One Year After Trump’s Order, Eight Insights Prompted by the Latest JFK Releases
What do we know now that we didn't know a year ago?
One year ago this week, the Trump administration released 77,000 pages of once-secret records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Information that had been concealed for decades was revealed for the first time.
Initial press coverage focused on a memo written by JFK adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. about the CIA’s infiltration of the State Department, and settled on the conclusion broadcast in a hasty New York Times headline (“Oswald Did It”) that was quickly rewritten.
Of course, even a team of Times reporters could read only a fraction of the 77,000 pages on deadline, so their tendentious conclusions on deadline were premature.
With the benefit of a year of discovery, discussion, and analysis, it can be safely said that the new JFK files undermine the notion that one motiveless man alone killed the president. The new files lend new credence to Oswald’s claim that he was a “patsy,” the fall guy for others whom he knew were responsible.
The new files do not reveal who organized the ambush that killed President Kennedy, but they do identify the CIA men behind the propaganda blitz that aimed to lay the blame on Cuba.
The new files do not shed light on a newly surfaced 1971 tape recording, made public by Shane Stevens, grandson of Billy Sol Estes, a lobbyist close to Lyndon Johnson. On the tape a voice attributed to Estes tells a voice attributed to Cliff Carter, former top official in the Democratic National Committee, that LBJ hired a man named Mac Wallace to assassinate JFK. The claim is not one that most JFK researchers believe because there isn’t a lot of evidence for it. The late Joan Mellen wrote extensively about tenuous evidence related to Wallace in her skeptical 2016 book, “Faustian Bargains.”
Why Estes and Carter came to the conclusion that LBJ was behind JFK’s murder, and why they talked about it in 1971, is not known. Stevens’ story about how he obtained the tape suggests it is authentic, but without more information, its significance cannot be assessed.
The new files, however, do identify the senior CIA officials who monitored Oswald as he made his way to Dallas, where he was arrested for killing a police officer and the president.
The files reveal the nature of the six code-named CIA operations that shadowed Oswald in his short life. They were: HTLINGUAL (mail surveillance), AMSANTA (penetration), AMSPELL (propaganda), LIEMPTY (photo surveillance), LIENVOY (audio surveillance), and LCIMPROVE (counterespionage).
The files also expose the subtle and extravagant lies that at least three top CIA officials told to hide their knowledge of covert operations involving the “lone gunman.”
Taken as whole, the new JFK files do not solve the crime. They clarify it. In particular, they clarify the role of senior CIA officers in the surveillance and manipulation of Oswald, the accused assassin who was killed in police custody.
Key Revelations
Context matters. It is important to understand how the clarification of the JFK story was deliberately obstructed and delayed by the CIA, which acted in defiance of the letter and the spirit of the law. The CIA’s obstinance was only overcome by the sweeping language of Trump’s E.O. 14176.
What was released a year ago were virtually all of the JFK files that were located and examined by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s. The Board, created by the 1992 JFK Records Act, was a panel of outside experts empowered to review and release all government records related to the assassination.
Between 1994 and 1998, the ARRB issued what are known as Final Determination Notices for 29,000 JFK documents that, by law, were supposed to become public 25 years after the passage of the Act, namely in October 2017.
JFK researcher Andrew Iler has shown how the National Archives and the White House, under Presidents Trump and Biden, ignored these notices. Instead, both presidents acquiesced to CIA demands for continuing secrecy and kept JFK records out of public view in defiance of a ministerial duty to make the records public.
Upon taking office again in 2025, Trump abandoned his deference to the CIA and ordered complete release of all JFK records without redactions. That started to happen on March 18, 2025, with additional documents released later in the year.
The point is that the JFK documents released last year should have been released, by U.S. law, in October 2017. Trump, Biden, and the National Archives ignored the Final Determination Notices. They flouted the explicit provisions of legislation that were approved unanimously by the House of Representatives and by the Senate, a law that was signed by a Republican president and implemented by his Democratic successor. There could be no clearer demonstration of the will of the people in enacted law.
Yet the CIA and its allies in Washington for eight years delayed enforcement of the democratic consensus about the murder of a president. During that time, multiple material witnesses to the events of 1963 died before they could be interviewed about the information in the files.
What was the government so determined to hide? What was hidden the longest? What’s truly new in the JFK files?
