The CIA Doesn’t Want You to Know Who Killed JFK
In November of this year, QAnon supporters gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, awaiting John F. Kennedy Jr.’s resurrection. Many media outlets portrayed the event as a sign of today’s absurd political climate, but such conspiracies belong to a proud American tradition. This lineage includes the events of November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. The questionable handling of the events following the killing contributed to a massive decline in trust in the US government—from 77 percent in 1964 to 36 percent just 10 years later. A majority of Americans are conspiracy theorists on this topic, rejecting the official story that Kennedy’s killer acted alone; today, 61 percent of the populace believes others were involved. The only group in the country where a minority hold conspiratorial views on JFK are college-educated white people.
The federal government maintains a strategic interest in the assassination: On October 22, 2021, President Biden once again postponed the final release of the JFK assassination records. This decision continues a nearly 60-year-long effort by the CIA and FBI to suppress information relating to JFK’s death. Their latest success is a timely reminder of why the United States will never be rid of conspiracy theories so long as the national security state wields unchecked power.
In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Records Collection Act, which ordered all branches of government to provide any assassination-related records to the National Archives for public inspection within 25 years. The move was spurred by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, an Oscar-winning blockbuster that portrayed the killing as a conspiracy by radical anticommunists in the CIA, FBI, and military. The law aimed to appease renewed controversy, stating that “most of the records…are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection.”
Another 30 years later, roughly 88 percent of the estimated files have been released. However, 11 percent were released with sensitive portions removed, the CIA illegally destroyed others, and at least 15,000 remain unpublished, according to the National Archives.
