Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, whose 1991 film “JFK” portrayed President John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the work of a shadowy government conspiracy, is set to testify to Congress on Tuesday about thousands of newly released government documents surrounding the killing.
Scholars say the files that President Donald Trump ordered to be released showed nothing undercutting the conclusion that a lone gunman killed Kennedy, and the declassified versions did not appear to contain significant new revelations about the assassination, based on a review by CBS News. Many documents were previously released but contained newly removed redactions, including Social Security numbers, angering people whose personal information was disclosed.
The first hearing of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets comes five decades after the Warren Commission investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine, acted alone in fatally shooting Kennedy as his motorcade finished a parade route in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who chairs the task force, said last month that she wants to work with writers and researchers to help solve “one of the biggest cold case files in U.S. history.” Scholars and historians haven’t viewed the assassination as a cold case, viewing the evidence for Oswald as a lone gunman as strong.
Stone’s “JFK” was nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, and won two. It grossed more than $200 million but was also dogged by questions about its factuality.
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The last formal congressional investigation of Kennedy’s assassination ended in 1978, when a House committee issued a report concluding that the Soviet Union, Cuba, organized crime, the CIA and the FBI weren’t involved, but Kennedy “probably was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” In 1976, a Senate committee said it had not uncovered enough evidence “to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy.”
The Warren Commission, appointed by Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded that Oswald fired on Kennedy’s motorcade from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked. Police arrested Oswald within 90 minutes, and two days later, Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast on live television.
For Tuesday’s hearing, the task force also invited Jefferson Morley and James DiEugenio, who both have written books arguing for conspiracies behind the assassination. Morley is editor of the JFK Facts blog and vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination. He has praised Luna as being open to new information surrounding the killing.
Shortly after taking office in January, Mr. Trump took executive action to establish a process to declassify and release any remaining documents related to Kennedy’s killing, as well as the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The recently released documents about JFK’s assassination have been uploaded to a portal maintained by the National Archives, which can be found here.
Stefan Becket
contributed to this report.
