Getty ImagesThe US government has released the final batch of documents on the assassination of President John F Kennedy (JFK) – a case that still inspires conspiracy theories more than 60 years later.
It follows an executive order by President Donald Trump that required remaining unredacted files in the case to be made public.
Experts are combing over the papers, not all of which have appeared online. They say the job will take time, and that they do not expect many ground-breaking revelations.
US authorities have previously released hundreds of thousands of JFK documents, but held some back, citing national security concerns. Many Americans still believe the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not act alone.
Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.
Trump said beforehand that 80,000 pages would be unsealed.
Of the 1,123 documents included in Tuesday’s release from the National Archives and Records Administration, it was not immediately clear how much material was new. Many documents have previously been released in partially redacted form.
“You got a lot of reading,” Trump told reporters on Monday, previewing the release. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”
But some of the hundreds of files unsealed on Tuesday night did appear to have passages blacked out. Others were hard to read, because they were faded or were poorly scanned photocopies, or appeared to bear little relevance to the JFK case, specialists said.
Non-scholars would probably be “baffled”, commented David Barrett of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, as he reviewed the released material on Tuesday.
Speaking to the BBC’s US partner CBS News, he said the release was “useful”, but he was not expecting “earth-shaking information, either with regard to the assassination or more broadly”.
Other JFK experts suggested the American public might keep wondering about the possible existence of other documents and information.
“I think there may continue to be more record releases,” historian Alice George told Reuters. But she went on to say the passage of time made investigations hard: “It’s much harder to find the truth when most of the people involved are dead.”
A government commission in the aftermath of the killing determined that President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran and self-described Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the US.
Opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin. But no clear alternative narrative is yet to emerge from the latest batch of unsealed documents.
Unanswered questions have long dogged the case, giving rise to theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish claims.
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 remained partially or fully secret.
Trump’s executive order two months ago also called on government archivists to release files related to the killings of presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, both of whom were gunned down in 1968.
His announcement on Monday that the document release was imminent came as a surprise to his national security team, which had been working since January to prepare the files by removing redactions, according to US media reports.
The Republican president vowed during last year’s White House race to release JFK files, shortly after he secured the endorsement of Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr), the nephew of JFK and son of Robert F Kennedy.
RFK Jr has gone on to become Trump’s health secretary. He is among those who have promoted conspiracy theories about the assassination of his uncle. He was yet to comment on Tuesday’s release of documents.
Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said of the release: “President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency.”
