Why did JFK die? Well, the CIA won’t tell us

As the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination looms, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill the president. Conspiracy theories will keep multiplying until 50,000 pages of assassination-related records are

defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations’’, a loophole that the CIA has exploited.

In 2010 archivists revealed that the CIA still withheld about 50,000 pages of JFK assassination-related records, as well as an unknown number of records that had been only partly made public. Last year, the president of the Assassination Archives and Research Centre called on the CIA to declassify the remaining files, pointing out the cache of secret material ‘‘contravenes both the letter and spirit of the JFK Act and is unacceptable as a matter of law’’, while enabling ‘‘purveyors of theories not based on documentary evidence [to] continue to spread doubt and confusion about the case’’.

The CIA has not complied and the files remain locked in metal boxes inside a temperature-controlled room within the archives, a standing invitation to imagine what they may contain.

Genuine historians believe that they do not hide some explosive history-changing revelation, but rather the long-suspected proof that the CIA had been monitoring Oswald in the period leading up to the assassination and failed to intercept him – embarrassing proof of incompetence in 1963 but hardly a threat to national security in 2013.

Until the last of the files is made public, the uncertainty will continue to poison American public life at a time when polls consistently show public trust in the US Government in sharp decline.

Making public the last documentary evidence relating to his death will not put an end to all the conspiracy theories; but for as long as the CIA files remain secret the belief that there is something to hide will flourish.

JFK remains a riddle. Even before his death, he exuded what Norman Mailer called an ‘‘elusive detachment’’.

But the nature of his assassination, and the secrecy surrounding it, has ensured that he has never settled into history. His is not the story of a presidency, or even a man, but a whodunit.