Tag: John F. Kennedy

The 2021 Release of the last of the JFK documents

There has been a slow release of previously top-secret documents relating to the JFK assassination. The official telling of the story of the assassination, ranging from the “Magic Bullet” theory to the silencing or killing of anyone who could tell the truth, left a void for many different stories. Was there a conspiracy to kill the president, or wasn’t there? The unofficial line, outlined by Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, backed up by a substantial part of what was known by th early 1990s, appeared to make more sense, but because it was a theory that involves a conspiracy, it was dismissed by Magic Bullet supporters as a “conspiracy theory”.

The assassination happened the year I was born, and after the Warren Report, the documents, it was said, would not be released for another half century or more.

Since 2017, there has been a trove of documents released to The National Archives in Washington, with digitized versions placed on the internet. The most recent release has been in December of 2021. The planned release was delayed a few months due to covid. The National Archives states that they have released over 5 million pages of documents related to the assassination.

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Oh yeah, and by the way: JFK Documents released

Back on 26 April, what I understand should have been the last of the JFK documents released to the general public and made available for download. Apparently, the deadline to release the last of them has been now moved to 2021.

With all the distractions surrounding Donald Trump, including those distractions Trump made for himself, you could be excused for not hearing about these rather ground-breaking developments, moving toward trying to end over 50 years of speculation and conspiracy theories.

The irony is, you can thank Trump for allowing the release of these documents. You wouldn’t know it from his preoccupation with making angry tweets about the news of the day. This would have actually made him look good, had one of his tweets mentioned it.

Since 24 July 2017, over 54,000 documents were released relating to the JFK assassination, made available largely as PDF scanned copies. A good deal of the early releases are listed as “NBR” or “Not believed relevant” on the Excel spreadsheet I downloaded, which lists the files and their links. There are hundreds of documents that are just plain illegible. I noticed a lot of newspaper clipping among the interviews and transcriptions of what must have been handwritten notes. There are also official correspondences on government letterhead., memos, and so on.

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