U.S. President Donald Trump has released information regarding former President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in an effort to fulfil his campaign promise to bring more clarity about the shocking event in Texas.
An initial batch of electronic copies of files hit the National Archives website on Tuesday night, with more than 80,000 likely to be published after justice department lawyers spent hours reviewing them.
The digital documents, including PDFs of previously classified memos, offers a window into the climate of fear at the time surrounding US relations with the Soviet Union shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 nearly led to a nuclear war.
The release is expected to pique the interest of those who have long been interested by a dramatic moment in history, the assassination, and President Kennedy.
Many of the documents showed investigators’ efforts to discover more about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union and monitor his movements in the months preceding Kennedy’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, a son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F Kennedy, has said he believes the CIA was involved in his uncle’s death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.
Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, said on X on Tuesday: “The Trump administration did not give anyone in president Kennedy’s family ‘leads’ about the release.”
Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor whose books include JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-56, said in an email the new documents may help fill in the picture.
One document with the heading “secret” was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.
Oswald was married to a Soviet woman, Marina Oswald, at the time of the shooting.
Department of defence documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.
The documents suggest Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the US or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime”.
One document released from January 1962 reveals details of a top secret project called “Operation Mongoose”, or “the Cuban Project,” which was a CIA-led campaign of covert operations and sabotage against Cuba authorised by Kennedy in 1961 and aimed at removing the Castro regime.
Trump signed an order shortly after taking office related to the release of the documents, prompting the FBI to find thousands of new documents related to Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
In the scramble to comply with Trump’s order, the justice department ordered some of its lawyers who handle sensitive national security matters to urgently review records from the assassination. according to reports.
“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X.
Kennedy’s murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Oswald.
The justice department and other federal government bodies have reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades.
Trump has also promised to release documents on the assassinations of civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jnr and senator Robert Kennedy in 1968.
Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for the releases.
