The Biden administration’s decision to release 13,173 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy this past Thursday may not resolve the decades-long debate over what actually happened that fateful November day in Dallas 59 years ago. But it may help researchers better come to grips with uncomfortable truths about America’s foreign policy and intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Any new light, however dim, that may be shed on covert activities at that time — and, of course, the background of Lee Harvey Oswald — should be welcomed by all who cherish the prospects of a healthier and more self-reflective American democracy.

Truman’s Dec. 22, 1963 warning

It was former President Harry Truman who pointed us in the right direction, with a column written for The Washington Post on December 22, 1963, one month to the day after Kennedy’s murder. Whether related to JFK’s killing or not — Truman doesn’t mention the slain president in his column — the headline alone speaks volumes to us today: “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” Indeed, Truman, who created the Central Intelligence Agency, laments in the article that “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.” The agency had begun, to use Truman’s words, to “inject itself into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

It was a column that displeased recently fired CIA director Allen Dulles, who, ironically, would become the de facto head of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination. The timing of Truman’s column has been suggestive to many JFK researchers over the years. Certainly, a glowing personal piece from the former president commemorating the legacy of Kennedy would have been more in keeping with the national mood of mourning. But perhaps Truman saw a warning as more relevant and better form of commemoration.

Turning the tide

Thankfully, more and more presidental scholars have begun to take the JFK assassination seriously as something potentially far more sinister than what the Warren Commission suggested happened in Dealey Plaza. David Wrone’s book on the Zapruder film and the work and efforts by the esteemed historian Douglas Brinkley and many other JFK researchers over the decades have made this undertaking more mainstream, despite ongoing efforts to relegate questions about Kennedy’s assassination to the realm of Seinfeld or the lunatic fringe.

Undoubtedly, it’s been a tough slog. Even former Secretary of State John Kerry’s suggestion to Tom Brokaw that “To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” created such a firestorm that he had to walk that comment back within days and discontinue the conversation altogether. “I just have a point of view,” Kerry would later tell the journalist David Gregory. “And I’m not going to get into that. It’s not something that I think needs to be commented on, and certainly not at this time.” That was nearly 10 years ago. Perhaps today, Kerry would feel freer to speak his mind.

Let there be light

One can hope, but straw-man arguments abound. Biden’s decision to release this new tranche of documents will certainly create no greater “conspiracy” culture than the one we already have, as some are already claiming. On the contrary, conspiracy thrives when government grows distant from its citizens and when ordinary people’s understanding of events is ridiculed. Like many, I doubt there are any files in the National Archives that will prove “decisive” in swaying long hardened views about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But as Thomas Jefferson argued, more information is always better in a democracy — all the more so when it demonstrates our own shortcomings.

As we approach the anniversary of Truman’s column — really an open letter to the American people about the troubling wrong turn the CIA took in its covert operations — we should all give pause to read it and take in Harry’s warnings about the hubris so common to new and expansive secretive powers. Release all the documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy. Let the people decide. After all, the buck stops there.