“Here is a bulletin from CBS news. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”
Those words from Walter Cronkite, blared from television sets across America on November 22, 1963, interrupting the broadcast of As the World Turns.
Then back to the soap opera. An hour after that, this announcement by Cronkite, “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock p.m. Central Standard Time.”
Undisputed Facts
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination about an hour later. The next day he was arraigned, then murdered a day later by Jack Ruby.
Fifty-eight years later, the world still does not know what the United States intelligence community knows about the assassination.
The Warren Commission, formed Nov. 29, 1963, submitted a report in Sept. 1964, to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Its conclusion was that the assassination was carried out by Oswald, acting alone, and that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald.
Writing for the History Channel’s website history.com, Steven M. Gillon, in an article from 2019 “Why the Public Stopped Believing the Government about JFK’s Murder,” notes that before the Warren Commission’s report, a Gallup Poll showed that just 29 percent of Americans believed Oswald acted alone, while 52 percent believed there was a conspiracy.
Months after the release of the report, 87 percent of respondents believed Oswald acted alone. The Warren Commission was the only body to conclude that Oswald acted alone, and that Ruby’s murder of Oswald was an individual act of outrage. That Commission’s records are public.
Other conclusions spark mistrust
Over the years, public skepticism has grown. A problem with the Warren Commission, according to Gillon, was its “failure to present a convincing explanation for why Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.”
Alternative theories exist. Some of the more familiar are that there was a second shooter (the grassy knoll theory); that Fidel Castro or Cuban exiles who fled Castro were acting in revenge for the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion – either Castro, enraged by the attempt, or the exiles angry with its failure; or that the CIA, FBI and/or the Mafia, acting alone or together, conspired in the assassination.
Some suggest LBJ had a role. The motive of Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, was never satisfactorily explained. A 1979 article by Rita Mae Brown in The Washington Post suggested that the 1965 death of reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, declared an accidental death from “acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication, circumstances undetermined” by the NYPD was neither accident nor suicide. Kilgallen’s secret, eight-minute interview with Ruby, done in prison, was never published.
In 1966, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, highly critical of the Warren Commission, focused on reports of additional shots from the grassy knoll. New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison pursued a complex conspiracy, and Life magazine released photos of a home movie of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder. The Zapruder film was requested by the Warren Commission, but certain frames were noted to be missing, splicing was visible, and other frames had been switched in sequence. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1965 wrote that there were printing errors and that some frames had been accidentally destroyed.
Other government investigations
In 1975 the Rockefeller Commission was formed in response to a 1974 New York Times report that the CIA had illegally conducted domestic activities. Regarding the JFK assassination, it concluded the CIA was not involved and that JFK had not been shot by a bullet coming from in front of the limousine.
The United State House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed in 1976 to further investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Its report stated that the Warren Commission did not fully investigate possible conspiracies and concluded there was a second gunman who fired from the grassy knoll.
The committee concluded that neither the Soviet Union nor Cuba were involved, nor were organized crime or anti-Castro groups, the Secret Service, CIA, or FBI. But it didn’t rule out individual members of organized crime families or anti-Castro groups being involved in what it believed was a conspiracy. Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, and other theorists added to the suspicion.
The current information gap
In 1992 Congress declared that all government records concerning Kennedy’s assassination “should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination” but that portions of the records could be withheld if they posed “identifiable harm” to military, intelligence, law enforcement or foreign operations.
In 2017, former President Donald Trump pledged to release all the remaining documents on the Kennedy assassination, but reversed course in 2018, citing security concerns. An October 24, 2021, NPR report revealed that the release had been once again forestalled by President Joe Biden, citing the pandemic, alleging the documents have still not been fully vetted for security.
It’s been almost sixty years
The “security concerns” excuse isn’t sitting well with everyone. “It’s an outrage. It’s an outrage against American democracy. We’re not supposed to have secret governments within the government,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told Politico in an October 24, 2021, interview. “How the hell is it 58 years later, and what in the world could justify not releasing these documents?”
“I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history,” Patrick Kennedy, son of Ted Kennedy, said.
The White House declined direct comment on the record but released a memo stating that “the National Archives advised that their review of classified material was severely hampered by COVID-19 since classified material cannot be reviewed remotely and asked for more time.”
Marc Caputo, writing for Politico noted that “the coronavirus first hit the U.S. in early 2020, more than 27 years after the JFK Records Act passed and more than 56 years after Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.”