The Iffy Transparency Of Trump’s Order On The Jfk Assassination Files

On Thursday, President Donald Trump picked up that big, black Sharpie of his and affixed his electrocardiogram-like signature to an executive order calling for the “full and complete release” of all still-classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of his predecessor John F. Kennedy.

Trump appeared eager in the Oval Office signing ceremony to congratulate himself in front of cameras as a champion of government transparency — as the president who finally brushed away decades of secrecy about Kennedy’s murder, an event that has inspired wild, corrosive conspiracy theories almost from the moment those shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.

“Everything will be revealed,” Trump said portentously as he signed the order, which also calls for the declassification of all still-secret documents about the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News the night before, Trump vowed to release the documents “immediately — we’re going to see the information.”

But Trump, no stranger to promoting conspiracy theories, including about JFK’s murder, appeared to make similar promises of full transparency about the Kennedy assassination files during his first term — and then broke them. And it is all but guaranteed that he will feel pressure to do it again.

In fact, a close reading of the new order — especially given what is known about the contents of the still-secret JFK documents, which appear to contain no “smoking guns” that would point away from Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman in Dallas — suggests that Americans who hope they are now only days away from the full truth about Kennedy’s death face disappointment.

The order contains loopholes that could delay the release of any documents indefinitely. And as in his first term, loyal, Trump-named political appointees at the CIA, FBI and elsewhere — not the “deep state” career civil servants he often denounces — will almost certainly try to persuade him to continue to withhold some material on national security grounds.

Public pressure to declassify the full assassination archives began in earnest as a result of the furor whipped up by the 1991 release of Oliver Stone’s popular, conspiracy-soaked film “JFK.” The film depicted Oswald as an innocent man and suggested that Kennedy was the victim of a far-flung conspiracy involving, among others, the CIA, the FBI, Pentagon defense contractors and JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson. But even before Hollywood got involved, opinion polls showed that most Americans refused to believe Oswald acted alone.

Congress tried to tamp down controversy over the film with passage of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The landmark open-records act forced the declassification of millions of pages of files, including documents that embarrassed the CIA and FBI since they proved those two agencies had Oswald under aggressive surveillance before the assassination and missed obvious chances to stop him.

The law also set a 25-year deadline for the release of all assassination-related documents in the government’s files — a deadline reached on October 26, 2017, when Trump was nine months into his first term.

At the time, several thousand files remained classified — and Trump at first seemed eager to release them all. In social media posts a week before the deadline, Trump boasted that, short of any last-minute appeal, “I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.”

But then the deadline came, and Trump blinked, giving into pressure from deputies at the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and other agencies who argued that some of the still-secret files contained information that might somehow endanger national security or foreign policy.

Trump did agree to release material from thousands of JFK documents during his first term — in many cases, by revealing names, dates and addresses that had previously been blacked out in otherwise declassified paperwork. But more than 8,000 documents remained sealed, in part or in full, by the time he left office. President Biden declassified more of the collection, but he, too, was convinced that thousands of other documents needed to remain at least partially secret. The National Archives reports that, as of last year, about 3,600 documents remain at least partially sealed, most from the files of the CIA.

Internal correspondence from the Archives made public in 2022 revealed the arguments used by the agencies over the years to try to withhold JFK files. They showed the FBI had struggled to prevent the release of documents that identified witnesses in organized crime investigations who, the bureau argued, clearly had no connection to JFK’s murder. The CIA argued against declassifying files that revealed the names and addresses of informants from the 1960s and 1970s who, while elderly, could be endangered if their identities became known.

Trump’s new executive order, which he promised to voters on the campaign trail last year, is vulnerable to the same kinds of arguments from the same agencies.

Despite his vow last week that documents will be released “immediately,” the order makes no demand for that. Instead, it instructs his director of national intelligence and attorney general — Cabinet posts unfilled at the moment as the Senate weighs Trump’s nominees — to present the White House within 15 days with a plan for the “full and complete release” of JFK assassination records. Beyond that, the order sets no deadline for Trump to act on the plan, allowing him to hold off on any document release for as long as he wants.

(Under the order, the director of national intelligence and attorney general have 45 days to complete a similar plan for release of documents related to RFK and King’s murders. Those assassinations have never inspired anything like the volume of feverish conspiracy theories that swirl around JFK’s death. Still, some assassination researchers — including Robert F. Kennedy’s oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services — have charged that the government may be hiding evidence of a conspiracy in those murders, too.)

Something else is missing from Trump’s executive order. It does nothing to address what becomes of perhaps the most tantalizing assassination-related materials still hidden in government files: tapes of hours of interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy and then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy conducted in the months after the assassination by the author William Manchester for his book The Death of a President; as well as several private letters Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to President Johnson, including three she sent to him the week after the assassination.

The tapes and letters were donated to the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, which is administered by the National Archives, under deeds from the Kennedy family that bar their public release for decades — until 2067 in the case of the tapes.

People close to the family have long suspected that Robert F. Kennedy, in particular, harbored doubts that Oswald acted alone and that he may have hinted at that to Manchester. Assassination researchers have wondered if Jacqueline Kennedy had similar doubts and why she felt the need to contact Johnson so often and urgently in the week after her husband’s murder.

But short of pressuring the Kennedy family to rewrite the deeds, Trump appears to have no legal authority to release the tapes or letters, which guarantees that at least some mysteries about the Kennedy assassination will linger long after Trump, too, is gone.