A JFK Memo Named Its Author After He Died
Morley says the delay lets witnesses die before they can explain what the files mean.
Who Killed JFK? · Withheld Documents [BONUS]Jefferson Morley, a JFK researcher and writer, was reading a detailed memo about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The substance was there on the page. The author's name was not.
Morley said the name stayed hidden until 2022. When researchers finally learned it and looked the man up, they found that he had died in 2017.
The gap shows how the delay over the files plays out in practice. Witnesses are dying while files stay closed. As of November 2023, 4,684 documents related to the assassination remained fully withheld from the public.
A law passed in 1992 required federal agencies to send assassination records to the National Archives, and to release them on October 26, 2017, unless the president saw identifiable harm from disclosure. More than 34,000 records came out in 2017 and 2018.
Then the deadline slipped. Morley said the CIA asked for about 15,000 documents to be held back in 2017, and President Donald Trump gave agencies more time. In October 2021, President Joe Biden issued an order that Morley said left future disclosure largely to the CIA and the National Security Agency.
Asked whether it is safe to say the files will never be seen, Morley answered, "There is no schedule for their release."
Morley said that if that document had been available in 2017, it would have led to a very important interview. That chance is now gone. "The point of this secrecy is that witnesses die and they can't talk about it, and the story becomes harder to get," he said.
Questions people ask
What was the JFK Records Act supposed to do?
Congress passed it in 1992 after the public outcry over the film JFK. It created the Assassination Records Review Board, which collected more than five million pages, and set a 25 year deadline for full disclosure unless a president found a specific harm.
What kind of records are still withheld, and why?
Most are CIA and FBI records, along with tax, intelligence, and security files. The CIA said in 2022 that they contain intelligence sources and methods whose release would do identifiable harm to operations, a claim critics find hard to accept after more than 60 years.
Have any secret JFK files actually come out?
Yes, in stages. The National Archives released tens of thousands of pages in 2017 and 2018, and more batches since then. The fight now is over the few thousand records, or parts of records, that remain fully or partly withheld.