The JFK files, apparently, say nothing. And that says everything.
No mystery in American history compares to what really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 – the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
The release of 80,000 ‘unredacted’ documents on Tuesday evening — ostensibly every remaining piece of paper relating to the investigation, though that now seems doubtful — promised to give the world the unfiltered, true story.
Following his executive order in January demanding their publication, President Donald Trump surely hoped he had made good on his campaign pledge of ‘transparency’.
Instead, we got the mother of all document dumps – uncategorized, unprioritized, countless pages unreadable with fading type, many containing interviews with people who seem, at best, tangential to the only question at hand: Did the CIA, the FBI, or the Mafia have anything to do with it?
The ghost of J. Edgar Hoover – the cross-dressing FBI director who despised JFK – laughs.
Here’s what we do know: by many accounts, Jackie Kennedy never totally bought the findings of the Warren Commission – established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination – which determined that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald had killed her husband.
We also know that Texas governor John Connally and his wife Nellie, seated in the presidential limousine in front of JFK when he was shot, never believed the commission’s finding – later dubbed the ‘magic bullet theory’ – that the first shot to hit JFK in the neck from behind was the very same bullet that struck Connally in his upper back, wrist and thigh.
No mystery in American history compares to what really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 – the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
We got the mother of all document dumps – countless pages unreadable with fading type (pictured), many containing interviews with people who seem, at best, tangential to the only question at hand: Did the CIA, the FBI, or the Mafia have anything to do with it?
Connally testified before the Warren Commission — whose findings he publicly supported, despite his personal disbelief — that he heard three separate shots, and that after the first one he said, ‘My God, they’re going to kill us all.’
The third and final shot, Connally said, left the presidential limousine covered in blood, tissue and brain matter.
Where are the transcripts of John and Nellie Connally’s private interviews with investigators? Where is any record of Jackie’s apparent concerns?
After all, one can safely assume that everyone involved was interrogated by the FBI, the CIA, state and local authorities.
Recall that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, when Lyndon Johnson wanted Jackie to change out of her blood-spattered pink Chanel suit for his swearing in on Air Force One, she refused.
‘Let them see what they have done,’ she said.
What they have done.
She had been right beside her husband when he was killed. She held pieces of his skull in her hands.
An hour after receiving word that his brother had been shot, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy told his aide Edwin Guthman: ‘I knew they’d get one of us. I thought it would be me.’
Bobby, Jackie, Connally: All used ‘they’ and ‘them’ right away.
For his part, Bobby suspected that the Mafia, an active target of his Department of Justice, might have been responsible and sent Walter Sheridan, his aide-de-camp, to Dallas to investigate.
Sheridan found nothing. But Bobby, like Connally, never believed the Warren Commission, despite publicly backing the final report.
The pressure was immense: If JFK’s widow and brother were to express doubt — during a decade that would also see the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and, eventually, Bobby himself — there would have been riots in the streets.
Bobby’s son, RFK Jr., now serving as President Trump’s health secretary, said last year that he — like so many Americans — believes the JFK assassination was an inside job.
‘The evidence is overwhelming,’ he said, ‘that the CIA was involved in the murder and the cover-up.’
It’s hardly far-fetched. Why else would these files have been withheld all this time?
Why else would President Trump, who vowed to release the remaining documents during his first term, walk back on that promise by saying the danger to national security ‘is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure’?
To be clear: There’s been nothing immediate about this release.
These files have been locked away for decades, and during that time any smoking gun has surely been destroyed — if the truth was ever put down in writing, which is highly doubtful.
If America’s top spies had been involved, they surely would have known not to memorialize plans to assassinate a sitting U.S. president. Nor would they have written of their success.
That their one and only suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot dead days later — on live TV and in police custody — only ratified a growing suspicion that dark forces in the deep state were involved.
That shooter, nightclub-owner Jack Ruby, had ties to organized crime. His stated motive — to prevent Jackie Kennedy from having to testify at Oswald’s trial — was hardly convincing.
She got the nation through the trauma of the assassination. She could have handled a courtroom.
And what about the other footage of the assassination?
The world only got a look at the infamous Zapruder film for the first time in 1975 — 12 years later.
But there’s at least one other home movie, taken by a Dallas maintenance man named Orville Nix, showing the JFK assassination from a different angle — capturing the so-called ‘grassy knoll’ along the presidential procession route, where many believe a second shooter hid.
The federal government, despite promises to the Nix family, has never returned that footage. The public has never seen it.
Why?
And what of JFK’s rushed and botched autopsy? Why are key portions of the final postmortem report still missing? Why did the Navy pathologist in charge of the examination take his original notes and burn them in his fireplace the night after JFK was killed?
Why would FBI agents take another note, handwritten by Oswald and delivered to their Dallas offices, and flush it down a toilet?
This pathetic document dump answers none of the questions. It’s an insult to the intelligence of Americans, who have waited patiently for the truth.
But one thing’s for certain: this new release — which feels like a ‘screw you’ from our secret agencies and faceless bureaucrats — confirms the only logical answer: It was an inside job, and they got away with it.
