United States President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Thursday, announcing that documents related to the assassinations of former US President John F Kennedy (JFK), his younger brother, Senator Robert F Kennedy (RFK) and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr (MLK) are to be declassified.
According to the National Archives and Records Administration, 99 percent of records about JFK’s death have already been released, with fewer than 4,700 documents remaining.
Here is what we know:
What does Trump’s declassification order say?
The executive order on Thursday states that within 15 days, the national intelligence director and the attorney general should coordinate with other government officials to jointly present Trump with a plan to release the “the full and complete” set of records about JFK’s death.
It adds that within 45 days the same group of government officials will review records related to the assassinations of RFK and MLK and present Trump with a plan for their “full and complete release”.
The order states that the families and the US public “deserve transparency and truth”.
“It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
How were JFK, RFK and MLK assassinated?
John F Kennedy
Democrat JFK was president from January 1961 until November 22, 1963, when he was shot dead while riding his motorcade through Dallas, Texas.
Accompanying him were his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nelly Connally. Governor Connally was also wounded in the attack.
JFK was 46 at the time of his death. His vice president, Lyndon B Johnson, took over and ordered an investigation by a commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine-turned-communist activist was responsible for killing JFK. They held that Oswald, 24 at the time, was acting alone. Oswald was shot and killed while he was being taken from police headquarters to county jail by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, two days after JFK’s death.
Robert F Kennedy
JFK’s brother and Democratic New York Senator, RFK was shot dead nearly five years later on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles.
He had announced his candidacy for the presidential election in 1968. After winning a California Democratic presidential primary, he was meeting supporters in the Ambassador Hotel.
This is where a then-24-year-old Palestinian Jordanian, Sirhan Sirhan, shot JFK, who was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital where he succumbed to his wounds. Sirhan, now 80, is serving a life sentence at Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County, California.
Martin Luther King, Jr
MLK, the leading civil rights activist and political philosopher, was shot and killed while he was standing on the balcony of his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He was 39 at the time of his death.
MLK was taken to St Joseph Hospital, where he died from his injury.
In 1969, James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old segregationist fugitive since his escape from a Missouri prison in 1967 where he was part-way through a 20-year sentence for a robbery in the 1950s, confessed to killing MLK. He had been captured by Scotland Yard investigators in London. According to the National Archives, the FBI concluded that Ray was a “racially motivated assassin”.
Ray was sentenced to 99 years in Brushy Mountain Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee by Shelby County Criminal Court and died 29 years into his sentence in 1998 from health complications.
How many documents about the assassinations have already been released?
The US Congress passed a law in 1992, mandating that the files related to the JFK assassination be released within 25 years.
Since the passage of this law, roughly 320,000 documents have been reviewed, 99 percent of which have been released, according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
The deadline by which all the documents should have been released was in 2017, during Trump’s first term. Trump released approximately 2,800 more documents but withheld hundreds of others which were pending review, under pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In 2023, President Joe Biden released about 17,000 more documents, leaving 4,684 documents still partially or fully withheld concerning JFK’s death.
What conspiracy theories have emerged about the assassinations?
The three assassinations, especially that of JFK have been shrouded in mystery because the CIA and FBI have kept several documents classified, stoking conspiracy theories.
The American public, government officials and even some family members of the late leaders have cast doubt on the final conclusions of the investigations into these deaths. Some believe the accused killers were not acting alone, and that significant details about the murders have been withheld.
“I’m just a patsy!” Oswald said in a video recorded after his arrest for JFK’s assassination in the Dallas police headquarters. Many read this as Oswald himself saying he was a scapegoat, and had not acted alone.
The Warren Commission concluded that one single 6.5-millimetre bullet both killed JFK and injured Governor Connally. Many doubt this finding and deem it implausible that a bullet went through the bodies of two adult men. Critics also doubt the trajectory of the bullet.
Footage of the assassination filmed by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder shows a gruesome frame of JFK’s head bursting open as a second shot hit his skull. For years, this section of the film was not released to the public until ABC News aired it in 1975.
The fact that Oswald was killed shortly after being arrested, and therefore no trial took place, has also fuelled conspiracy theories.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s health secretary pick and son of RFK, said in 2023 that there was “overwhelming” evidence that the CIA was involved in the killing of his uncle, JFK.
He said that there was also “very convincing” but “circumstantial” evidence that the CIA was involved in the killing of his father.
After he met Sirhan in prison, Kennedy Jr said, “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit,” The Washington Post reported him saying in 2018.
MLK’s family does not believe that Ray killed him, and have said they think his murder was the result of a conspiracy by the FBI. Ray also did not stand trial as he had pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.
“It pains my heart that James Earl Ray had to spend his life in prison paying for things he didn’t do,” Bernice King, the youngest of MLK’s four children said, according to The Washington Post in 2018.
MLK’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit titled “King family v Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators” in 1999. Loyd Jowers was the owner of a restaurant close to the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. In 1993, Jowers told ABC News that he had been paid $100,000 by the alleged Memphis mobster Frank Liberto to arrange MLK’s assassination.
A Memphis jury ruled that Jowers and “conspirators” including “government agencies” were responsible for the killing. The family said they were satisfied with this verdict. MLK’s son, Dexter, said after the verdict, “After today, we don’t want questions like, ‘Do you believe James Earl Ray killed your father?’ I’ve been hearing that all my life. No, I don’t, and this is the end of it.”