The last set of documents pertaining to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which continues to inspire conspiracy theories over 60 years after his passing, was made public by the US National Archives on Tuesday.
The action comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January mandating the unredacted release of the remaining documents pertaining to the murders of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and President John F. Kennedy.
“In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive… all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released,” the Archives said in a statement on its website Tuesday evening.
Millions of pages of records about the assassination of former President Kennedy in November 1963 have been made public by the National Archives in recent decades. However, thousands of documents were withheld at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, citing national security concerns.
The Warren Commission, which looked into the shooting death of the charismatic 46-year-old president, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, was the only person responsible.
However, the official finding hasn’t done much to stop rumors that Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, was the result of a darker conspiracy, and the government files’ delayed publication has only fueled additional conspiracy theories.
Kennedy scholars have said the documents that were still held by the archives were unlikely to contain any bombshell revelations or put to rest the rampant conspiracy theories about the assassination of the 35th US president.
Oswald was shot by a strip club owner, Jack Ruby, on November 24, 1963 — two days after the Kennedy assassination — while being moved to a county jail.
Raw intelligence made up a large portion of the previously made public information, including numerous reports from FBI agents who followed up on fruitless leads.
Much of what they include was also known before, such as the fact that the CIA, which was infatuated with communism, concocted a number of bizarre schemes to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.
Oswald returned to the United States in 1962 after defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959.
Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK” have fueled the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson.
The release of the documents follows an October 26, 1992 act of Congress which required that the unredacted assassination records held in the National Archives be released in full 25 years later.
