The Most Important Blank Page in the JFK Assassination Files

President Kennedy contemplated reorganizing the CIA in 1961. In 2023, Americans are not allowed to know why.

CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. often quotes his uncle as saying he wanted to “splinter the agency into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” In June 1961, White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a 15-page memo for President John F. Kennedy offering a plan to do just that.

Schlesinger, a Harvard history professor, warned about the CIA’s “encroachment on the policy-making functions.” He laid out a practical case for breaking up the power of the spy service so that a single entity did not have sole power over both intelligence collection and analysis.

Sixty years later, the CIA is still censoring more than a page of Schlesinger’s memo on “CIA Reorganization” with the justification that disclosure would harm U.S. national security in 2023. It is perhaps the most important blank page remaining in the JFK files. It looks like this:

Censored 1961 memo on ‘CIA Reorganization.’