On Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump’s administration declassified thousands of documents related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F Kennedy (JFK), whose death has fuelled at least six decades of conspiracy theories.
Here is what we know so far:
How many documents were released?
On Tuesday evening, 2,182 PDF documents, comprising about 63,400 pages, were uploaded to the US National Archives and Records Administration’s website. The documents were released in two rounds, a few hours apart.
According to the National Archives, “all records previously withheld for classification” have been released and are accessible either online or in-person. Many of the documents were handwritten or typewritten.
Trump issued an executive order on January 23, announcing that documents pertaining to the deaths of JFK, as well as his younger brother, Senator Robert F Kennedy (RFK) and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr (MLK) would be declassified.
On Monday, Trump announced at the Kennedy Center that the documents would be released the following day. At least 80,000 pages were expected to be released.
It may take historians and conspiracy theorists months to examine the new documents and make sense of what they reveal.
When was JFK assassinated?
JFK, a Democrat, was US president from January 1961 until November 22, 1963, when he was killed at the age of 46.
He was shot dead while riding his motorcade through Dallas, Texas alongside his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally and Connally’s wife, Nelly Connally. The attack also wounded Governor Connally.
After JFK’s death, his vice president Lyndon B Johnson was sworn in as president. Johnson ordered a probe under Chief Justice Earl Warren into the assassination. The Warren Commission concluded that former marine turned communist activist, Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, was alone responsible for the killing.
Why is there a conspiracy around JFK’s death?
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was acting alone, without influence from other domestic or foreign actors.
But Kennedy’s killing, at the height of the Cold War, has always fuelled speculation – a Gallup poll in November 2023 found that 60 years after the assassination, two-thirds of Americans believe that Oswald acted with accomplices. The fact that several documents related to the assassination have been withheld from the public for decades has cast further doubt on the investigation’s conclusions.
“I’m just a patsy!” Oswald was seen saying in a video recorded of him at Dallas police headquarters after his arrest. Many sceptics of the official narrative have interpreted this as Oswald saying that he was just a scapegoat.
Two days after JFK’s death, Oswald was shot and killed while he was being taken from police headquarters to county jail by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. No trial took place, which further fuelled conspiracy – and suggestions that Oswald was killed before he could reveal the identities of others he was working with, or for.
The Warren Commission concluded that a single 6.5-millimetre bullet killed JFK and also injured Governor Connally. Many deem it implausible that one bullet passed through the bodies of two adult men.
In gruesome footage of the assassination filmed by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, it appears that a second shot hit JFK’s skull. This frame of the footage was not made public for years until ABC News aired it in 1975.
Have all the Kennedy files been released?
No, but most of them have.
Before Tuesday’s releases, there were nearly 3,500 still redacted documents with the archives, according to Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, The Associated Press reported. A little over 2,000 were released on Tuesday.
But last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said that it had discovered 2,400 new records about JFK’s assassination. Morley said that the trove of files released on Tuesday does not contain any of the recently discovered documents.
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, he released 2,800 files regarding JFK’s death but did not release hundreds of others which were pending review, under pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. In 2023, former President Joe Biden released about 17,000 more documents.