US president Donald Trump said on Saturday that, "subject to receipt of further information", he planned to allow the opening of long-secret files on the November 1963 assassination of US president John F Kennedy. The files are due for release next week.
Politico magazine earlier quoted Trump administration and other US government officials as saying the president would almost certainly block the release of information from some of the thousands of classified files, which the US National Archives is scheduled to make public by October 26th.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” Trump said in a tweet.
Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017
"The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency, unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise," a White House official said.
The assassination on November 22nd, 1963, cut short “Camelot,” as the 1,000 days of the Kennedy presidency became known. Kennedy was 46 at the time and remains one of the most admired US presidents.
Thousands of books, articles, TV shows, movies and documentaries have been produced about the assassination and surveys have shown a majority of Americans still distrust official evidence pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole killer.
Despite serious questions about the official inquest, and theories claiming that organised crime, Cuba or a cabal of US security agents were involved in the killing, conspiracy theorists have yet to produce conclusive proof Oswald acted with anyone.
Over the years, the National Archives has released most of the documents related to the case, but a final batch, amounting to tens of thousands of pages, remains withheld. Only Trump has the authority to decide whether some should continue to be withheld or released in redacted form.
Concerns
The Washington Post and other media have quoted officials as saying that government agencies have lobbied Trump to withhold some of the documents, arguing that they could expose relatively recent intelligence and law enforcement operations.
Philip Shenon, the author of the Politico article and of a book on the assassination, said he did not think the last batch of papers contained any major bombshells, but may shed light on the activities of Oswald while he was travelling in Mexico City in late September 1963, and courting Cuban and Soviet spies.
“From the record we already have, we know he met there with Soviet spies and Cuban spies and other people who might have wanted to see Kennedy dead,” Shenon said.
“It’s going to be very interesting to see what else the government knew about the threat Oswald might pose – how much more they learned about his trip in Mexico City and whether or not they bungled evidence to suggest he was a threat.”
Shenon said it would be interesting, too, to see if there was anything in the documents to substantiate comments Trump made during his election campaign linking Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz’s father to Oswald.
“It’s the president’s favourite conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination . . . but I don’t think there is [a link],” Shenon said.
Cruz's father Rafael has called Trump's allegations that he was pictured with Oswald in New Orleans before the assassination "ludicrous".
Reuters