Margaret O'Connor
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ONE OF THE strangest stories of the late 20th century is that of the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act 1992 (JFK Records Act). Whatever reviewers (or viewers) think of Oliver Stone’s film JFK , few if any motion pictures have resulted in an Act of Congress, as Stone’s film did. The JFK Records Act legislated for the establishment of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, a public repository of what is now over one million documents, housed in a National Archives and Records Administration building in College Park, Maryland. The JFK Records Act also established an independent agency active from 1994 to 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to oversee the process by which records relating to the assassination were disclosed.
When President George Bush Snr signed the Act into law on 26 October 1992, he stated that one of the reasons for its existence was:
In the minds of many Americans, questions about President Kennedy’s assassination remain unresolved.
‘Because of legitimate historical interest in this tragic event, all documents about the assassination should now be disclosed, except where the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.’
ARRB members and staff focused the majority of their efforts on the identification, review, and release of assassination records. The Final Report specifically refers to fallout from the film JFK as an influencer of the public perception that more openness was required with respect to the records about the events on 22 November 1963 in Dallas.
Although many people have never heard of the JFK Records Act, it has been massively influential in informing a historical understanding of JFK’s era and the aftermath. Whilst to some extent these issues are still debated by historians and writers, its impact is best summed up by Professor Donald E Wilkes of the University of Georgia:
‘Today, except for a few diehard Warren Commission defenders… hardly any serious student of the JFK assassination believes the Oswald-was-the-single-assassin theory anymore, although the mainstream media remain wedded to it’.
Indeed, according to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, ‘much of what we now know of the Warren Commission’s creation comes from taped phone calls of President Johnson, declassified in the 1990s under the JFK Records Act.’ They show that a major impetus with regards to the establishment of the Warren Commission on the part of Johnson was to shut down allegations of Soviet involvement in the assassination to avoid escalation into armed conflict.
Another key takeaway illuminating the early 1960s mindset and culture of the military establishment was the information about Operation Northwoods, unknown to the public until the release of a document called ‘Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba’ by the ARRB on 18 November 1997. In an annex to the document, a range of proposals for false flag operations aimed at provoking war with Cuba were outlined, described by author James Bamford as maybe ‘the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. Government.’
Fascinating parallels link many official endeavours to clarify the circumstances of JFK’s assassination, including (but not limited to) formal inquiries and investigations. A stand-out example is the enduring power of public disquiet. The fallout from the Watergate revelations and the impact of reporting by Seymour Hersch were influential in the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission and the Schweiker-Hart sub-committee. Public horror at the first broadcast in history of the Zapruder film was significant in the establishment of the HSCA. The events depicted in the film JFK, real or fictional, were also important in the creation of the JFK Records Act and the ARRB.
Consistently scathing statements by public officials about security agencies also echoed each other. Senator Boggs was scathing about the FBI’s behaviour. In 1976 Senator Schweiker even spoke on national television of a cover up, saying that the Warren Commission was ‘snuffed out before it even began’ due to its reliance on CIA and FBI personnel.
G. Robert Blakey, former Chief Counsel of the HSCA, is on the record as saying;
‘I now no longer believe anything the Agency [CIA] told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity… We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.’
The Final Report of the ARRB talks at length, in several sections, about a range of issues created by government secrecy. The ARRB’s former Chairman, John R. Tunheim, and former deputy director Thomas Samoluk even stated in an article in the Boston Globe, Assassination questions remain that:
‘Neither the work of the Review Board, previous government investigations nor the passage of almost 50 years has quieted the controversy surrounding the assassination.’
Further saying:
‘Despite the herculean efforts of the Review Board to find more relevant records and make virtually all the records it saw public, the fight for disclosure goes on. There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released.’
And still the books kept coming: Robert Dallek in An Unfinished Life (2003) documented JFK’s life and flaws in a forensically dogged manner; womanising aside, when he wasn’t giving great speeches and being charming, it is apparent that he could be dislikeable; unpleasant, even occasionally gormless and wimpy (never standing up to his ambitious father, for example), and a terrible husband.
But whilst JFK’s infidelities in general aren’t disputed, specific claims and allegations can be terribly difficult to interrogate. For example, most of the information in Dallek’s biography about JFK’s infidelities and affairs appears to be drawn from Seymour M. Hersh’s 1997 book Dark Side of Camelot which Dallek lionises in the footnotes as being comprehensive and accurate on the subject. But Hersh’s research on this issue is criticised by researchers such as Edward Epstein and James Di Eugenio. How difficult it can be to winnow out credible writing from nonsense.
Who to believe, when within twelve months, two books from eminent authors are published, proposing diametrically opposing views on the circumstances of JFK’s assassination? In May 2007, American prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi, who came to fame in the early 1970s as the author of Helter Skelter on the Manson Family killings, published Reclaiming History: the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy which rejected perceived conspiracy theories and posited that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the sole assassin of JFK.
The next year, scholar James Douglass’ somewhat hagiographic but forensically footnoted JFK and the Unspeakable (2008) made claims about his assassination most definitely going beyond a theory of Oswald as the sole assassin – and highlighted JFK’s transformation in response to the great issues of the times, not the least of which was the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
Dissent and disquiet persisted and festered. Since 19 October 2022 the Mary Ferrell Foundation has been engaged in ongoing legal action against President Biden and the National Archives for failing to implement the JFK Records Act, claiming the failures have resulted in confusion, gaps in the records, over-classification, and outright denial of thousands of assassination-related files, five years after the law’s deadline for full disclosure. One of the documents the Foundation wants released is a June 1961 memo from Arthur Schlesinger to JFK recommending a reorganisation of the CIA following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Over the objections of researchers, President Biden issued an executive order on June 2023 bringing the work of the JFK Records Act to a close. Eminent public officials, such as the ARRB’s former Chairman, John R. Tunheim, continue to have plenty to say, which frequently fails to find its way into the mastheads.
Ages ago a friend told me of the time he had visited the site of the assassination in Dealey Plaza and wandered around so called ‘sniper’s nest’ on the 6th floor of the Texas Bookstore Depository. He stood at the window and thought about whether shooting JFK from that distance and under those conditions was even possible.
He had shot a lot of guns in his time, he said, and drawing on his military experience concluded it was not. You would need the best gun in the world, the best marksman in the world, the best conditions in the world, and even then, you would need a bit of luck. I don’t know what a single assassin’s chances of hitting a target under those conditions were, or could be.
For some years now the whole 6th floor has been closed off to the viewing public, so since then it has been impossible to stand where my friend did, and theorise. I suppose this could make a great analogy about being walled off from the truth and historical evidence or whatever, were it not for the fact that such an analogy would be total bollocks.
Thanks to the enduring disquiet and efforts of the citizenry, a massive amount of evidence about JFK’s era has been compiled, archived and published. And it’s been analysed and researched and crafted into books, articles, reports and transcripts and preserved in archives and libraries and on film by persistently dedicated individuals. You might think their efforts are interesting and worthy, you might think they’re rubbish. But the amount of information they have collected over the last sixty years is just extraordinary. And it’s mostly all available at the click of a mouse or the turn of a page.
You wouldn’t read about it. People still do, though.
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Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here
Read Part 3 here
Featured photo: Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby as Oswald is being transferred by police to the Dallas County jail, Sunday, November 24, 1963. Credit: Robert H. Jackson (29), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
