2024 Is the Right Time for a New JFK Records Act
All three presidential candidates have taken a stand on the last of the assassination files. Will Congress act?
Why is it that the terrible events of November 1963 figure in the increasingly tense presidential election of 2024? Why does the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which took place before a majority of voters were born, still figure in public discourse?
Has the smog of conspiracy theories distorted public understanding of the past? Or are secretive government agencies sitting on long-obscured truths relevant to the wrongful death of a president? The answer is yes.
JFK’s assassination and its confusing investigatory aftermath (featuring six official inquiries, two of which reached diametrically opposed conclusions about who was responsible) still matter to American voters.
High-minded pundits will assure us the JFK story endures only as proof of the paranoid style in American politics. These savants, blithely ignorant of the new facts in the JFK case, assure us a benign government had it right long ago: A Little Man killed a Big Man, they declaim. Get over it.
But the majority of Americans are more in the mood of Bob Dylan, whose 2020 dirge, “Murder Most Foul,” depicts JFK’s assassination as a foundational crime of American history. Some Big Men killed a Big Man, moans our Nobel Laureate. And they got away with it.
JFK’s assassination is understood, in popular memory (and elite opinion), as an inflection point. Either JFK is the wellspring of conspiracy theories, which demonize the government and now overload political debate with QAnon nonsense. Or, Kennedy’s murder in broad daylight (and the fact no one was ever brought to justice for the crime) speaks to a belief in high-level malfeasance and militaristic power that thwarted — and thwarts — the will of the people.
The JFK story is still politically potent because it is so deeply embedded in American memory.
Three Candidates, Three Positions
It comes as no surprise that the three presidential contenders have taken strong and divergent positions on the disposition of the last of the secret JFK assassination files.
President Joe Biden says, in effect, “Trust the process.” In a June 2023 executive memo, Biden turned over decisions about the release of these documents to the National Security Agency with guidance from a CIA-authored “Transparency Plan.”
Biden, an institutionalist, asks voters to trust the government to act in the public interest and historic truth.
Former president Donald Trump says, in effect, “Trust me.” In January 2023 Trump told Judge Andrew Napolitano that the contents of the JFK files were so explosive, he chose not to make them public in 2017. Instead, Trump acquiesced to CIA and FBI demands for continuing secrecy around some 15,000 JFK documents. Trump, the candidate of charisma, asks voters to trust him to make a different decision next time.
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who made his name as a litigious environmentalist lawyer, says, in effect “Trust full disclosure.” Last November, Kennedy launched an online petition drive calling for the release of all records related to the assassination of his uncle on Nov. 22, 1963, a petition that has since been signed by more than 7,000 people. Kennedy, the insider running as outsider, insists full disclosure will illuminate the cause of his uncle’s murder, which he blames on enemies of JFK’s policies in the CIA.
All three candidates are speaking to voters who know and care about the issue.
According to a 2022 survey of midterm voters conducted by the Miami-based polling firm Bendixen & Amandi International, solid majorities of Democrats (66 percent), Republicans (76 percent), and Independents (69 percent), said they favored full JFK disclosure without exceptions or delay. Less than 25 percent said they had no opinion.
So, while JFK is not a life-or-death issue (like Ukraine and Gaza), nor a kitchen table issue (like gas prices and inflation), nor a global challenge (like climate change and pandemics), the assassination story is a historical symbol with contemporary real-life implications.
What Can Be Done?
The limitation of Biden’s approach is that the CIA’s ill-named Transparency Plan will perpetuate JFK secrecy for as long as certain unelected and unidentified national security officials choose. That’s an abrogation of the spirit and the letter of the 1992 JFK Records Act, which mandated full disclosure by 2017.
The limitation of Trump’s approach is that it depends on the whims of a single chief executive who previously delayed full disclosure.
The limitation of RFK Jr.’s petition is that he lacks an enforcement mechanism and he does not address a delicate issue: the assassination-related evidence that is under the control of the Kennedy family.
What supporters of all three candidates — and Democrats and Republicans in Congress — can agree on is a law to ensure full JFK disclosure now.
We have a legislative model proven to dispel polarization. The JFK Records Act was approved in October 1992 by a vote of 435-0 in the House of Representatives and passed by acclamation in the Senate (where Joe Biden then served). It was signed into law by a Republican president and implemented by a Democratic president.
The law proved a success because it created an independent civilian review panel that had authority to overrule secretive agencies intent on keeping documents out of public view. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) declassified several million pages of JFK records in the 1990s, which, in their totality, make the JFK Records Act a model of open government legislation.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need a new JFK Records Act, patterned on the 1992 law, to wrest control of the last of the JFK files away from unelected CIA and NSA officials and return it to an independent board with authority to declassify fully in the public interest (while respecting the handful of cases where genuine national security information might be involved).
There is a group of people working on just such a plan, and they have a strategy to move it forward. The work begins its public component this week.
The 2024 JFK Records Act, drafted by civil rights litigator Bill Simpich, uses the exact language of the 1992 law, with updated passages to plug known loopholes.
The bill would reconstitute a new JFK review board to serve as the good faith arbiter of declassification decisions about the 3,400-plus JFK records that still contain redactions. A new ARRB could also complete the search for JFK files that the ARRB sought in the 1990s but never obtained due to delay, deceive, and destroy tactics of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and other federal agencies.
What the JFK majority needs now are champions on Capitol Hill. The presidential candidates have weighed in on the need to address the issue. Now Congress needs to enact the will of the people, to demonstrate that the government can be held accountable, to show that even secretive agencies must subject themselves to the democratic control or else forfeit their legitimacy and their charter.
The alternative is a surrender to the power of the CIA. We have seen the clandestine service protect its prerogatives under two very different presidents, a telling display of bureaucratic clout.
The implications of the CIA’s sway go far beyond the question of what happened in 1963. As long as the Congress and the people cannot impose their will on the CIA concerning the murder of a sitting president, the clandestine service will enjoy a degree of impunity incompatible with a democratic republic. It’s that simple.
And the contrary is true. If Congress can rein in the secretive agencies, it will go a long way toward demonstrating that Big Government, the “deep state,” the military-industrial complex — call it whatever you want — can be subject to the will of the people.
Three Smoking Guns
Inevitably people ask: Is there a “smoking gun” proof of conspiracy to kill President Kennedy in the remaining documents? Or to state the question more precisely: Is there definitive evidence that Kennedy was ambushed by enemies of his policies?
The answer is yes.
Some of the CIA’s most sensitive JFK files related to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald remain highly classified. When declassified, they will illuminate the CIA’s unexplained role in the events of 1963.
The Agency still suppresses the personnel file of undercover officer George Joannides. He was the Miami-based chief of psychological warfare operations who played a supporting role in a covert operation targeting Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing JFK. Joannides later stonewalled congressional investigators for reasons the CIA has never explained. And when the Assassination Records Review Board asked about Joannides in 1997, the CIA responded deceptively.
The Joannides file may well contain smoking gun proof that top CIA officers manipulated Oswald into being what he said he was: a “patsy” for others who committed the crime.
Some material held by the Kennedy family will likely be revelatory.
What First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy really thought about who killed her husband is not known, though she was certainly skeptical of the Warren Commission’s improbable single bullet theory. The former First Lady gave four confidential interviews to historian William Manchester in 1964 in which she spoke candidly about who she thought was behind her husband’s murder. She also sent three letters to President Lyndon Johnson that are sealed.
Jackie’s private views might not amount to smoking gun proof of conspiracy, but they probably show that the closest witness to the crime thought her husband was killed by domestic enemies — which would be newsworthy to say the least.
The tapes and transcripts of those conversations, however, are controlled by JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, who is RFK Jr.’s cousin. The tapes and Jackie’s correspondence are under a deed of gift seal until 2067. And the Kennedy family is divided over RFK Jr.’s candidacy. Which is all the more reason for a new JFK Records Act: to prevent a family dispute from obstructing the public interest in full disclosure.
The last of the JFK files may also yield new physical evidence related to JFK’s assassination.
The original tape of communications between U.S. generals and Air Force One on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, has never been made public. (A version surfaced in 2011, with signs of editing.) It is known that top generals discussed the conspiracy question as the plane flew back to Washington in the panicky hours after JFK’s murder, but why they spoke of a conspiracy is not known. The unedited Air Force One tape, if it is found, could yield smoking gun-type revelations about the Pentagon’s response to Dallas.
Or maybe not. It is possible (some will say likely) that the release of the last of the still-secret JFK files won’t change a single person’s mind. That’s not a problem or a failure. Pointing fingers was never the point or the goal of the JFK Records Act. The landmark 1992 law was not approved unanimously because it would identify the perpetrators of a JFK conspiracy. The law was approved by acclamation because it promised to restore public confidence in government via complete and timely disclosure.
The 2024 JFK Records Act would deliver on that promise, ensuring that the American people have the fullest possible account of JFK’s assassination, without regard to partisan politics or deference to those secretive, self-interested agencies that have covered up the truth for 61 years.
I second the motion. Happy to help push congress. Send us form emails/letters
The national security state decides what it will disclose regardless of its legal obligations.
Rand Paul requested unclassified (!) documents he was entitled to, and he got back 250 fully redacted pages:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Qo8dHsgRk&t=2s
Outrageous!
What kind of country are we living in?