Trail of Destruction, Pt. 12: The Secret Service Shreds Its JFK Files

Reports on protection of the president in the autumn of 1963 are illegally destroyed

[Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in the 12-part JFK Facts series, “Trail of Destruction.” All the episodes can be viewed here.]

President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade to San Diego State College, with California Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown, Jun. 6, 1963 (Credit: Robert Knudsen/JFK Library)

On April 1, 1997, Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) senior analyst Joan Zimmerman called James “Mike” Mastrovito, an ex-Secret Service agent who had been in charge of the agency’s JFK assassination file in 1975. As she discovered, Mastrovito had destroyed most assassination-related Secret Service files decades earlier.

As Zimmerman explained in a memorandum of her call:

When Mastrovito took charge of the JFK assassination file, it consisted of 5 or 6 file cabinets of material. After Mastrovito finished “culling” irrelevant material, the collection was down to one five-drawer file cabinet. Mastrovito guessed that his purging of extraneous material took place around 1970. He said that the extraneous material consisted of records of 2000-3000 “mental cases” who called the Secret Service after the Kennedy assassination to claim responsibility for the shooting.