President John F. Kennedy is seen riding in his motorcade approximately one minute before he was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Jim Altgens/AP
In a significant move towards transparency, around 80,000 documents tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are scheduled for release, potentially unveiling new details of the 1963 incident.
Just days after assuming office, President Trump issued an executive order to declassify these files, alongside documents involving the murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom were slain in 1968.
The precise timing for the release of the JFK files was confirmed by President Trump during a visit to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He announced, “While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate — we are, tomorrow, announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. So, people have been waiting for decades for this, and I’ve instructed my people … lots of different people, [Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard that they must be released tomorrow.”
Despite previous document releases during Trump’s tenure, some files remained classified due to extensions granted by former President Joe Biden. Historians suggest that while the new documents could illuminate certain details of the assassination, they are unlikely to change the widely accepted belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the shooting from the Texas School Book Depository.
Kevin Boyle, a professor at Northwestern University, remarked that already 300,000 pages related to Kennedy have been disclosed, and the remaining files are “not going to reveal … something new about John Kennedy’s assassination.”
JFK biographer Fredrik Logevall also commented that the documents are not expected to “dramatically overturn our understanding of what happened on that terrible day in Dallas,” but acknowledged that “even if they don’t alter our understanding in this deep way, I think there’s still useful information potentially in these materials.”
The timeline for the release of files related to RFK and King remains uncertain. Some documents on the civil rights leader have been sealed by a federal court until 2027.
This article was originally written by www.npr.org
