On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was 46 years old and had been in office 34 months.
A little more than an hour after Kennedy was shot, Dallas police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with murder. Two days later, as Oswald was being moved through the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, he was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Ruby was tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned on technicalities and while awaiting retrial he died of cancer.
Oswald was a former Marine and communist sympathizer who had lived in the Soviet Union from October 1959 till May 1962. Ruby was a shady character with connections to organized crime. In the wake of the assassination and the murder of Oswald came widespread speculation that the president had been the victim of a conspiracy and that Oswald had not acted alone.
A week after taking office, President Lyndon Johnson established the “Warren Commission” and charged it with conducting an investigation into the assassination. The Commission, a seven-man committee chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren and including former CIA director Allen Dulles and future president Gerald Ford, published its findings in September 1964. The Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no credible evidence of a conspiracy. The Warren Commission’s report did not, of course, end public speculation about a conspiracy, with most Americans continuing to believe (as most still do) that Oswald did not act alone.
In response to public pressure, in 1976 Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Relying heavily on acoustic analysis of a police recording, which seemed to indicate a second shooter, the Committee concluded that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a “probable conspiracy.” Subsequent and more advanced analysis of the recording by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the National Academy of Sciences, however, determined that the acoustic data did not support the existence of a second shooter.
As public dissatisfaction and speculation continued, particularly demands for the release of all documents associated with the investigation, in 1992 Congress created an “Assassination Records Review Board,” charged with reviewing, declassifying, and releasing the records. Over 4 million pages of records were released from 1994 to 1998, but an additional 5,000 pages continued to be withheld on security grounds. Those documents were scheduled to be made available by October 27, 2017, unless the president determined that their release would create “an identifiable harm to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations.” On the eve of the deadline, President Trump sided with the FBI and CIA and prevented the release of the documents.
Last October President Biden ordered a further review of the remaining classified documents and established a deadline of December 15, 2022 for a determination of whether all or some of them will be released. As that deadline approaches, many are anxiously awaiting new disclosures about the assassination and investigation. But history suggests that whatever new additional information is revealed, if any, it is highly unlikely that it will end the speculation.
A little more than an hour after Kennedy was shot, Dallas police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with murder. Two days later, as Oswald was being moved through the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, he was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Ruby was tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. His conviction was overturned on technicalities and while awaiting retrial he died of cancer.
Oswald was a former Marine and communist sympathizer who had lived in the Soviet Union from October 1959 till May 1962. Ruby was a shady character with connections to organized crime. In the wake of the assassination and the murder of Oswald came widespread speculation that the president had been the victim of a conspiracy and that Oswald had not acted alone.
A week after taking office, President Lyndon Johnson established the “Warren Commission” and charged it with conducting an investigation into the assassination. The Commission, a seven-man committee chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren and including former CIA director Allen Dulles and future president Gerald Ford, published its findings in September 1964. The Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no credible evidence of a conspiracy. The Warren Commission’s report did not, of course, end public speculation about a conspiracy, with most Americans continuing to believe (as most still do) that Oswald did not act alone.
In response to public pressure, in 1976 Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Relying heavily on acoustic analysis of a police recording, which seemed to indicate a second shooter, the Committee concluded that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a “probable conspiracy.” Subsequent and more advanced analysis of the recording by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the National Academy of Sciences, however, determined that the acoustic data did not support the existence of a second shooter.
As public dissatisfaction and speculation continued, particularly demands for the release of all documents associated with the investigation, in 1992 Congress created an “Assassination Records Review Board,” charged with reviewing, declassifying, and releasing the records. Over 4 million pages of records were released from 1994 to 1998, but an additional 5,000 pages continued to be withheld on security grounds. Those documents were scheduled to be made available by October 27, 2017, unless the president determined that their release would create “an identifiable harm to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations.” On the eve of the deadline, President Trump sided with the FBI and CIA and prevented the release of the documents.
Last October President Biden ordered a further review of the remaining classified documents and established a deadline of December 15, 2022 for a determination of whether all or some of them will be released. As that deadline approaches, many are anxiously awaiting new disclosures about the assassination and investigation. But history suggests that whatever new additional information is revealed, if any, it is highly unlikely that it will end the speculation.
