The Kennedy Papers

 

Some nightmares don’t fade with the morning light. They stick around, year after year, decade after decade, festering in America’s subconscious like an untreated wound. And brother, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on that clear November day in 1963 is the granddaddy of them all.

You know how it goes in those bad dreams—you’re running from something terrible, but your legs won’t work right. Your mouth opens to scream, but no sound comes out. That’s America since Dallas. Running in place. Screaming silently. Never quite getting to the truth.

Truth. Now there’s a five-letter word that packs more punch than most.

On March 18, 2025, Donald Trump—yeah, that guy, serving his second term now, God help us—released another batch of declassified documents about what happened in Dealey Plaza all those years ago. More than 63,000 pages dumped into the public’s lap like a cat dropping a half-dead mouse on your doorstep. Here ya go, folks. Chew on this awhile.

The conspiracy nuts are having a field day, of course. Always do. Been waiting for this moment like kids outside a candy store with their noses pressed against the glass. But so far—and this is the real kick in the teeth—nothing new about who killed Kennedy or why. Just more bread crumbs leading nowhere.

I remember my ma talking about where she was when it happened. Doing the dishes, hands deep in soapy water, watching through the kitchen window as the neighbor lady ran across the yard crying. Bad news travels faster than light, folks. Always has.

The Warren Commission—now there’s a group of men who must’ve had some interesting dreams after they signed off on their report. Chief Justice Earl Warren and his boys concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, that strange little man with the strange little smile, acted alone. Case closed. Nothing to see here.

Except…

Except people just couldn’t swallow it. Like trying to force down a pill too big for your throat. The questions kept bubbling up like gas from a rotting corpse: What about the magic bullet? What about the witnesses who heard shots from the grassy knoll? What about Jack Ruby shooting Oswald before he could spill whatever beans he had to spill?

By ‘79, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was admitting there was “probably” a conspiracy. Probably. As if the death of a president deserved a shrug and a “maybe.”

And the theories—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—the theories sprouted like weeds after a spring rain. The military-industrial complex did it because Kennedy wanted peace. The Mafia did it because Bobby Kennedy was cracking down. Castro did it as payback for assassination attempts. The CIA did it because Kennedy threatened to, in his own words, “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

That last one’s got some meat on its bones now, at least according to these new documents. Turns out the spooks had been watching Oswald like hawks, tracking his movements in Mexico City, noting his contacts with Soviet and Cuban officials. They knew who he was, what he was doing, where he was going.

And they did nothing.

Let that sink in for a minute. Feel the cold finger tracing down your spine?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—JFK’s own flesh and blood and now part of Trump’s cabinet—believes the CIA had a hand in his uncle’s murder. Imagine carrying that thought around in your head, day after day, year after year. The kind of thing that would keep you up at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling fan spinning above your bed, wondering what else they’re capable of.

I think about Oliver Stone’s JFK movie sometimes. Came out in ‘91, caused one hell of a ruckus. Kevin Costner playing Jim Garrison with that Louisiana drawl: “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Good line. Wish it worked that way. But in the real world, justice doesn’t always get done, and the heavens stay right where they are, indifferent to our little human dramas.

The movie did light a fire under Congress, though. They passed the JFK Assassination Records Act in ‘92, mandating all files be released by 2017. But you know how it goes with government promises—like pie crust, made to be broken. Clinton, Bush, Obama, they all dragged their feet. Even Trump held back some files during his first term. Something about “national security concerns.”

What exactly in documents over 60 years old threatens national security? That’s the kind of question that keeps conspiracy theorists in business.

The Schlesinger Memo—sounds like a Ludlum novel, doesn’t it?—turns out to be a treasure trove of Cold War spycraft. Secret wiretaps, espionage tactics, surveillance programs targeting not just foreign enemies but American citizens. The kinds of things that make you look twice at that unmarked van parked across the street.

And the CIA’s global reach? My God. They had their fingers in more pies than a bakery on Thanksgiving. Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam. Every major European capital. Latin America? Hell, they practically owned the continent. Everywhere you look in these documents, there’s the CIA, watching, listening, manipulating like some paranoid deity.

The connection to Watergate is another gut-punch. James McCord, one of the burglars caught red-handed in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, turns out to have been a CIA tech wizard developing surveillance equipment throughout the sixties. The threads connecting these American tragedies are woven tighter than we thought.

Will we ever know the whole truth about Dallas? Fredrik Logevall, that Harvard historian working on Kennedy’s biography, doesn’t think so. “I doubt this release will change our understanding of what happened on that dreadful day in Dallas,” he told The New York Times.

The sad truth—and this is the part where the nightmare gets really dark—is that we might never wake up from this one. Some mysteries resist solving. Some wounds never heal.

The task force Congress has formed to oversee future declassifications is a start, I suppose. UFOs, 9/11, Jeffrey Epstein, MLK—all these American mysteries might get their day in the sun. But as long as there are intelligence agencies with secrets to keep, there will be truths we’re not allowed to know.

In the end, we’re all just like those bystanders in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Watching something terrible unfold before our eyes, trying to make sense of the senseless, the echoes of gunshots still ringing in our ears all these years later.

And maybe that’s the scariest thing of all.