documents were not categorized or presented in any organized way. Some appeared to have been versions of papers already released to the public. Others had no obvious connection to the assassination. It is also possible that Tuesday’s initial release did not include all the documents covered by Mr. Trump’s order.
What’s left to uncover? About 99 percent of the roughly 320,000 known Kennedy papers have been publicly disclosed since Congress passed a law in 1992 requiring their release, according to the National Archives. But more than 2,100 documents remain fully or partially withheld as a result of redactions, and another 2,500 remain under court-ordered seals and other restrictions.
The promise of a “final” release of all government secrets relating to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy has whetted the appetite of many Americans, including the current occupant of the Oval Office. But many historians are taking a measured, wait-and-see approach to the latest documents, which the National Archives released on Tuesday.
“I doubt that these releases are going to overturn our understanding of what happened on that terrible day in Dallas,” Fredrik Logevall, a historian at Harvard who is working on a multivolume biography of President Kennedy, said before the release.
No comments:
Post a Comment