JFK files release does little to quell conspiracy theories
WASHINGTON (AP) — Botulism pills. Conspiracy theories. What the government might have known and still won’t say about Lee Harvey Oswald.
The release of thousands of records relating to the assassination of former US president John F. Kennedy hasn’t settled the best-known, real-life whodunit in American history, but the record offered riveting details of the way intelligence services operated at the time and are striving to keep some particulars a secret even now.
“The Kennedy records really are an emblem of the fight of secrecy against transparency,’” Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the private National Security Archive research group in Washington, said.
“The ‘secureaucrats’ managed to withhold key documents and keep this long saga of secrecy going,” he added.
The 2,800 records released on Thursday night include some that had dribbled out over the years but are getting renewed attention from being in this big batch.
Some highlights of the records, which are detailed on the news story posted on the Associated
Press website, include then Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover dictating a memo saying the government needed to issue something “so we can convince the public’” that Oswald killed Kennedy, just a few hours after the assassination in Dallas; former US president Lyndon B. Johnson theorizing that Kennedy was behind the assassination of the South Vietnamese president weeks before his death and that Kennedy’s murder was payback, according to one document released on Thursday; and the former Soviet Union’s intelligence agency KGB allegedly claiming it had information tying Johnson to Kennedy’s assassination.