Almost 60 years after the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, current President Joe Biden has published more than 12,000 previously kept secret documents. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre justified the move on Thursday in Washington by saying that Biden believes “all information related to the assassination of President Kennedy should be made public to the greatest extent possible”. For security reasons, further documents remained under lock and key for the time being. However, work is also being done on their publication.
John F. Kennedy was shot dead in an open car on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. The democratic politician was only 46 years old. Investigations by a commission into the crime came to the conclusion that the – later murdered – assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Nevertheless, a number of conspiracy myths have persisted over the years – such as the thesis that Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, in conjunction with the CIA, pulled the strings during the assassination or that Cuba was involved. Experts are now hoping for new insights from the 12,000 released documents. They are freely available to the public at the United States National Archives.
Former US President Donald Trump also made an attempt during his tenure and announced that the files on the Kennedy assassination would be released. However, he eventually succumbed to security concerns from intelligence agencies: According to government officials, the CIA, FBI and other agencies demanded that some of the files not be released without first being processed – so that only 2,800 documents were ultimately released in 2017.