One Month After Dallas, Harry Truman Called for the Abolition of the CIA
The president who created the CIA denounced its shadow on the events of 1963
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment,” wrote former president Harry Truman in the Washington Post on Dec. 22, 1963. Truman spoke exactly one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas,” Truman wrote.
The former president never explicitly attributed JFK’s death to the clandestine service, but the timing and venue of his piece was suggestive.
Why Truman spoke
At the time, news outlets in the Soviet Union and allied communist countries were speculating that Kennedy’s murder — and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin who denied responsibility — pointed to U.S. government involvement in the assassination.
Truman, the president who presided over the creation of the CIA in 1947, addressed the allegatio…
