The real lesson of the JFK files

For half a century, conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy have flourished. President Donald Trump himself has dabbled in these theories, once claiming that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the former president’s murder.

Now, Trump has officially declassified the remaining JFK files. And so far, the documents appear to be disorganized and hard to sift through, with some being entirely illegible because of a combination of age and bad photocopying. Some of the new insights include details on how the CIA wiretapped phones in Mexico City to surveil communications between the Soviets and Cubans.

Despite being given access to everything that the government knows about the events that led to the killing of a US president, the public might not necessarily get the salacious answers they were looking for. But the move is undoubtedly a good one, regardless of whether the remaining files will uncover anything meaningful. Not only can people no longer accuse the government of continuing to hide evidence of some sort of cover-up, but finally releasing these files helps set expectations for the government to be more transparent in the future.

The public release of the JFK files is a reminder of how the government routinely fails when it comes to adequately communicating with the public. Its tendency to overclassify documents — whether they’re hiding mundane or explosive details of government operations — only gives conspiracy theories oxygen to thrive by creating an information vacuum.

Though it might seem like the government has always been secretive, this wasn’t always the case. According to the historian Matthew Connelly, author of The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, the tendency to keep more and more government records secret started after World War II.

“For more than a century and a half after its founding, our government was remarkably transparent,” he said in an interview with Columbia Magazine in 2022. In previous wars, the government set up security agencies that kept sensitive information from public view, he said, but those agencies and their practices were usually dismantled after wars ended. That changed after World War II, when the government left its wartime practices intact. The result was a sprawling security state that started keeping more and more secrets as time went on.

The amount of information that the government keeps secret is staggering. Today, more than 50 million documents are classified each year.

This tendency to overclassify documents has gotten so extreme that there have been efforts to address it. Early in his presidency, Barack Obama signed an executive order creating the National Declassification Center to coordinate declassification plans across government agencies. The executive order also set deadlines for documents to be declassified unless they receive special permission.

Still, these efforts are not enough and, experts still believe an excessive number of files are classified. One expert told the New York Times that only about 5 to 10 percent of the 50 million files merit classification.

They’re hard, if not impossible, to keep track of. Documents get lost. And it’s evidence that government agencies tend to err on the side of classifying something, even when it’s not really warranted.

Classification for indefinite or long periods of time has the potential to mask a lot of wrongdoing and protect government officials from accountability. While it makes sense to keep some information classified, the government often overplays its hand, as with the Kennedy files. Time after time, it refuses to declassify documents pertaining to historical events that happened decades ago. In some cases, many of the people involved in the event in question have long been dead.

This ultimately leads to more distrust. “When you analyze what information tends to get classified, and what takes the longest time to be revealed, you can’t help but conclude that we paid a price for all that secrecy,” Connelly said. “Far from keeping us safe, the secret activities of government officials, the incredible risks they took, put us all in danger.”

In 1975, the federal government revealed that the CIA conducted mind-control studies starting in the 1950s, experimenting on human subjects with drugs and psychological torture. The experiments came to be known as Project MKUltra, and documents that detailed the program were eventually declassified, though some have been lost to history.

Then, in 1991, the federal government acknowledged, for the first time, that it conducted experiments during World War II to test mustard gas and other chemical weapons on Americans enlisted in the US military. And in 1993, the government declassified documents related to the secret program. According to a later investigation by NPR, the government specifically tested troops based on race, singling out Black people, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans to see how they would react to mustard gas compared to white people, who were also subjected to these experiments.

Obviously, the biggest problem with these unethical experiments is that they were allowed to happen in the first place. But when the government engages in these kinds of clandestine experiments and also keeps them secret for many decades, it only leads to further distrust in government. After all, efforts to keep those programs secret give people reason to believe that there is plenty more that the government is covering up, even when a classified report is relatively benign.

Keeping so many records under wraps doesn’t just fuel conspiracy theories; it also prevents us from keeping an accurate historical record. “All that secrecy,” Connelly said, “has made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, even to reconstruct the history of what really happened.”

In 1992, driven by public speculation about Kennedy’s assassination, Congress passed a law requiring that all files related to the assassination be released within 25 years, unless they posed national security threats. And after vowing to make these files public during his first term, Trump released some of the documents but delayed others, citing (surprise!) national security concerns. (The batch of documents that was released in 2017 included memos like the Soviet Union’s reaction to the killing.)

Now, historians and experts are rummaging through the newly released files to see if they can find anything to add to the historical record. It’s unlikely that they’ll turn up any earth-shattering revelations about the assassination itself. Ninety-nine percent of the documents had already been public, and some of the remaining ones might be duplicates or have already been at least partially released.

But in the future, if the government is really concerned about conspiracy theories and what people think about its role in certain historical events, then it ought to stop keeping so many needless secrets.