The JFK assassination still has too many questions

On Jan. 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing declassification of government records concerning the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Hopefully, this order will be implemented and reveal just what the CIA and other agencies are still concealing.

Over 60 years after JFK was assassinated in Dallas, a November 2023 Gallup Poll showed that 65% of the public still believes there was a conspiracy. Why do the CIA and other government agencies still insist on withholding documents and redacting others?

Trump released only some of the withheld documents in 2017, and President Joe Biden released some of the others, but they were required by the JFK Records Act to release them all. So why does this issue still matter?

In addition to the 65% who believe in a conspiracy, according to a June 2024 report by Pew Research Center, Americans’ trust in government has gone from 77% to 22% in the last 60 years.

Americans don’t trust that they’re getting the full story about what happened in Dallas that awful day. And many are haunted by loose ends like these:

• Former President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1973 that the assassination had been part of a conspiracy. “I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger,” LBJ said.
• Former President Richard Nixon said the Warren Commission report was “the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.”
• The commission based its narrative on Exhibit CE 399, the so-called magic bullet that allegedly entered JFK’s back, exited his neck and then caused a variety of wounds to Gov. John Connally. The FBI, to its credit, never bought that story and neither did a myriad of experts who tried to replicate the shot and end up with a pristine bullet like the one found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Just last year, Secret Service agent Paul Landis revealed that he found the bullet in the limo’s back seat and placed it on JFK’s gurney.
• Of the commission’s seven members, three did not subscribe to the single-bullet theory. They were Sens. Richard Russell and John Cooper, and Rep. Hale Boggs, The Athens Observer reported in 1989.
• The scene of the crime, the limo, was partially scrubbed of evidence at Parkland Hospital and then finally scrubbed on Nov. 25 in Washington D.C., as reported by Doug Horne of the Assassination Records Review Board in his book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
• The two people who took and developed official photos at JFK’s autopsy, John Stringer and Saundra Spencer, both testified that the photos submitted to the Warren Commission were not the ones they took or developed.

The above facts are merely the tip of the iceberg. Those who still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone need only ask themselves why records have been redacted and withheld for over 60 years. Then ask whether Lee Harvey Oswald could have been the one to carry out the cover-up.

Dennis McCuistion is a former banker, professor and host of the McCuistion television program on KERA in Dallas. Dory Wiley is president and CEO of Commerce Street Holdings LLC and a lifelong JFK assassination researcher.

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