ASSASSINATIONSDeclassified JFK Files Provide “Enhanced Clarity on CIA Actions, Historian Says
Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer winner writing three-volume Kennedy biography, shares takeaways from declassified docs.
Six decades later, Americans know a bit more about the CIA’s clandestine operations in the early 1960s, particularly in Cuba and Mexico, thanks to a new tranche of declassified documents concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy released last week.
The more than 77,000 pages released by the National Archives and Records Administration do not appear to contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusion that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But historians say the papers hold important new details about the CIA’s involvement in foreign elections during the Cold War and its infiltration of Fidel Castro’s inner circle.
In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Fredrik Logevall, a professor of history and the Kennedy School’s Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs, highlights key details in the documents, shares what he’d still like to know, and offers some thoughts on why the assassination of JFK remains fodder for conspiracy theorists. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Logevall published the first book in a three-volume series on Kennedy in 2020. The second volume will be published next year.
What’s your impression of this new tranche of JFK records? Have you seen anything noteworthy so far?
With respect to the assassination, there’s little or nothing that’s new, at least in terms of what I’ve been able to see thus far. I can’t say I’m surprised — going in I didn’t expect we’d learn anything that would overturn our understanding of what happened in Dallas. The releases are, however, quite interesting on U.S. covert operations in the Cold War in the early 1960s. Some of them range beyond Kennedy’s years, but it’s for this period that they’re most interesting, especially with respect to Latin America. That’s actually been quite revealing to me.
“Interesting” in terms of what the CIA was doing or the volume of things they were doing back then?
In a way, it’s both. A lot of the “new” documents had been released before; the difference now is that they are unredacted. In 2017, for example, we got some really important CIA documents, but they would have certain words or passages blocked out. What’s been illuminating for me, even though it’s sometimes just a handful of words, is to have those words inserted.
