JFK Records Release Brings 'Lone Gunman' Theorists Out of the Woodwork

With the recent declassifications, proponents of the assassination's outdated official narrative are reemerging to restate their stale version of events

The “Backyard Photos” of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly taken by his Russian wife, Marina, in late March 1963, and which he claimed in Dallas police custody were forgeries (Credit: Warren Commission)

With the full release of over 60,000 previously redacted pages related to JFK’s assassination from the JFK Collection in the National Archives on Tuesday, Mar. 18, advocates of the “official history” embodied in 1964’s final report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (the Warren Report) have reappeared to tell us: “See? Nothing to see there!”

Their aim: to marginalize and foster insecurity among skeptics. These advocates of the “lone gunman” theory of the assassination are reasserting the idea that all dissenters are either dishonest or mentally unsound, a bunch of wacky, disingenuous “conspiracy freaks” who just don’t want to accept “the truth.”

That is, regardless of whatever new facts emerge from this latest declassification process, the truth for Warren Report defenders is already carved in stone: a “lone nut” — alienated, disturbed, and ultimately homicidally violent — acted pretty much spontaneously, entirely alone and on his own volition, to kill the president on Nov. 22, 1963, for motives only he knew. But his “left-wing extremism” is all we need to know about what motivated him.

What they ignore is that in this, the first stage, only documents from the so-called JFK Collection in the National Archives have appeared. These files are not the entire corpus of assassination related records sought by serious researchers and historians.