Movie JFK - End Scroll (1991)

Oliver Stone's best film


Later this year President Joe Biden will face a decision about the disposition of the last of the U.S. government’s still-secret records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. With an April 26 deadline looming, federal agencies must inform the National Archives later this month about their plans to release the historic documents or continue withholding them. The Archivist is scheduled to make a recommendation by September 26 about the disposition of the records. The president must then decide by October 26 whether to accept or modify the Archivist’s recommendations.

Some 15,834 assassination-related documents remain partially or wholly classified, according to the National Archives. Most of these records were generated by the CIA and FBI. They include contemporaneous reports related to the murder of the 35th president in Dallas on November 22, 1963, files of CIA officers who knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and interviews conducted by congressional investigators in the 1970s.

The legal timetable was established by an executive memo issued by President Donald Trump on October 26, 2017. After hearing from CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump stated that because “national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns. I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security.”

The release of the material is mandated by the JFK Records Act, passed by Congress in October 1992 in response to the furor over Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which depicted the assassination as the work of senior CIA and Pentagon officials. The act created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which oversaw the declassification of some four million pages of material related to the assassination of JFK and the various investigations into his murder.