Takeaways from the Kennedy files: Spycraft, collateral damage and granular detail

The release of about 64,000 documents about the assassination of President John F Kennedy on Tuesday started a race to find a revelation, as journalists, historians and amateur sleuths scoured the pages in hopes of finding something, anything, that could be considered consequential.

Instead, the big reveal was that there wasn’t much of a reveal at all. Here are the biggest takeaways of the blockbuster that wasn’t.

Decades of secrecy protected CIA spycraft, not a second gunman.

For years, as the government has declassified and published documents related — some very tenuously — to the Kennedy assassination, the assumption expressed by conspiracy theorists and some historians has been that anything still being withheld must be big. Even Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the nation’s top health official, had long called for the release of all the documents related to his uncle’s death.

But with the release of nearly 64,000 pages by the National Archives, including some that had previously been rendered opaque by redactions, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decades of secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unsavory practices of US intelligence operations.

Rather than reveal what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed was “overwhelming evidence” that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination, the files are filled with details about the agency’s agents and informants, covert actions and budget lines. The secrets, it seems, were the small details, not any big news.

The release produced few revelations but plenty of collateral damage.

While the documents revealed little to challenge the known facts about the assassinations of Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., this might not be the end of declassifications.

The Justice Department on Wednesday moved to unseal FBI surveillance records involving King, over the objections of those concerned that revelations about the civil rights leader’s private life will be used to tarnish his legacy.

Others will be affected directly by the document release, too: Among the new files released are accounting records that include the Social Security numbers of dozens of congressional employees from the late 1970s. Some of those people are still alive, including Judy K. Barga, 80, who once worked as a government contractor.

She said she was surprised to learn that her private information had been included in the files and unsure how to remedy the situation. “People’s private information should be kept private,” she said.

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

The latest trove of documents may not have thrilled the general reader, and its disorganised release did not make the files easy to navigate. But for historians and scholars, there were some gems to be unearthed in reading between the lines.

A summary of a 693-page secret CIA report from 1975, for example, touches on cases in which the agency “may have exceeded its mandate.” But there were also references to station chiefs, overseas break-ins, illegal surveillance and various “extremely sensitive” operations. “It’s such a catalog of agency ‘bad acts,’” said David J. Garrow, a historian with deep experience in intelligence files.

Trump said 80,000 pages would be released. We got about 64,000.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said he would release 80,000 pages of documents related to the assassination within 24 hours. There would be no redactions, he said. That sent national security officials scrambling.

In two document dumps Tuesday evening, about 64,000 of those documents were made public. Some of them did indeed have information blocked off. But that’s 16,000 files short of what Trump promised. Are there more coming?

There was just enough to keep the conspiracy theorists going. (There will always be enough.)

There may not be anything that can satisfy the conspiracy theorists who are certain that there is information still missing from the public record. The theories that took hold immediately after the killing were only amplified by the investigations that were meant to quash them. The film “JFK,” released in 1991, gave new life to even more. One man wrote to officials repeatedly, claiming for years that he alone knew more than the government was letting on.

The Warren Commission, which was established in 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination, explicitly tried to discredit conspiracy theories. (It didn’t work.) Then there was the 1992 law that ordered papers related to the killing be made public within 25 years, with limited exceptions. (That didn’t quiet the doubters, either.)

By 2023, 99 per cent of documents had been disclosed, and now 64,000 more have been added to the record. Still, the question of what is missing may never go away.