As an avid history buff of American icons, I must confess to great anticipation as to the contents of the last 3,000 files regarding the John F. Kennedy assassination. On November 22, 1963, while riding in an open-air limousine with his wife Jackie, the Texas Governor and Mrs. John Connally of Texas, President Kennedy was brutally shot and killed. While conspiracy theories still abound, I must confess that I have been convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Lee Harvey Oswald is the lone gunman
I think it was Oswald's trips to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City only seven weeks before the assassination, as depicted in a 2017 History Channel series on the investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald, that helped solidify my roughly 40-year belief.
Moreover, Oswald's shooting of Officer Tippit during his escape attempt, I reasoned, was the act of a guilty man. However, some mystery still remains. The law that requires the release of the final documents, some 3,000 files, on the JFK assassination, was enacted 25 years ago today. With public interest enhanced by the Oliver Stone 1991 movie "JFK," a law called the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, was passed. The law required, according to the New York Times, that the final documents and files related to the case be released on October 26, 2017.
According to CNN News, there is one person who has veto power over the release of some or all of the assassination documents, President Trump.
Although the president intimated last week that he would allow the release of the documents, some feel that he may get advice to the contrary from sensitive insiders. His latest tweet on the subject, however, seemed to show that he felt the release of the JFK documents may have some value.
What did the CIA or FBI know?
The documents of many thousands of pages are not thought to contain any new revelations in the who killed JFK question, according to Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK." However, in an interview with CNN analyst and talk show host Michael Smerconish, Posner said that interesting material on what happened in Mexico City -- with Oswald and the Soviet Embassy, could emerge.
The thoughts of Clint Hill -- former Secret Service detail for the Kennedy's and four other Presidents between 1958 and 1975 -- were similar. When interviewed by Wolf Blitzer of CNN, he said he believed that there may be embarrassing information regarding the CIA or FBI in the remaining Kennedy documents, regarding information that they knew or should have known.
Hill related that perhaps there was information in their possession that in hindsight the agencies would have acted on, that may have prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from being successful. Clint Hill was the secret serviceman in the iconic photograph of him jumping on the back of the presidential limousine following the shots that killed the president. He was credited with keeping Mrs. Kennedy safe when she was desperately reaching over the back of the moving vehicle trying to recover shards of the president's head following the gunfire.
