It remains one of the most famous political whodunits: Who shot John F. Kennedy? Although 54 years have passed, conspiracy theories have swirled throughout that time over who pulled the trigger on the 35th president of the US and why? The theorists will continue to salivate now that US President Donald Trump has just ordered the release of 2,800 files on one of history’s biggest assassinations. A 1992 law passed by Congress required all records related to the assassination - around five million pages - to be publicly disclosed in full within 25 years. The deadline was Thursday.
These remaining documents are being made public for the first time, and the information held in these files could debunk even the most absurd of rumors that have withstood the test of time. The facts are that Kennedy was shot dead on Nov. 22 1963 as he was travelling in an open-topped limousine in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested at the scene and within 12 hours, was charged with Kennedy’s killing. Two days later Oswald himself was shot dead, on live TV, in a Dallas police department by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner. Ruby was sentenced to death but died of cancer in 1967.
A week after Kennedy was killed, President Lyndon Johnson set up a commission to investigate the case. That became known as the famed Warren Commission whose report published in 1964 said that shots that were fired from the sixth-floor window at the south-east corner of the Texas School Book Depository came from a rifle Oswald was holding, and that there was “no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign”.
Despite the Warren Commission, the majority of Americans don’t believe Oswald acted alone. In fact, 61 percent of the American public to this day think Kennedy’s death involved multiple players. And they don’t believe Oswald was a deranged killer. While the Warren Commission said Oswald acted alone, it did note that he travelled to the Soviet Union in 1959, unsuccessfully applied for Soviet citizenship, and lived there until 1962. It also found that Oswald - a self-proclaimed Marxist - visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City in September 1963, two months before Kennedy was shot.
It would be easy to add two and two together. Kennedy had stared down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and had approved the failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA a year earlier.
Perhaps the most frightening theory in circulation is that the Kennedy assassination was an inside job. CIA leaders were notably angry with Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs Invasion but the organization maintains it had nothing to do with the crime.
But still, there is no conclusive evidence of a Kennedy assassination cover-up. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission found “no credible evidence of any CIA involvement”. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations largely supported the Warren Commission but said there was a “high probability that two gunmen fired at President Kennedy”.
It is unlikely that the new documents will reveal any bombshells or contradict the conclusion that Oswald was solely responsible for killing Kennedy. Most of the information is classified as “not believed relevant” to the assassination when a review board initially met in the 1990s.
But allegations of a government cover-up are unlikely to be assuaged by reports that the CIA, FBI, Department of State and other agencies lobbied Trump at the last minute to keep certain documents under wraps. So some closure to the theories is not expected. The conspiracy theorists will most certainly still pore over these papers, seeking any clue that could help decipher the enduring tale of JFK’s murder.
