John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States from 1961 until his assassination near the end of his third year in office.
At that time, JFK was riding in his motorcade through Dallas on November 22, 1963, at the age of 46, when he was hit by two bullets. One of the bullets hit the President near the base of the back of the neck, and exited from the front of the neck, whereas the other entered the right rear of the President's head and exited from the right side of the head.
JFK arrived at the hospital, and was later pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m.. His death was announced by the White House Acting Press Secretary at 1:33 p.m.
The Commission based this statement primarily upon the testimony of the doctors who had treated the JFK at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, and the doctors who performed the autopsy on him at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
The assassination of JFK has created thousands of books, articles, TV shows and films, many of which have explored the idea that the assassination was the result of an elaborate conspiracy.
Regardless, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which is an "independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records, posted 13,173 documents containing newly released information subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act).
The released documents have been made available for download, in accordance with U.S. President Biden’s memorandum of December 15, 2022.
The record release is not expected to give major revelations about JFK's assassination, and that it doesn't include any change to the conclusion reached by the commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the erstwhile Soviet Union, acted alone.
The released documents produced no conclusive proof that Oswald worked with anyone else.
However, it's worth noting that many documents are still held back, and not published to the public yet.
So here, despite many of the documents about the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F Kennedy were released, many other sensitive records about the killing were still kept secret for "national security" reasons.
Some 515 documents remained withheld in full and another 2,545 withheld in part, said the National Archives.
But still, the release of 13,173 documents should be useful for historians focusing on the events around the assassination.
Many of the documents that were released belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including several others that studied the assassination of JFK, as well as Oswald’s movements and his contacts.
Other documents focus on requests from the Warren Commission investigating the assassination.
The documents also show how the U.S. government opened a so-called 201 file on Oswald in December 1960, which was nearly three years before Kennedy’s murder, and after Oswald’s failed defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.
Among others, there is also a document in 1963 that described how CIA officials in Mexico City “intercepted a telephone call” from Oswald made in October from that city to the Soviet embassy there “using his own name” and speaking "broken Spanish."
Oswald was hoping to travel through Cuba on his way to Russia and was seeking a visa, the documents show.
There were initial concerns that Jack Leon Ruby might have had some connection to Oswald.
It was Ruby, the American nightclub owner who murdered Oswald, two days after Oswald was accused of the assassination of JFK.
But here, in a 1964 document, it is written that a memo to the presidential commission investigating the assassination said "the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner."
Speaking about the remaining documents, Jefferson Morley, Vice President of the Mary Ferrell Foundation that sued the Biden administration in back in October over the delay of the document drop.
He questioned why the U.S. government still had to redact and block some information on JFK's murder from the public, decades after it happened.
"What the CIA has hidden," is whether the CIA had "operational interest in Oswald" at the time of the assassination, Morley said in an interview.
It was the Congress in 1992 that ordered that all remaining sealed files pertaining to the investigation into JFK's death should be fully opened to the public through the National Archives in 25 years.
What this means, the public should be well informed by October 26, 2017, except for those the president authorized for further withholding.
Then, in 2017, then-President Donald Trump released a cache of records, but decided to release the remaining documents on a rolling basis.
All of the remaining JFK files were originally supposed to have been released in October 2021. It was Biden who postponed that planned release, citing delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and announced that they would be instead disclosed in two batches: one on December 15, 2021, and another by December 15, 2022, after undergoing an intensive one-year review.
What this means, 95% of the documents in the CIA’s JFK assassination records collection have been released in their entirety, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement, and no documents shall remain redacted or withheld in full after an "intensive one-year review" of all previously unreleased information.
