“What are they hiding?” asked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, in response to a lawsuit filed Wednesday that seeks to force the release of documents the government is still keeping secret concerning President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation, the largest online source of JFK assassination records in the country, filed a federal lawsuit against President Joe Biden and the National Archives. Biden issued a memo last year delaying the release of an estimated 16,000 records under the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Collection Act, which required the release of all the documents to the public by October 26, 2017. But President Donald Trump opted to delay the release, and Biden has followed suit in a show of bipartisan stonewalling.
Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (whose own father was slain by an Arab nationalist in 1968), supports the effort to force release of the records. “It was a momentous crime, a crime against American democracy,” Kennedy said. “The law requires the records be released. It’s bizarre. It’s been almost 60 years since my uncle’s death. What are they hiding?”
It is a good question from the nephew of the late president, who has been in the news as a major critic of the policies of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose promotion of Covid vaccines while simultaneously opposing treatments for the virus have made him quite unpopular.
“It’s high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,” said Jefferson Morley, the vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Morley is considered an expert of both the assassination and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
One can only speculate as to what the government could be hiding about a tragic episode that took place nearly 60 years ago, but the government’s reluctance to release the still-secret documents has generated much guessing and multiple conspiracy theories as to what really was behind the assassination. (It should be noted that, contrary to the way the media ordinarily uses the term “conspiracy theory,” such theories are not necessarily false, as there have been conspiracies all throughout human history. The validity of a theory should be judged by the evidence supporting it, and some are true, some are false, and some are no doubt a mixture of both).
After the assassination, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to investigate the assassination, a commission led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and many prominent political figures, including future President Gerald Ford. The Warren Commission concluded months later that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas.
This conclusion — that Oswald acted alone, with no conspirators — has drawn much criticism and is not believed by the vast majority of Americans.
Joseph Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who specializes in conspiracy theories, asserts that the belief that Oswald acted with others is the most popular conspiracy theory of all. He calls the government’s refusal to release the documents “stupid,” adding, “The CIA is wrong. All of this should have been released a long time ago, and it’s shameful the government has yet to do so.”
Untold numbers of books and magazine articles have been published about the JFK assassination, pointing fingers at a variety of alleged perpetrators of the crime, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the Mafia; anti-Castro Cubans; pro-Castro Cubans, and even Lyndon Johnson himself.
Perhaps the most ludicrous theory of all is that the anti-communist John Birch Society (JBS) was in on the assassination. After all, if that were true, does anyone really think the Biden administration would be covering that up?
The government’s secrecy on the subject, persisting even six decades after the event, has only fueled the fire of conspiracy theories. Some have speculated, for example, that Cuba’s communist dictator, Fidel Castro, was behind Oswald (a communist himself who was the founder and possibly only member of a group calling itself The Fair Play for Cuba Committee), in retaliation for JFK’s efforts to have him killed. Others point to the Kennedy administration’s heavy investigations of the Mafia by Kennedy’s brother, Robert, who was the attorney general.
One theorist is Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, himself a former CIA agent, who has spoken at Harvard on the assassination. He believes that Oswald was recruited into a “rogue CIA plot.” According to his theory, a small group within the CIA decided they needed to get rid of Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis “because they thought it was their patriotic duty given the threat the country was under at the time and their views, which would be more hard-line or more radically anti-communist and very extreme politically.”
Why Oswald, a known communist who defected to the Soviet Union and, after marrying the daughter of a KGB colonel, returned to America, would be in with a “rogue” group of CIA agents who were anti-communist is not clear. Perhaps he thinks Oswald was a double agent, and was really an anti-communist. Certainly, it would not be surprising that there were only five or so anti-communists at the CIA. In fact, John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, actually voted for the Communist Party candidate for president in 1976.
President Harry Truman, who signed the legislation — reluctantly — creating the CIA, later expressed regret, opining it had created an American Gestapo.
Of course, one could speculate forever, but the bottom line is that the government should follow the law and release the documents and let the American people make their own judgments as to what they actually mean. Perhaps they would reveal a lot, perhaps little, but one can safely assume that there is something in those documents that someone alive today does not want out, perhaps many someones.
Ironically, as historian David Talbot — who is actually anti-Trump — wrote, “They decided to pillory Trump over this issue [of holding onto government documents] because he’s a political enemy, but they’re guilty of violating records laws themselves with the JFK records act.” Talbot added, “They’re sitting on documents that belong to the American people.”
