For experts, the more than 60,000 pages released reveal little about the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy
The government of current US President Donald Trump released documents on Tuesday, the 18th, about the death of former President John F. Kennedy , assassinated in November 1963 in an open limousine in Texas. But, despite what was expected, the files reveal less about the motive for the assassination and more about the espionage operations carried out by the US in that decade, in the context of the Cold War.
At least, that’s what experts who have pored over the more than 60,000 pages of documents believe. Kennedy’s death is still the subject of conspiracy theories. This is because only one person was found guilty, former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald . However, Lee was killed two days after the crime and never went to trial. Thus, some aspects of the plot remain unexplained.
“There will be people who will look at the record and see if there is any corroborating evidence for their theory,” Larry Schnapf, an environmental lawyer who has researched the killing and pressed the government to make public what it knows about what led to the shooting in Dallas on a November afternoon six decades ago, told Reuters.
Schnapf, who stayed up until 4 a.m. poring over the documents, said what he found while examining them was less illuminating about the Kennedy assassination than about U.S. spying operations. “It’s all about the covert activities of our government that led up to the assassination,” he said.
Defense Department documents from 1963 that were among those released covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and U.S. involvement in Latin America, attempting to thwart Fidel Castro’s support for communists in other countries. A document released in January 1962 reveals details of a top-secret project called “Operation Mongoose,” or simply “the Cuban Project,” which was a CIA-led campaign of covert operations and sabotage against Cuba, authorized by Kennedy in 1961, with the goal of removing the Castro regime.
Trump promised on the campaign trail to provide more transparency into Kennedy’s death. Upon taking office, he also ordered aides to come up with a plan for releasing records related to the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said he advocates transparency in Washington and noted that previous administrations, including the Biden administration, have also released documents from the Kennedy assassination. But he added that even with the thousands of new documents, the public still won’t know everything because much of the evidence may have been destroyed over the decades.
