Published on 24/01/2025
U.S President Donald Trump has directed officials to prepare for the declassification of critical documents surrounding three vital assassinations in U.S. history: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
“A lot of people are waiting for this for long, for years, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “And everything will be revealed.”
The order directs top administration officials to present a plan to declassify the documents within 15 days. That does not make it certain it will happen, however.
President John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963. His brother Robert F Kennedy was assassinated while running for president in California 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.
Many of the documents related to the investigations have been released in the years since, although thousands still remain redacted, particularly related to the sprawling JFK investigation.
President John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the United States.
A government commission determined that Oswald acted alone.
However, unanswered questions have long dogged the case, and have given rise to alternative theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish conspiracy theories.
Opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin.
In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years. Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden released piles of JFK-related documents, but thousands – out of a total of millions – still remain partially or fully secret.
Trump promised to declassify all of the files in his first term, but held back on his promise after CIA and FBI officials persuaded him to keep some files secret. Today’s executive order states that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest”.
“As a statement of intention it’s great that the president has put his promise into words on paper. That’s important,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post journalist, JFK assassination expert and editor of the online newsletter JFK Facts.
“But the details and implementation are everything. This process is just beginning. How exactly this is going to be carried out is not at all clear,” he said.
Recent document releases have revealed new details about the circumstances surrounding the assassination, including about the CIA’s extensive monitoring of Oswald.
In 2023, Paul Landis, an 88-year-old former Secret Service agent who witnessed the assassination at close range, said he took a bullet from the car after Kennedy was shot.
Experts say the detail complicates the official story that a single bullet hit both the president and Texas Governor John Connally, who was riding in the motorcade and survived the shooting.
Mr Morley said new information has cast further doubt on the theory that Oswald acted alone and predicted that a full release of all the redacted documents could add significantly to public knowledge.
But he said that there may not be a “smoking gun”, and that CIA and other security officials will push to maintain some level of secrecy.
“This story is not over,” he said.
During the signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, Trump asked for the pen he used to sign the order to be given to Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is RFK’s son, JFK’s nephew and the president’s nominee for health secretary.
RFK Jr has long cast doubt on the official narratives about his uncle’s assassination as well as that of his father, Robert F Kennedy.
Kennedy Sr was killed in a Los Angeles ballroom by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian man angry at US support for Israel. RFK Jr has spoken to Sirhan in prison and has stated that he does not believe Sirhan killed his father, although other Kennedy family members reject that claim.
Martin Luther King Jr was shot to death by white nationalist James Earl Ray. Members of the King family have alleged Ray did not act alone and was part of a larger conspiracy.
