By Steve Holland and Rich McKay
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Thousands of pages of digital documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy are now available for historians, conspiracy theorists and the merely curious, following orders from U.S.
President Donald Trump.
An initial tranche of electronic copies of papers flooded into the National Archives website on Tuesday evening after Justice Department lawyers spent hours scouring them.
As of 10:30 p.m., the National Archives had published 2,182 PDFs totaling 63,400 pages. Trump had said a day earlier that the release would include around 80,000 pages.
The archives did not immediately respond on Wednesday to a request for comment on whether more documents would soon be released in response to a January order from Trump.
The archives’ Kennedy assassination collection has more than six million pages of records, the vast majority of which had been declassified and made public before Trump’s order.
The digital documents released on Tuesday offer a window into the climate of fear surrounding U.S.
relations with the Soviet Union shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 nearly led to a nuclear war. Experts doubt the new release will change what is known about the assassination of JFK, as Kennedy is known, in Dallas on Nov.
22, 1963. The release is nonetheless likely to intrigue people who have long been fascinated with a dramatic period in history, with the assassination and with Kennedy himself.
Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor whose books include “JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-56,” said in an email the new documents may help fill in the picture.
“It’s valuable to get all the documentation out, ideally in unredacted form.
But I don’t expect dramatic new revelations that alters in some fundamental way our grasp of the event,” he said.
One document with the heading “secret” was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the State Department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.
Oswald was married to a Soviet woman, Marina Oswald, at the time of the shooting.
Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and the U.S.
involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communists in other countries.
The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime.”
“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.
One document released from January 1962 reveals details of a top secret project called “Operation Mongoose,” or simply “the Cuban Project,” which was a CIA-led campaign of covert operations and sabotage against Cuba, authorized by Kennedy in 1961, aimed at removing the Castro regime.
Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the documents release, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X on Tuesday.
Alice L.
George, a historian whose books, including “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” explore modern America, said Americans’ curiosity about assassinations and questions about government transparency add “to a sense that there must be important evidence hidden away in these files.”
But she said government records were unlikely to resolve questions some still have.
“I think there may continue to be more record releases,” she said.
“I seriously doubt that any will include great revelations. The Warren Commission report was done well, but it was done when many of the key players were alive. It’s much harder to find the truth when most of the people involved are dead.”
Kennedy’s murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Oswald.
The Justice Department and other federal government bodies have reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans still believe his death was a result of a conspiracy.
Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., a son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, has said he believes the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in his uncle’s death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.
Kennedy Jr.
declined comment when contacted by Reuters on Tuesday.
Trump has also promised to release documents on the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, both of whom were killed in 1968.
Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for those releases.
(Reporting by Steve Holland, Rich McKay and Donna Bryson; Editing by Donna Bryson, Aurora Ellis, Leslie Adler and Michael Perry)
