The U.S. government has begun publishing a series of documents on the assassination of President John Kennedy – a case that still sparks conspiracy theories 60 years later.
President Donald Trump has demanded that unedited files be made public in the case after an executive order in January.
Historians would not expect many groundbreaking revelations on the record, which they sorted out after Tuesday night’s release. Trump is expected to unseal 80,000 pages of documents.
U.S. authorities have previously issued hundreds of thousands of Kennedy International Airport documents, but are based on national security issues. Many Americans still believe that the gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was not acting alone.
Kennedy was shot dead while visiting Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
It is not clear that the Kennedy material released by the National Archives and Records Administration is new.
According to experts, many documents have been published previously in partially deleted form.
“You have a lot of reading,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I don’t believe we’ll edit anything.”
However, some of the hundreds of files that were not closed on Tuesday night seemed to have been blackened, while others were difficult to read because they faded or scanned poorly.
A government committee determined that President Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran and self-proclaimed Marxist who later defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the United States.
But decades of polls have shown that most Americans do not consider Oswald the only assassin.
Unresolved issues have long plagued the case, raising theories about the participation of government agents, mafia and other evil figures, and more eccentric claims.
In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years.
Trump issued a large number of documents related to Kennedy International Airport in his first term and President Joe Biden, but thousands of documents remain partially or completely secret.
Trump’s executive order also called on government archivists to release archives related to presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, who were both shot dead in 1968.
The Republican president vowed to release the Kennedy International Airport archives in last year’s White House competition, and soon after he was recognized by Kennedy nephew Robert F Kennedy Jr, the son of Robert Kennedy.
Kennedy Jr continues to be Trump’s health secretary.
