The JFK files: the truth at last?

“It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.” So declared Donald Trump on the campaign trail, vowing to order the release of all official records related to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Last week that cache of documents, nearly 64,000 pages of it, was duly released, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times.

Some are illegible owing to age, and it will take months for people to scour through them all. Many, though, will be eager to do so. The JFK assassination is the “source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking”. Hosts of self-styled sleuths will be poring through them for evidence that Kennedy was killed by the Mafia or the CIA or the “Deep State”.

‘They’re looking for more questions’

They won’t find any, of course, said David Harsanyi in the New York Post, but that won’t allay their suspicions. Why? Because conspiracy theorists aren’t really looking for the truth; “they’re looking for more questions”. Still, it was high time these files were released. Washington’s tendency to overclassify documents only fuels paranoia. They’re unlikely to contain any revelations, but they should yield some intriguing titbits. And those are sure to be misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists.

One file already much shared on social media, for instance, contained a copy of a 1967 article in Ramparts magazine casting suspicion on the death of Gary Underhill, a CIA man who died by suicide after JFK’s death. This means nothing, as it happens: Ramparts was a pro-Soviet magazine that “blamed literally every modern atrocity on the CIA”. So far, it seems that decades of secrecy were mainly protecting the CIA’s murky practices, said Talya Minsberg et al in The New York Times: illegal surveillance, break-ins and the like. There’s not a peep about any “second gunman”.

‘Trump will do anything for attention’

The only shocking thing about this data dump, said Jack Ohman in the San Francisco Chronicle, is that Trump hyped it up so much. But it’s not the first time he has used JFK’s killing for political advantage. In 2016, he falsely claimed the father of Ted Cruz, his Republican presidential rival, was implicated in it.

His evidence? A blurry photo of Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans with a dark-haired man who wasn’t Rafael Cruz. For all the fanfare over the JFK files, all it really shows is that Trump will “do anything for attention”, including “exploiting the murder of a predecessor”.