By Robert Reynolds
The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) returned to the news in 2024, with then presidential-candidate Donald Trump claiming credit for releasing stacks of withheld records during his first term, and vowing to release what remained during a second term.
Trump did indeed open many records from the collection in 2017-2018. But his administration left thousands of records redacted as well, and the release process itself was less than transparent, with press speculation and anonymous second- or third-hand sourcing taking the place of documentation and comprehension.
Following Trump 1.0, the Biden administration also had a crack at the records, restoring much text that had been redacted from documents, but still leaving blanks in as many as 3,000 records. That gave Trump 2.0 one more chance to tantalize the public with the prospect of new revelations.
What are the prospects for more releases? In the past, the dearth of information on the Trump 1.0 releases made it hard to prognosticate how release of the small remaining set of redacted records might play out. Fortunately, a Freedom of Information request to the National Archives has made new documentation available on the 2017-2018 release process, shedding useful light on future releases.[1]
More releases will certainly come, but what about prospects for revelations? There has been more than enough time to sift through and weigh the meaning of the increasingly elusive redactions in the collection, and as the fortune-telling 8 ball says, “Outlook not so good.”
Releasing JFK Records: A Look Back
The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) is the US government’s primary collection of records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, subsequent investigations of Kennedy’s death, and the cold war background of the assassination.
The collection was established by the 1992 JFK Act, which gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The act also created a limited-term federal board, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to secure, review, and oversee the release of the records. By the time the Board closed its doors in 1998, it had placed more than 300,000 records in the collection, about 88 percent of which were released in full.
Why were 12 percent of ARC records not released in full, or in federal governmentese, portions of these documents were “redacted”? The JFK Act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records, up until a final release date of 26 October 2017. Departments, bureaus, and agencies were permitted to request redactions, subject to case-by-case review by the ARRB. Even though the ARRB established strict guidelines, 12 percent of the records met the board's criteria for postponements of one kind or another, for periods of time ranging from a few years up until October 2017.
What has to be remembered though is that the ARRB was determined to release, before going out of business, any and all records judged central to the assassination story, and it succeeded in this task. Board members and staffers have always, and vigorously, defended the Board’s record in this regard. As ARRB chairman John Tunheim told author Vincent Bugliosi, “The Board protected [postponed] nothing, not one document or page, that was centrally related [emphasis added] to the facts of the assassination itself.”
This key point cannot be stressed enough in any discussion of the ARC, although it is often ignored. The lengthy reviews and releases undertaken in 2017-2018 and afterward are important for completing the task set out in the JFK Act. But the key records, documents, artifacts that together constitute the basic facts have been accessible to the public since 1998, if not long before. Post-1998 releases have added interesting details here and there, but they have not changed our basic understanding of central facts. Nor will they ever do so in the future.
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