Details unlikely to clarify whether Oswald acted alone

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government’s full record on the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy full record will be kept from the public for at least six months — and longer if agencies such as the FBI and CIA make a persuasive enough case for continued secrecy.

The collection includes more than 3,100 records — comprising hundreds of thousands of pages — that have never been seen by the public.

About 30,000 documents were released previously — with redactions.

Whatever details are released, they’re not expected to give a definitive answer to a question that still lingers for some: Whether anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in the assassination.

The Warren Commission in 1964 concluded that Oswald had been the lone gunman, and another congressional probe in 1979 found no evidence to support the theory that the CIA had been involved.

But other interpretations, some more creative than others, have persisted.

The 1992 law mandating release of the JFK documents states that all the files “shall be publicly disclosed in full” within 25 years — that meant by Thursday — unless the president certified that “continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defence; intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations.”

That doesn’t allow the president, for example, to hold some records back because they might be embarrassing to agencies or people.

“In any release of this size, there always are embarrassing details,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Rice University.

The law does not specify penalties for noncompliance, saying only that House and Senate committees are responsible for oversight of the collection. This much is clear: On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy sat in an open-topped convertible with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John B. Connally Jr. and Connally’s wife, Nellie, as their motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Several shots rang out. Kennedy was shot in the neck and then the head, fatally. Officials zeroed in on the Texas School Book Depository building and then on a worker in the building named Lee Harvey Oswald, whom they arrested.

Oswald, a former Marine who called himself a Marxist and tried to become a citizen of the Soviet Union, would become one of history’s most enigmatic figures. He was assassinated two days later while in police custody. It was broadcast on live television.

He was shot by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who, like Oswald, would become an enigma dissected for decades to come.