Donald Trump swaggered to journalists today as he released more than 1,000 files related to the assassination of John F Kennedy.
The US President, 78, remarked: “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading” as he teased the disclosure of the material, which includes records, photographs, motion pictures and sound recordings. The files have been posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration, and journalists and historical experts continue to trawl through the documents today to assess their significance.
But it is understood some of the files may have already been made public through the archive’s existing extensive database of material, such as artifacts. Larry J Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century”, said his team has started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full importance becomes clear.
Following Mr Trump’s announcement at the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC on Tuesday, Mr Sabato said: “We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that.”
The US National Archives and Records Administration already has more than six million pages of files, such as documents and records, relating to the assassination of the former president.
Many who have studied what’s been released so far by the government say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
Mr Trump’s January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records. Previously, these documents have been classified – unless the archive already had access to them, which is thought to be the case in some instances.
Mr Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas. As his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
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In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
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