Sixty-two years after the crack of rifle shots in Dallas shattered the American psyche, the ghosts of November 22, 1963, refuse to stay buried. President John F. Kennedy's assassination, officially pinned on a lone malcontent named Lee Harvey Oswald, has long been a Rorschach test for our national paranoia, spawning theories from Mafia hits to Cuban revenge plots. Yet, in March 2025, under President Donald Trump's Executive Order 14176, the federal government unleashed over 62,000 pages of previously redacted or withheld documents from the JFK Assassination Records Collection. These files, mandated for release by the 1992 JFK Act but repeatedly delayed, promised closure. Instead, they've ignited a fresh inferno of questions, exposing not just the machinery of Cold War espionage but the rot within our own intelligence apparatus.
The establishment's response? A collective shrug. As The American Conservative's Philip Giraldi incisively asks in his November 2025 essay, "Why is the Establishment Ignoring the Recently Declassified JFK Files?" The corporate media and Democratic operatives have buried these revelations under a blizzard of Epstein distractions and partisan noise. It's as if the files, detailing CIA perjury, secret backchannels, and a four-year surveillance obsession with Oswald, were mere footnotes to a history already written. But they're not. They're dynamite, and their suppression reeks of self-preservation by a security state desperate to guard its skeletons.
The Spark: Trump's Order and the Flood of Files
The declassification saga traces back to Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, which galvanized Congress to compel the release of all assassination-related records by 2017. Presidents from both parties kicked the can, citing "national security," until Trump, fulfilling a 2024 campaign vow, signed EO 14176 on January 23, 2025. This sweeping directive didn't stop at JFK; it encompassed records on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., too. By March 18, the National Archives had digitised and posted tens of thousands of pages, including freshly unearthed FBI files (over 2,400 discovered in 2025 alone) and CIA operational logs.
Historians and transparency advocates hailed it as a milestone. The National Security Archive, sifting through the trove, uncovered "enhanced clarity" on CIA covert ops, from Vatican infiltration to Latin American coups. Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst there, noted the files illuminate "the CIA global effort to influence elections, sabotage economies, overthrow governments." Yet, as Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall observed, while the documents flesh out the agency's shadowy playbook, they offer "little or nothing that's new" on the assassination itself, no smoking gun proving a second shooter or agency-orchestrated hit.
That hasn't stopped the drip of intrigue. The Associated Press reported in March 2025 that the files detail Oswald's flirtation with defection in Mexico City weeks before Dallas, where he hobnobbed with Cuban and Soviet diplomats, conversations the CIA monitored but downplayed. New Mexico-specific releases in May revealed an astonishing cosiness: Mexican authorities not only tolerated CIA espionage but initiated joint ops against communists, including surveillance of Oswald's embassy visits. And in Brazil, just months before the 1964 coup, CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms briefed on ops to topple João Goulart's government, echoing JFK's own wariness of agency overreach.
If the files don't rewrite the "lone gunman" narrative, they do demolish the CIA's halo of competence. Enter James Jesus Angleton, the agency's counterintelligence czar and a figure straight out of a John le Carré novel, paranoid, obsessive. The declassified trove paints Angleton as the architect of a multi-decade cover-up.
For starters, the CIA maintained a classified "201" surveillance file on Oswald for four years pre-assassination, personally controlled by Angleton. Yet, under oath to the Warren Commission and the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations, he perjured himself, claiming ignorance of the would-be assassin. He buried Oswald's 1963 Mexico City jaunt to the Cuban embassy, feigning post-Dallas discovery. Jefferson Morley, a leading JFK archivist, calls this "compartmentalisation" a deliberate stall: Angleton "preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA's knowledge."
These aren't fringe fever dreams; they're from the files themselves; X threads tie it to modern media ops, alleging CIA "narrative control" via outlets like MSNBC, echoing the files' exposure of agency propaganda.
The Stonewall: Media, Democrats, and the Deep State's Echo Chamber
Giraldi nails the conspiracy of silence. At an April 2025 House hearing, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) dismissed the files outright: "They show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy," while slamming Oliver Stone. The New York Times' Julian Barnes decreed, without full review, "The CIA did not kill JFK… Oswald acted alone." ABC News branded calls to reopen the probe "unfounded."
This isn't oversight; it's orchestration. The files indict the CIA's "stenographers" in media and politics, protecting a post-WWII security leviathan JFK himself sought to "splinter into a thousand pieces." As USA Today noted, the releases illuminate "JFK's mistrust of the CIA" and Oswald surveillance, yet outlets pivot to "no second gunman," burying the perjury and foreign meddling. Fact-checkers admit the docs "raise new questions about CIA activity" but hedge: no "incontrovertible new answer."
The Reckoning: Truth as the First Casualty
These files aren't a bust, they're a blueprint of betrayal. They confirm the CIA's Cold War excesses, Angleton's double-dealing, and a cover-up that prioritised secrecy over sovereignty. Oswald may have pulled the trigger, but the agency's lies ensured we'd never know the full story.
Giraldi's right: Americans deserve answers on why 60 years of redactions shielded Angleton's pipeline. The establishment's hush isn't disinterest; it's damage control for a system rotten with unaccountable power. As we mark another anniversary, the files demand not conspiracy-mongering, but congressional probes, Stone's call to reopen the investigation rings truer than ever.
In a republic, sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant. Trump's release cracked the vault; now, it's on us to demand the rest. Because if we ignore this, Dallas won't be the last time history repeats as tragedy.