By Daniel Payne
CNA Staff, Jan 24, 2025 / 15:15 pm
President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the federal government to release classified records on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., directing recordkeepers to reveal the long-secret files as a matter of “public interest.”
Trump in his executive order said that though more than half a century has elapsed since the assassinations of the historical American figures — President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 — the federal government still “has not released to the public all of its records related to those events.”
“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” the president said. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
Trump noted that the federal President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 ordered that all records related to the president’s murder be released by Oct. 26, 2017.
Trump himself had accepted some redactions to those records in 2017 and 2018, he noted, but he had ordered an ongoing review of the redactions themselves. Former President Joe Biden had similarly given federal agencies more time to review the records.
“I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue,” Trump said.
Though Congress has not similarly mandated the release of records regarding the killings of King and the younger Kennedy, “I have determined that the release of all records in the federal government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest,” Trump said.
The president ordered security officials to develop and present a plan to the White House for the release of the records.
John F. Kennedy made history in 1960 when he became the first Catholic president elected in U.S. history.
His assassination in Dallas in 1963 marked a seminal moment in U.S. and world history; then-Speaker of the House John McCormack said his death was a “personal tragedy” for “millions of persons throughout the world … as if one had lost a loved member of his own immediate family.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination five years later marked a flashpoint in U.S. racial tensions, with the civil rights leader’s 1968 murder touching off riots and violence in cities around the country. And Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination just eight weeks later left the nation reeling from one high-profile killing after another.
All three killings have been the subject of major conspiracy theories in the decades since. Rutgers University professor Ross Baker told the New York Times in 2018 that the assassinations “robbed the country of three of its most prominent and promising leaders, leaders who represented change.”
“I think the most immediate reaction was despair and a sense that perhaps the democratic experiment was in the process of failing,” Baker said.
Daniel Payne is a senior editor at Catholic News Agency. He previously worked at the College Fix and Just the News. He lives in Virginia with his family.
