National Archives releases papers on JFK assassination

WASHINGTON — The National Archives on Wednesday made public nearly 1,500 documents related to the U.S. government’s investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The disclosure of secret cables, internal memos and other documents satisfies a deadline set in October by President Joe Biden and is in keeping with a federal statute that calls for the government to release records in its possession concerning the Kennedy assassination. Additional documents are expected to be made public next year.

There was no immediate indication that the records contained new revelations that could radically reshape the public’s understanding of the events surrounding the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of Kennedy at the hands of gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.

But the latest tranche of documents was nonetheless eagerly anticipated by historians and others who, decades after the Kennedy killing, remain skeptical that at the height of the Cold War, a troubled young man with a mail-order rifle was solely responsible for an assassination that changed the course of American history.

The documents include CIA cables and memos discussing Oswald’s previously disclosed but never fully explained visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, as well as discussion in the days after the assassination of the potential for Cuban involvement in the killing of Kennedy.

While 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, other interpretations have persisted.