More than 61 years after President John F Kennedy was killed, the final files are being unsealed, but could the new revelations shed light on a plot connected to Chicago? NBC 5 Investigates’ Chuck Goudie has the story.
Over the past 24 hours, our NBC 5 Investigates team has pored over what portends to be the final files to be made public related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with a slew of newly released documents.
Tens of thousands of pages were released overnight and Wednesday, but they are following a similar course as the first batch did on Tuesday.
"I don't think there are any major revelations to speak directly to the Kennedy assassination," said JFK assassination expert Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University.
Boyle, considered a leading JFK expert, is underwhelmed by the 65 or 70 thousand pages of a promised 80,000 thousand pages released thus far.
Boyle said the lack of solid news in the newly circulated records may be because the CIA had been truthful over the years when officials claimed they'd released everything of importance and that the essential story was out there:
- That one man shot President John F. Kennedy from a sniper's perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas.
- The sharpshooter was Soviet-sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald, armed with a mail order rifle from a Chicago sporting goods store.
- Oswald was himself murdered by Chicago native, nightclub owner and mob enthusiast Jack Ruby.
- There were a half-dozen plots known to law enforcement targeting JFK by people or groups that disliked him, including the Chicago Outfit, but the thousands of pages of investigative files reveal no conspiracy with Oswald, who worked alone.
"These are mostly CIA files as far as I can tell, but mostly what the CIA had said all along, that they had released what info they had on the Kennedy assassination," Boyle told NBC Chicago on Wednesday.
One memo from a JFK aide -- unmasked Wednesday -- does reveal that the White House was considering a reformation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1963, especially after the Bay of Pigs invasion debacle in Cuba, a memo that some conspiracy theorists may point to as a motive for the agency to target the president.
"That would be a very, very, very big leap, yes," said Boyle. "But it's those kinds of things that conspiracy theorists have hung on to as the potential smoking gun."
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As NBC 5 investigates the JFK files, it's apparent that many documents have been previously released but with large sections blacked out, mostly redacted for national security or privacy reasons.
In all, more than 6 million JFK pages have been collected by the National Archives and are now public. But the latest round this week are the first to list names of undercover agents, people that experts say they hope aren't still alive to potentially face harm for serving their country.
