Sixy-years since the Nov. 22, 1963 assasination of President John F. Kennedy, 70% of the public thinks it was part of a wider government conspiracy, maybe involving the CIA, FBI or a host of other domestic and foreign agenices. On Sept. 24, 1964, the official government investigation called the Warren Commission Report said the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the lonne gunman, killing JFK without any motive, only concluding the Oswald fired the three shots from the Texas Book Depository as Kennedy’s open mortorcade passed through Dealy Plaza, in Dallas Texas 12:30 p.m. Oswald fled the scene shooting Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit at 1:30 p.m., before apprehended by Dallas police at 1:51 p.m, yelling, “Well it’s all over now.” Oswald was shot and killed Nov. 24, 1963 by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the Dallas Police basement before handing Oswald to federal custody.
Whatever the details of Oswald’s involvement, the Warren Commission’s omitted the fact that Oswald worked for the CIA, an important glitich in the 888-page report. Warren Commission also announced that the all documents related to the JFK assassination would be sealed for 100 years to protect U.S. national security. Sixy-years laster the public knows nothing more aboutt JFK’s murder than they did 48-hours after Oswald succumbed to his gusnhot wounds by Jack Ruby. Dallas police and FBI officials were givn almost no time to interrogate Oswald to get to the bottom of his involvement in JFK’s assassination. With government files sealed, it’s no wonder that the public’s still the dark about that fateful day in Dallas. Univerity of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said it’s the government cover up that keeps everyone guessing, keeps the conspiracy theories alive.
What possible national security concerns could there be from declassifying all documents related to the JFK assassination? At the time the assassination took place, the U.S. was in the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, nearly coming to nuclear war in the Oct. 15-29, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev stared nuclear war in the face before deciding to call off putting Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles [ICBMs] in Cuba. So much was going on at the time when JFK, CIA Director John McCone and Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy discussed the assassination of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Declassifed reports of Oswald travling to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City weeks before the JFK assassination raise suspicions of who Oswald was working for in the months, maybe years before the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination.
Conspiracy theories, as Sabato said, were created because of the government sealing the files of the Kennedy Assassination for 100 years, despite providing dribs-amd-drabs of redacted files, some relevant, some not. Filmmaiker Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK prompted the creation to the government’s 1992 JFK Records Act, where Congress agreed to release in due time all relevans JFK documents. Stone’s film concluded that with the Cold War raging, the last thing that President Lyndon Johnson wanted was nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Stone believed that Oswald worked for the CIA who, at the time, sought to assassinate Fidel Castro. If the public knew that Russia and Cuba paid Oswald to assassinate JFK it could have sparked WW III, possibiy all-out nuclear war. Since Johnson didn’t want that, he sealed all the files related to JFK’s assassination.
Some wild conspiracy theories think that Lyndon Johnson, as JFK’s vice president, wanted to become president and conspired to assassinate JFK. There’s no logic or facts to support the Johnson jealousy theory, left to the dutsbin of history. When it comes to Oswald’s work for the CIA and his past time spent in the Soviet Union with his Russian wife, Marina, there are real concerns about Oswald’s ties to the Soviet Union. So much that isn’t known or revealed after the JFK Record’s Act concerns the CIA’s unredacted files about Oswald. It’s possible that many of Oswald’s CIA files have been purged, outright destroyed, much like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton did with 33,000 emails, purged from her private server. When files are destroyed, it’s hard to retrieve information once containing insights about what happened Nov. 22, 1963.
So, when it comes to whatever remaining files could shed light on Oswald’s motives, but, more importantly, who he worked for and who, if anyone, paid him to kill JFK, there’s much that could still shed light on what happened. Sixty-years after the fact, there’s zero national security significance to the remaining government files, other than admitting that the government holds pertinent documents that could help end conspiracy theories. What’s known today about the Department of Justice, the FBI and U.S. intel agencies is they’ve been used by government for political persecution for former President Donald Trump. So, there’s little that the government wouldn’t do or cover-up to deal with any malfeasance. Whatever’s left in the governments secret files, they need to fully come clean to end, once and for all, all the outrageous conspiracies of what happened Nov. 22, 1963.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analzying spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
