U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to declassify files related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The move comes after years of public demand for the release of these documents, some of which have remained classified due to national security concerns.
During the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump remarked, “A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades,” and assured the public that “everything will be revealed.” He also jokingly passed the pen he used to sign the order to an aide, saying, “Give that to RFK Jr.,” referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The National Archives has already released tens of thousands of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, but many records were withheld due to national security concerns. In December 2022, the Archives stated that 97% of the Kennedy-related documents, totaling approximately five million pages, had been made public. However, some documents were still held back at the request of agencies like the CIA and FBI, and President Joe Biden confirmed that a limited number of records would continue to be withheld.
The Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy’s assassination, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, acted alone in shooting Kennedy in Dallas. Despite this official finding, conspiracy theories suggesting that other entities were involved in the assassination have persisted for decades. The slow release of documents has fueled these theories, with some theorists pointing to the Mafia, Cold War rivals like the Soviet Union and Cuba, or even Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, as potential suspects.
In addition to the Kennedy assassination, the new order also addresses the killings of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan, and Martin Luther King Jr. in the same year, for which James Earl Ray was convicted. While Ray died in prison in 1998, King’s family has voiced doubts about the conviction and the official narrative surrounding his assassination.
Trump’s move to declassify these files has the potential to reignite debate over the events that shaped American history in the 1960s, though experts caution that these documents are unlikely to provide the conclusive answers that conspiracy theorists have long sought.
