Kennedy Assassination Files Released
Last Thursday, the federal government conducted a scheduled release of 2,800 secret documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. While the new documents don’t answer the question of who killed the former president, they do reveal a lot of interesting information.
Lee Harvey Oswald
Sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas…
Lee Harvey Oswald is the man often named as Kennedy’s assassin. However, the documents released last Thursday include a memo written by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time, which seems to give other evidence. According to the memo, which was written just hours after Jack Ruby shot Oswald, Hoover sent an FBI agent to the hospital in the hopes of getting a confession out of Oswald before he died.
When the Oswald confession did not happen, Hoover suggested that strong evidence was needed to confirm Oswald was the president’s assassin. The reason for this was because Hoover was worried that an in-depth investigation would threaten the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. As was the case with many political decisions during these years, the rivalry and tension between these two superpowers shaped the actions and thoughts of many politicians and government officials.
Much Speculation But No Proof
According to another document, President Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, had his own theory about the Kennedy assassination. He believed that Kennedy was behind the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, on November 2, 1963. Johnson believed that Kennedy’s death was payback for his role in the assassination of Diem and his brother earlier that month.
No evidence has ever supported Johnson’s theory. One of the hundreds of records that remained sealed was a CIA report on the United States’ involvement in the Diem assassination.
Another document released last Thursday was a letter written in 1966 from Hoover to a presidential assistant. In the letter, Hoover states that the KGB (the Soviet secret police) had information linking President Johnson to President Kennedy’s assassination. However, no solid evidence has ever been presented to prove that Johnson had a role in Kennedy’s death.
An Anonymous Warning
Also among the documents: a memo Hoover wrote to the CIA on November 26, 1963. In it, Hoover writes that on the morning of November 22–the day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas–the Cambridge News (a British newspaper) received an anonymous phone call telling them that they should phone the American Embassy in London for some important news. Twenty-five minutes later, Kennedy was shot. However, the Cambridge News claims that there is no record of the call.