Five JFK Questions for 2025
CIA demands for secrecy will test Trump's rhetoric on the assassination files
While we learned a lot in 2024 about key events leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963—the surveillance of Oswald, the CIA’s doubts about the “lone gunman”—the coming year highlights the challenge of getting the rest of the JFK story out of the grip of a defensive national security bureaucracy.
(Some call this apparatus “the deep state.” Other more friendly sources speak of “the intelligence community.” I’m referring the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies whose functions and budgets are not public.)
While Trump’s election creates new possibilities for completing the historical record of JFK’s assassination, the obstacles to full disclosure in 2025 are many.
The institutional resistance of the CIA is sure to be strong. The documents in question shed light on highly sensitive, sometimes illegal, operations at the time of Kennedy’s murder. And the credibility of Trump’s promise to release the last of the JFK files is open to doubt.
