No missing piece of American history fascinates people more than the classified JFK assassination files.
Conventional wisdom has long held that doubts about the official findings are the province of conspiracy theorists and kooks.
But we may not have to wait much longer for the truth.
On January 24, four days after taking office, President Trump announced he had signed an executive order declassifying the JFK files — a promise he had made during his first term, a promise unfulfilled.
Citing a severe threat to national security, Trump reneged in 2018, saying that the remaining secret files, page count unknown, could not enter public record.
The danger to America, Trump said then, ‘is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.’
What could that grave danger possibly be?
Kennedy was killed more than 61 years ago. The man held responsible by the US government, 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, was found to be ’emotionally disturbed’ by a psychiatrist.
President John F. Kennedy, his wife Jackie, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie smile at the crowds in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
The Dallas Police Department mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald following his arrest for his involvement in the JFK assassination.Â
Oswald, who conveniently had ties to the Soviet Union, was also conveniently killed by another assassin, Jack Ruby, while in police custody.
Other main players — Secret Service agents on JFK’s detail that day, survivors and eyewitnesses — are long dead. Those who remain are elderly, with memories tainted by trauma and time.
So, why is one of the most consequential events in world history shrouded in secrecy, decades on?
And will this new, promised release by Trump — which sparked, just weeks ago, the sudden unearthing of 2,400 more files, 14,000 ‘lost’ pages in all — finally reveal who really killed JFK?
On the morning of November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, were making a crucial campaign stop in Dallas, Texas.
The glamorous First Couple were greeted at Love Field airport by an adoring throng. The mayor’s wife, Elizabeth Cabell, presented Jackie with a bouquet of red roses.
Jackie would never forget those flowers.
The president and First Lady were seated in the back of a gleaming Lincoln Continental convertible to begin the presidential motorcade through the streets, top down — the young president defying Secret Service orders so that people could get a good look at him.
Seated in front of JFK and Jackie were Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.
Oswald, according to the official findings of the 1964 Warren Commission, was stationed on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, training his 6.5x52mm Carcano Model 38 rifle on Kennedy.
He was a former Marine who had been court-martialed twice, then moved to the Soviet Union in 1959, where he met and married a Russian woman named Marina.
Upon his return to the US in the summer of 1962, the CIA and FBI kept tabs on Oswald. Suspicions abound that he was either a spy for the CIA or KGB.
Could those answers be in the secret JFK files? To this day, we do not know what motivated Oswald.
JFK and Jackie greeting the crowd at Love Field airport upon their arrival for a campaign tour on the day of his assassination.
Governor Connally sits in the front while JFK and Jackie take the rear seats in the Lincoln Continental convertible as they drive into the city of Dallas from the airport.
On that bright Texas afternoon, the first of multiple shots (complete number unknown) was fired from the southeast corner of the Book Depository at 12.30pm.
The president was struck in the neck, from behind.
That bullet, according to the Warren Commission, then exited through Kennedy’s throat, hit Governor Connally under his back right shoulder, exited below Connally’s right nipple, then shattered his right wrist before lodging in his left thigh, where it remained.
Quite a trajectory for a single bullet — subsequently derided, by skeptical historians, journalists, documentarians and most Americans as ‘the magic bullet’ theory.
Connally himself was a vocal skeptic right up until his death in 1993, as was his wife. Testifying before the Warren Commission, the governor said he did not believe he and JFK had been hit by that same, first bullet.
Mrs. Connally said she had clearly seen the president grab his throat before her husband was hit by a second shot.
Even the doctors who treated Connally that day said they did not believe a single bullet had caused all his wounds.
Another curious claim of the Warren Commission: that second shot, also fired by Oswald from behind, hit Kennedy in the head, killing him instantly.
Yet Kennedy’s head, we would learn much later, actually snapped backward, which would indicate a second shooter with an unimpeded sightline to Kennedy’s face.
Adding to the public’s distrust was the Warren Commission’s refusal to review the findings of JFK’s autopsy, or the X-rays or photographs taken of his wounds.Â
According to the JFK Assassination Records — more than 5 million pages of almost all known assassination-related material, ordered by a 1992 Congressional Act to be housed publicly at the National Archives: ‘A determination of the number and location of the president’s wounds was critical to resolving the question of whether there was more than one assassin.Â
‘The secrecy that surrounded the autopsy proceedings, therefore, has led to considerable skepticism toward the Commission’s findings. Concern has been expressed that authorities were less than candid, since the Navy doctor in charge of the autopsy […] destroyed his notes, and the Warren Commission decided to forego an opportunity to view the X-rays and photographs or to permit anyone else to inspect them.’
JFK’s assassination was the first of three during that tumultuous decade. Less than five years later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
A mere two months later, JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president, was himself assassinated on June 5.
Fatally shot, JFK slumps down in the back seat of the presidential limousine as it speeds along Elm Street toward the Stemmons Freeway overpass. Jackie can be seen scrambling out the backseat and over the trunk, pushed back inside by Secret Service agent Clint Hill.
The presidential limousine races toward the Parkland Memorial Hospital seconds after he was shot while Clint Hill clings to car, having leapt onto the trunk from his follow-up vehicle.
Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president as Jackie, still covered in her husband’s blood, stands at his side in the cabin of Air Force One on the ground at Love Field airport.
Perhaps a traumatized nation, having lost its most youthful, charismatic, optimistic figures, was all too happy to accept the Warren Commission’s findings.
At least, that is, until March 6, 1975, when ABC aired the Zapruder film — amateur footage recorded by a man named Abraham Zapruder, in the crowd at Dallas that day.
At 26.6 seconds long, this film remains the most comprehensive look at Kennedy’s physical movements during his murder.
Crucially, a second bullet hitting Kennedy’s forehead, from the front, is undeniably clear — as is Kennedy’s head snapping sharply backward.
This supported what came to be known as the ‘grassy knoll’ theory: a second gunman firing the fatal shot, from a hidden spot behind a sloping hill, along JFK’s route.
In the Zapruder film, a horrified Jackie can be seen scrambling out of the backseat and over the trunk, pushed back inside by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who had leapt onto the presidential car from a follow-up vehicle.
Jackie’s roses were soaked with blood, and in one hand she clutched a piece of the president’s brain.
That the nation had to wait 12 years to see the Zapruder film — hidden by the government all that time — only added to a growing unease that America had been lied to, by its own government, about the death of a sitting president.
Jackie testified before the Warren Commission but never pushed for answers. Neither did any immediate surviving Kennedy family member.
One wonders why, and what they may have suspected.
So, if there was a second shooter, who was it?
One theory posits that the Mafia, long embroiled with the Kennedy clan, exacted revenge for multiple reasons.
We now know that JFK’s corrupt father, Joe Kennedy, used the mob to buy votes for his son during the extremely close 1960 presidential election.
Among JFK’s numerous paramours was Judith Campbell Exner, who also happened to be mob boss Sam Giancana’s girlfriend.
And JFK’s close friend, superstar singer Frank Sinatra, had his own ties to the mob and used his celebrity to endorse Kennedy.
But for all that the Mafia did to get JFK to the Oval, what did they get in return?
RFK, appointed head of the Department of Justice by his brother, decided to vigorously target the mob with the intent to destroy them.
Meanwhile, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had secret files on JFK, RFK and Marilyn Monroe — along with just about every other prominent American, including MLK.
Hoover knew all about the Kennedys and the mob, about JFK’s affair, in his younger years, with a rumored East German spy.
He also knew all about JFK and RFK having simultaneous sexual relationships with Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe, who was having simultaneous sexual relationships with JFK and his brother Robert F. Kennedy, sitting up in a train bunk bed in the 1959 Billy Wilder film ‘Some Like It Hot’.
The only known picture of Marilyn with both Bobby, left, and JFK, on May 19, 1962 (the night she famously sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president at Madison Square Garden).
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (pictured) was a secret cross-dresser who had files on JFK, RFK and Marilyn Monroe – along with just about every other prominent American.
The day before she died at age 36 on August 4, 1962, Bobby had been to her Los Angeles home, caught on wiretaps that Monroe herself didn’t know were there.
Who bugged Marilyn? Probably Hoover, a secret cross-dresser obsessed with the sex lives of celebrities and politicians alike.
On those tapes, discovered years after Monroe’s death, RFK can be heard shouting at her: ‘Where is it? Where the f*** is it?’
Also heard is the sound of something, or someone, thudding against a wall.
RFK was worried, with good reason, that Monroe would go through with her threat: If the Kennedy brothers were going to use her and toss her like trash, she was going to hold a press conference and tell the world who they really were.
‘We have to know,’ Bobby is heard telling her. ‘It’s important to the family. We can make whatever arrangements you want, but we must find it.’
Hours later, Marilyn’s body was discovered by her housekeeper. She was sprawled across her bed, nude, a telephone receiver in one hand.
Her death was officially ruled a suicide. But Monroe’s ex-husband, the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio, never believed that.
‘I always knew who killed her,’ DiMaggio said years later. ‘But I didn’t want to start a revolution in this country.’
Monroe died just 15 months before JFK’s murder.
Oswald was shot to death at point-blank range by Jack Ruby, during a televised perp walk just two days after the assassination.
How police allowed that to happen – for anyone to even come close to the most high-value suspect in modern American history – has never been explained.
Ruby, a nightclub owner with a long rap sheet, had his own ties to the mob and, according to his employee Thomas H. Killam, to Oswald.
The Warren Commission, of course, found that Ruby had no ties to either organized crime or Kennedy’s assassination and had acted alone. For his part, Ruby claimed that he did it out of patriotic duty and to save Jackie Kennedy from having to testify at Oswald’s trial.
JFK, through his widow’s myth-making, is remembered as a great president who presided over a modern-day ‘Camelot’.
In truth, JFK was a promiscuous drug and sex addict, risking national security with the parade of women he brought into the White House — leaving little time for running the country, let alone exiting the war in Vietnam, as he had promised, or negotiating the escalating Cold War.
He left his own Secret Service agents disgusted by the orgies he participated in while on the road, deputizing them to find him hookers and leaving them horrified by his recklessness.
It was an open secret in Washington: no one could contain or control JFK.
Against all best advice, he was determined to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and authorized the secret ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion in April 1961.
That spectacular failure only emboldened America’s enemies, leading directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis — the Soviet Union moving nuclear weapons within touching distance of the US east coast, a 13-day stand-off that nearly resulted in all-out nuclear war.
JFK was a problem, a threat to national security, a liability. Just six weeks after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy met Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna.
The over-confident Kennedy had refused to prepare. Perhaps he believed his charm and charisma, so lauded by an adoring American media, would be enough.
It was not.
Lee Harvey Oswald being moved by Dallas police detectives during a televised perp walk on November 24, 1963. Nightclub owner Jack Ruby can be seen approaching with a pistol.
Oswald reacts as Ruby fires his .38 caliber Colt Cobra revolver at point blank range.
The shot, to Oswald’s stomach, was fatal.
Khrushchev, 61 years old to JFK’s 44, swiftly took the measure of the young American president and saw someone he could push around.
‘This man is very inexperienced, even immature,’ Khrushchev said to his interpreter.
Kennedy knew he’d humiliated himself, admitting years later to the New York Times that the summit was the ‘worst thing in my life’ and that Khrushchev ‘savaged me’.
Two months after that fateful summit, the Berlin Wall went up.
Is it really that farfetched to believe that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI or, for that matter, the CIA – both with their own connections to the mafia – killed JFK?
Think about it: Why else would these documents on the assassination remain hidden for decades?
What kind of threat to national security could still exist? Is Khrushchev going to rise from the dead and move nuclear weapons our way once more? Is the ghost of Fidel Castro going to have his revenge?
No. More likely to my mind is that this ‘grave threat to national security’ is an unspeakable truth: that the assassination of JFK was an inside job, and those who know it fear another American revolution.
They are all-too-rightly afraid that no citizen would ever again trust a government that turned a blind eye to its own security agencies killing a duly elected president.
But here’s the rub: most Americans already believe it. Most of us are convinced that the CIA and the FBI had, at the very least, some involvement in a cover-up.
It’s an unspoken part of our history that we’ve all somehow accepted, and it’s a poison — because we now take, as a matter of course, the government’s refusal to tell the truth, whether it’s election denialism, the wet-market Covid lie, the Hunter Biden laptop suppression, or a puppet Biden presidency.
In this light, throwing open the JFK files, with full transparency, would be the healthiest thing the US government has ever done for its people.
Americans have the courage to face what’s in there.
Does the government have the same faith in us?
