Trump and Intelligence Community Are on a Collision Course as Deadline To Release JFK Files Looms

The keepers of America’s secrets are scrambling. They have two weeks to “present a plan” to President Trump “for the full and complete release of all” records related to President Kennedy’s assassination. Expect intelligence agencies to clash with the White House and public skepticism to grow.

“All is riddle,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “and the key to a riddle is another riddle.” Americans have puzzled over Kennedy’s assassination ever since his death at Dallas in 1963. After his slaying, the myth of Camelot was created, and it grows to this day. 

In 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton spoke after President Lincoln succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. “Now,” he said, “he belongs to the ages.” Lincoln became a martyred ideal. It was the same with Kennedy. Americans found it hard to accept that the dynamic, young president was cut down by a single, angry man acting alone. 

That the gunman who shot Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a leftist who’d defected to the USSR made the truth even more unpalatable to the keepers of the Democratic president’s legacy. It was preferable to blame right-wingers, the military, Cuba, the CIA — even President Lyndon Johnson.

Last month, hoping to curb speculation, Mr. Trump tasked the intelligence community with “ending the endless delays” and, by March 8, making public everything about Kennedy. The order executes the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992” which ordered full transparency by 2017.

The law, however, has a trapdoor. It empowers presidents to certify that “continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm” to national security “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

Mr. Trump exercised that option twice in his first term and President Biden did so three times. Mr. Trump now says he regrets conceding to the intelligence agencies’ concerns; his new order is meant to solve the riddles that have fascinated so much of the public.

In 2023, a Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the murder of Kennedy “involved a conspiracy.” The author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” Gerald Posner, doubts that March 8 will change those numbers.

“I don’t think we’re going to see files for some time,” Mr. Posner, whose book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, tells the Sun. “A few with simple redactions might come in March, but I think there will be a tug-of-war over others for a few months.” 

Anything short of full disclosure would be further complicated now that Kennedy’s nephew, Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy, serves in Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Mr. Kennedy, skeptical of the official story of the slaying, released a statement praising Mr. Trump’s order. 

“A government that withholds information,” Mr. Kennedy wrote, “is inherently fearful of its citizens’ ability to make informed decisions and participate actively in democracy.” He invoked his uncle’s statement that “‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.”

The Assassination Records Review Board, created to preserve documents relevant to the assassination, sees its mandate as protecting society, too. So do the intelligence agencies. They have operatives, information, and trade secrets to protect, setting them on a collision course with the White House.

“People will be disappointed,” Mr. Posner said, “if they expect that the release of the JFK files will stop the conspiracy industry that has flourished around the assassination.” An estimated 40,000 books have been written on the subject in addition to countless movies and TV scripts. It’s an industry unto itself.

Any delays or redactions will only inspire new riddles. “If the unsealed files do not contain a smoking gun document,” Mr. Posner said, “those who believe that a grand plot was behind JFK’s murder will simply look elsewhere for the evidence they hope to find.” 

Only facts can solve a riddle. It would be a mistake, though, to  expect whatever, if anything, is released by March 8 to shake those convinced that a conspiracy existed at Dallas. Lincoln may belong to the ages. JFK belongs to those who doubt the government and who are unmoved by the mountain of evidence pointing to Oswald’s guilt.