We deserve to see ALL the JFK assassination documents

If you were alive and were of at least school age, you remember where you were on Nov. 22, 1963, a day that America lost its innocence when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

When word flashed across America — by radio and television, there was no social media — everything stopped.

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing?

I was the editor of four weekly newspapers in Brooklyn, and I remember first the flash that he had been shot, which stunned me and my small staff.

We were an offset operation, meaning we were working with a very early type of computerized typesetting, utilizing punched tape. An older woman was the typist.

Her name was Rose and she wore an orange bouffant wig that we were not supposed to know was a wig.  

We always had a news radio station on in the small newsroom on Flatbush Avenue, and when she heard that the beloved 35th president of the United States had been shot, Rose burst into tears.

I tried to comfort her by saying, “They say he is shot. That doesn’t mean he was killed.”

A little later the radio reported the worst, that the president was dead, the first American president assassinated since William McKinley in 1901. Rose backed away from the keyboard, buried her head in her hands, and wept. Her wig was askew on her head. 

It was a beautiful sunny Friday in Dallas, and in Brooklyn.

I ordered my small staff out on to the streets to interview Brooklynites — man in the street interviews — while I dug through the newspaper clippings to write a story about JFK’s visits to Brooklyn, especially during the 1960 presidential campaign. He was enormously popular in Brooklyn. 

We would put out a special edition.

The same was true for the Brooklyn College evening division newspaper, where I was the editor.

After 60 years, is there anything left to say?

Yes.

I have written about it before, I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. I interviewed James Leavelle, the 10-gallon-hat wearing Dallas homicide detective who was guarding assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot in the stomach and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. (Leavelle expressed great lifetime regret at failing to protect his prisoner.) 

In the decades since, a government-appointed commission found that Oswald acted alone, and a tidal wave of conspiracy theories was generated, believing Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter were part of a massive cover-up.

Although Congress in 1992 passed the John F, Kennedy Assassination Records Collection act, mandating that all records be released by 2017, both Presidents Trump and Biden allowed postponements on the advice of the FBI, CIA and other security agencies.

Why?

Trump ultimately released tens of thousands of documents, the majority of which include at least some redactions, CNN reported, adding that by December 2022, Biden had released more than 14,000 additional JFK assassination-related documents.

Earlier this year, the National Archives reported that 99% of the records have been released. 

What is in the remaining 1%, which amount to thousands of documents?

Why the secrecy?

The FBI and CIA maintain that even after 60 years, the documents contain names and personal details of still-living intelligence and law-enforcement informants from the ‘60s and ‘70s, who could be at risk if they were publicly identified, wrote reporter Philip Shenon in a piece for Politico.

Some of these informants live overseas, where the U.S. could not protect them, and the spy agencies claim the documents would reveal the location of some safe houses that are still in use. Wow. Talk about a long-term lease.

How much of the estimated 14,000 remaining documents contain that kind of classified information, and why could not they be redacted?

The 1992 law was adopted in hopes of controlling a firestorm of conspiracy theories whipped up the year before by the release of Oliver Stone’s popular film “JFK,” which suggested Kennedy was killed in a coup d’etat involving his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, Shenon writes. 

Stone was a propagandist, his movie was fiction, and yet, long before Instagram and Tik Tok, millions of people were brainwashed by a damn movie that embraced conspiracy theories.

The general rule of thumb is that bad information is countered by good information, even though that gets progressively harder when too many Americans can’t spell critical thinking, let alone practice it.

 Nevertheless, another rule of thumb is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. That means transparency will dissolve the lies. 

I can’t say it works in every case — such as for the deluded fools (and anti-Semites) who believe Israel is committing genocide and colonialism and apartheid. All three are lies. But I’ll stick with trying the truth.

The cloak of secrecy around the JFK assassination gives oxygen to the conspiracy theories.

I believe that releasing the remaining 1% would not satisfy all the hard core conspiracy theorists, who have so much emotion invested in the CIA or Lyndon Johnson or the Mafia or Fidel Castro or Regis Philbin killing JFK that they can’t back off.

But 99% of us will be able to move on.