What’s new in the JFK files? 4 things to know about the assassination records.
The federal government Tuesday night released tens of thousands of pages on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s unclear how much light they’ll shed.
The federal government on Tuesday night released tens of thousands of pages about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, although it’s unclear how much light they will shed on one of the great turning points in American history.
The National Archives published the documents at the order of President Donald Trump, who on Monday told reporters at the Kennedy Center that officials would release “all of the Kennedy files” Tuesday. That sparked a “scramble” at the Justice Department, whose attorneys worked through the night, scouring hundreds of pages of documents, ABC News reported.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields, in a recent interview with NewsNation, promoted the upcoming records release, saying: “The American people will have their hands on these documents, and there will be a story to tell. I won’t preview you that story, but let me tell you: The American people are truly going to be shocked at what they see.”
Here are four things to know about the newly released documents on a watershed moment in U.S. history.
This release includes tens of thousands of pages
The National Archives on Tuesday initially released more than 1,100 records totaling more than 31,000 pages.
Tuesday night’s disclosure is the latest in a series of disseminations since the 1990s that have molded the nation and its historians’ view of Kennedy’s killing. The vast majority of the Archives’ 6 million pages of records related to the assassination have already been declassified, according to the agency’s website.
Late Tuesday night, federal officials published a second tranche of more than 1,000 files, although most appeared to have been previously released. All of the documents from both releases can be read on the Archives website.
Many of the documents had been released earlier in slightly different forms
Based on their document identification numbers, none of the files released Tuesday are new, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Most of the new material is previously redacted information that has now been unmasked.
After scanning multiple documents, Philip Shenon – who wrote “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination” – said there wasn’t much that altered his understanding of the killing. He said this is dense material that requires an expert’s eye to discern how the new unredacted records are different from their partly or fully redacted prior versions.
“We’ve seen virtually all of these documents before with redactions, but I can’t instantly tell you what’s new,” he said. “It’s always possible there is a blockbuster, but so far, nothing here on the face of it is rewriting the essential truth of what happened that day. It would take days, weeks and months for a serious researcher to really understand what’s in these documents.”
The files give a wide-ranging view into 1960s bureaucracy
The Post is still combing through the documents. The newly unredacted records include single sheets that represent the mundane bureaucratic blizzard of paper that kept Washington running half a century ago: cables, memos and dispatches.
The files range from a translation of a message asking for medication to treat anemia to a memo explaining that someone had enlarged a photo from the summer of 1961 showing what appears to be Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald standing with a group of people in front of the Palace of Culture in Minsk, Russia.
Most of the National Archives’ records related to the assassination, including some the agency has not put online itself, are available on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, named after a deceased Dallas legal secretary who became one of the earliest researchers into the assassination.
Experts’ and politicians’ reaction so far has been measured
The overall reaction has been muted as experts and others try to make sense of the unredacted records.
Vogue correspondent and social media savant Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of Kennedy and the son of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, posted about the records online.
Schlossberg, who has been critical of Trump, chastised the president and his first cousin once removed, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“These men are stealing history from present and future generations – by appropriating the past for their criminal agenda, they normalize themselves in the minds of those without living memory,” Schlossberg wrote Wednesday morning on X.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) praised Trump for releasing the records, saying in a post on X, “Promises made, promises kept.”
Ian Shapira, Clara Ence Morse, Aaron Schaffer, Sarah Cahlan and Evan Hill contributed to this report.
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