More breaking news tonight.
In fact, it is a moment.
59 years in the making.
The National Archives
tonight has released
more than 13,000
documents related to the 1963
assassination of President
John F Kennedy.
The second of two releases
ordered last year by President Biden
extraordinary
because of the subject matter
as well as the decades
it's taken to finally see
these documents.
The CIA tonight
says it has now released
all information known
to be related directly
to the assassination
with about 95% of all agency documents
within the JFK Assassination
Records Collection Act.
Now public in their entirety.
CNN's Tom Foreman
joins us with more on this milestone.
What do we know about these documents
so far?
Well, we know,
first of all, as you noted,
there are a lot of them Anderson.
This is the equivalent of a dozen copies
of War and Peace being dumped out there.
And yet this is a tiny fraction
of the roughly 5 million documents
related to the JFK assassination.
We also know, based on what
some JFK assassination
historians have said,
what the CIA has said, what
other people shown,
what history has shown
that what we're not likely to find in
this is any kind of giant breakthrough,
some really smoking gun explanation here
as to how this happened.
Or some secret conspiracy,
nothing that will satisfy
the conspiracy theorists out there.
That said,
there are a lot of interesting details
here, Anderson. Like what?
What have you found so far?
Well,
a lot of it has to do with the process
of how the CIA goes about things.
Some of that explains partially
why this has been hidden for so long.
So it doesn't reveal their methods,
how they surveilled
people down in Mexico.
Soviet people down there
had secret wiretaps down there.
At one point,
there is a small line
where a psychologist of some sort
who had looked at Oswald,
Oswald was cited as saying
Oswald's motivation
is largely explained
in terms of his neurotic background,
his failure
to achieve status
and his very deep resentment
of all authority.
Oswald saw a movie on TV
about an attempted
presidential assassination
with a rifle
shortly before his death,
which could have sparked him into action.
So there are explanations like that
which would totally point
toward Oswald as acting alone.
But then there's another one
where they talk about
an intercepted phone call
between Cuba and Miami
two days
after the assassination of the president.
The gist of which was Plan of Castro
carried forward.
Bobby is next.
Obviously a reference to Bobby Kennedy,
who indeed was killed five years later.
Soon the atomic bombs will reign
and they will not know from where.
This, however,
although that would light up
a conspiracy theorist.
There is no indication in this record
that the CIA
or anyone else took this very seriously.
This was like the talk of a blowhard.
It seemed like
if anything, they said,
well, it's a good lesson
in how people can be listening
in on your phone calls.
You don't expect a lot of that in here.
And is everything released now or
I mean, it seems like there
still may be some more stuff out there.
No, there is still
some material out there
and not a whole lot.
It's a it's a small amount.
The collection,
according to the archives,
still has 515 documents withheld in full.
Another 2545 withheld in part.
I'm not entirely clear
when or how the rest of
it will be released, but again,
there's just no indication
that what is hiding
there is some great revelation.
But what could be hiding?
There is even more information
about the details
of how things were handled,
how it was investigated,
and maybe something that will put rest
some of these conspiracies,
although after all these years Anderson.
I wouldn't bet on it.
Yeah. Tom, thank you.
I keep going through the documents.
Fascinating perspective
now from CNN
presidential historian Tim Naftali.
Tim, how big a deal is this?
Well, Anderson,
it's a huge deal that our government
basically is forcing our intelligence
community to release things
they never wanted to release.
Remember, this is the fourth
or fifth bite at the Apple
that the intelligence community had.
And the first few go arounds
the intelligence community kept
arguing for national security reasons.
We can't release these details
And the combination of Trump's conspiracy
thinking
and Joe Biden's
determination for transparency
has led to this day
where we have documents
that have no redactions at all,
which talk about very sensitive
CIA operations
that have nothing to do
with the assassination of JFK.
But everything to do
with the secret world
of the 1960s and seventies.
Does anything in the files
change the official
historical record
and conclusion about JFK assassination
Now, I don't think nothing.
I mean, I have to say
this was described as ten worn pieces
I couldn't possibly get through.
One War and Peace
in the course of an afternoon
I sampled
based on some assumptions
I had about what might be out there.
About 10% of the material.
I didn't see anything
nor was expecting anything
to change the main narrative that
Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-radicalizing
assassin.
We had had a number of them before
in our history.
And of course,
if you think about the history
of Islamist terrorism,
a lot of it involved
self-radicalized individuals.
So that basic narrative doesn't change.
But here's the crux of it all.
One of the reasons we have conspiracy
theories to the extent
we do in our culture, is that after World
War Two,
we created a national security state
that introduced layers of secrecy
in our own government.
That meant that our own government,
for reasons
it felt reasonable
couldn't always tell us what it was doing
abroad and at times at home,
that was secrets
layered upon secrets, layer upon secrets,
led to an explosion of
skepticism in this
country in the seventies,
a series of investigations
and then shocked Americans
about what our government was up to
We've never recovered
from that shock to our basic
trust in government to this day.
Now, I think it's worse now than it's
been since the seventies.
But if you want to see
why Americans thought
their government was overly secretive,
take a look at some of these details,
give you a few examples.
The U.S.
government
illegally was intercept
getting our letters.
That's not a
that that became known in the seventies,
but they were intercepting letters
of pretty prominent
people like Jane
Fonda in the 1970s
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda sued the U.S.
government to get access
to their FBI materials
that had not been released
in the Freedom of Information
Act requests they had made to the FBI.
They lost.
Well today
we know that the CIA had intercepted
four letters that were sent to MS.
Fonda in the year 72 73,
and then
she wouldn't and
wouldn't release them to her.
It gives you an example of sort
of the level of surveillance
that our government
was engaged in that period.
So I think people will understand
now a bit about the culture of secrecy
that developed in the Cold War
and why there was a huge pitch
back in the seventies, and again
there was a huge push back after nine 11.
And one reason
why we should be very worried
about unrestrained
and unrestrained
national security community.