For half a century, conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy flourished. President Donald Trump himself dabbled in these theories, claiming that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's father was involved in the murder of the former president.
Currently, Trump has officially declassified the remaining JFK files. And so far, the documents seem confused and unsieged, but some are completely unreadable due to the combination of age and bad copying. New insights include details of CIA wiretapping mobile phones in Mexico City to investigate communication between Soviets and Cubans.
Despite the government being accessed to everything they know about the events that led to the murder of the US president, the people may not necessarily get the remarkable answer they were looking for. But whether the rest of the files reveal something meaningful or not, this move is definitely a good one. Not only will the government be unable to accuse them of continuing to hide evidence of any kind of concealment, but ultimately freeing these files will help set expectations that the government will become more transparent in the future.
Publication of JFK files is a reminder of the ways governments fail on a daily basis when it comes to communicating properly with the public. Whether it is concealing the mundane or explosive details of government operations, the tendency to overclassify documents simply makes the oxygen of conspiracy theory flourish by creating a vacuum of information.
It wasn't always like that
It may seem like the government has always been a secret, but this has not always been the case. According to historian Matthew Connery, author of Confidentialization Engine: What History Reveals About America's Top Secretsthe trend of keeping more and more government records secret began after World War II.
“For over a century and a half since its establishment, our government has been remarkably transparent,” he said in a 2022 interview with Columbia magazine. The government has established security agencies that maintain sensitive information from public places. That changed after World War II, after the government left wartime practices intact. The result was a vast security situation that began to be kept more and more confidential over time.
The amount of information the government keeps secret is incredible. Today, more than 50 million documents are classified each year.
This trend of overclassifying documents has become so extreme that there has been an effort to address it. Early in the presidency, Barack Obama signed an executive order creating a national declassification center to coordinate declassification plans across government agencies. The executive order also sets a deadline for documents to be declassified unless special permission is granted.
Still, these efforts are not sufficient and experts still believe an excessive number of files are classified. An expert told the New York Times that only about 5-10% of the 50 million files deserve classification.
It's hard to track, if not impossible. The document gets lost. And it's evidence that even if government agencies are not actually guaranteed, they tend to make mistakes on the part of classifying something.
Classification drawbacks
Indefinite or long term classifications can hide many misconduct and protect government officials from accountability. It makes sense to continue categorizing some information, but the government often exaggerates its hands, like Kennedy's files. It refuses to declassify documents about historical events that took place decades ago. In some cases, many of the people involved in the event in question have long been dead.
This ultimately leads to more mistrust. “When we analyze which information tends to be categorized and takes the longest time to be revealed, we can't help but conclude that we paid a price for all of that secret,” Connelly said. “We never kept us safe, the secret activities of government officials, the incredible risks they took, we were all at risk.”
In 1975, the federal government revealed that the CIA had been conducting mental control studies since the 1950s, experimenting with human subjects with drugs and psychological torture. The experiment became known as Project Mkultra, and the document detailing the program was eventually declassified, but some were lost to history.
Then, in 1991, the federal government first confirmed that it had conducted experiments to test mustard gas and other chemical weapons from Americans who enlisted in the US military during World War II. And in 1993, the government declassified documents related to the secret program. A later investigation by NPR showed that the government specially tested the military based on race, picking out blacks, Japanese-Americans and Puerto Ricans to see how they respond to mustard gas compared to white people exposed to these experiments.
Clearly, the biggest problem with these unethical experiments is that they were allowed to happen in the first place. But when the government engages in experiments with these kinds of secrets and keeps them secret for decades, it only leads to further mistrust of the government. After all, efforts to keep these programs secret give people reason to believe there is a lot of things the government is hiding, even when categorized reports are relatively benign.
Having so many records under wraps doesn't just promote conspiracy theory. They also cannot maintain accurate historical records. “All that secret has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct history of what actually happened,” Connery said.
What to expect from a JFK file
In 1992, public speculation about Kennedy's assassination passed a law requiring that all files relating to the assassination be released within 25 years, unless poses a national security threat. And after vowing to release these files during his first term, Trump released several documents, but delayed others, citing national security concerns. (A batch of documents released in 2017 included notes like a response to the Soviet killing.)
Now, historians and experts are scurried through newly released files to see if they can find something to add to the historical record. It is unlikely that they will put on them an earth-smashing revelation about the assassination itself. 99% of the documents are already public, and some of the remaining documents may be duplicated or at least partially released.
But in the future, if the government is really worried about people thinking about conspiracy theory and its role in certain historical events, it should stop maintaining so many unnecessary secrets.
