The final batch of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – a case that still inspires conspiracy theories more than 60 years later – has been released by the US government.
It follows an executive order by President Donald Trump that required remaining unredacted files in the case to be made public.
US authorities have previously released hundreds of thousands of JFK documents, but held some back, citing national security concerns. Many Americans still believe the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not act alone.
JFK was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
President Trump said beforehand that 80,000 pages would be unsealed.
Of the 1,123 documents included in March 18 release from the National Archives and Records Administration, it was not immediately clear how much material was new. Many documents have previously been released in partially redacted form.
“You got a lot of reading,” President Trump told reporters on March 17, previewing the release. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
However, some of the hundreds of files unsealed on March 18 did appear to have passages blacked out. Others were hard to read, because they were faded or were poorly scanned photocopies, or appeared to bear little relevance to the JFK case, specialists said.
JFK experts suggested the American public might keep wondering about the possible existence of other documents and information.
A government commission in the aftermath of the killing determined that President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran and self-described Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the US.
Opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin. But no clear alternative narrative is yet to emerge from the latest batch of unsealed documents.
Unanswered questions have long dogged the case, giving rise to theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish claims.
In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years.
Both Trump, in his first term, and Biden administrations released piles of JFK-related documents – but thousands remained partially or fully secret.
President Trump’s executive order two months ago also called on government archivists to release files related to the killings of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom were gunned down in 1968.
