Classified Documents: What’s in the New Kennedy Files? Spies. State Secrets. No Second Gunman. (2025)

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Takeaways from the Kennedy files: Cold War spycraft, collateral damage and granular detail.

Decades of secrecy protected C.I.A. spycraft, not a second gunman.

For years, as the government has declassified and published documents related — some very tenuously — to the Kennedy assassination, the assumption expressed by conspiracy theorists and some historians has been that anything still being withheld must be big. Even Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the nation’s top health official, had long called for the release of all the documents related to his uncle’s death.

But with the release of nearly 64,000 pages by the National Archives, including some that had previously been rendered opaque by redactions, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decades of secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unsavory practices of U.S. intelligence operations.

Rather than reveal what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed was “overwhelming evidence” that the C.I.A. was involved in the Kennedy assassination, the files are filled with details about the agency’s agents and informants, covert actions and budget lines. The secrets, it seems, were the small details, not any big news.

The release produced few revelations but plenty of collateral damage.

While the documents revealed little to challenge the known facts about the assassinations of Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this might not be the end of declassifications.

The Justice Department on Wednesday moved to unseal F.B.I. surveillance records involving Dr. King, over the objections of those concerned that revelations about the civil rights leader’s private life will be used to tarnish his legacy.

Others will be affected directly by the document release, too: Among the new files released are accounting records that include the Social Security numbers of dozens of congressional employees from the late 1970s. Some of those people are still alive, including Judy K. Barga, 80, who once worked as a government contractor.

She said she was surprised to learn that her private information had been included in the files, and unsure how to remedy the situation. “People’s private information should be kept private,” she said.

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

The latest trove of documents may not have thrilled the general reader, and its disorganized release did not make the files easy to navigate. But for historians and scholars, there were some gems to be unearthed in reading between the lines.

A summary of a 693-page secret C.I.A. report from 1975, for example, touches on cases where the agency “may have exceeded its mandate.” But there were also references to station chiefs, overseas break-ins, illegal surveillance and various “extremely sensitive” operations. “It’s such a catalog of agency ‘bad acts,’” said David J. Garrow, a historian with deep experience in intelligence files.

Trump said 80,000 pages would be released. We got about 64,000.

On Monday, President Trump said he would release 80,000 pages of documents related to the assassination within 24 hours. There would be no redactions, he said. That sent national security officials scrambling.

In two document dumps on Tuesday evening, about 64,000 of those documents were made public. Some of them did indeed have information blocked off. But that’s 16,000 files short of what Mr. Trump promised. Are there more coming?

There was just enough to keep the conspiracy theorists going. (There will always be enough.)

There may not be anything that can satisfy the conspiracy theorists who are certain that there is information still missing from the public record. The theories that took hold immediately after the killing were only amplified by the investigations that were meant to quash them. The film “J.F.K.,” released in 1991, gave new life to even more. One man wrote to officials repeatedly, claiming for years that he alone knew more than the government was letting on.

The Warren Commission, which was established in 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination, explicitly tried to discredit conspiracy theories. (It didn’t work.) Then there was the 1992 law that ordered papers related to the killing be made public within 25 years, with limited exceptions. (That didn’t quiet the doubters, either.)

By 2023, 99 percent of documents had been disclosed, and now 64,000 more have been added to the record. Still, the question of what is missing may never go away.

A Kennedy aide worried that the C.I.A. threatened the State Department’s power.

But one section of the document was always redacted — until now.

Over about a page and a half, which was released on Tuesday in a trove of documents related to Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Schlesinger describes how roughly 1,500 supposed State Department employees were actually undercover C.I.A. officers who sometimes operated at odds with U.S. ambassadors. He wrote that nearly half of the political officers at U.S. embassies, who were responsible for understanding and advising on their host countries’ politics, were working for the C.I.A.

The new information suggests that early in the Cold War, U.S. leaders were concerned that the agency had too much independent power in secret operations abroad, and that this could erode the authority of the president.

When the C.I.A. was established in 1947, some officers went undercover by posing as State Department employees, a practice that was supposed to be temporary and limited. But it persisted because it was cheaper, easier and ensured a “pleasanter life for the C.I.A. people,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote.

In Paris, for example, 128 C.I.A. officers were based at the embassy. The spy agency even sought to cut the State Department’s contact with some politicians, including a key leader in parliament, according to the memo.

Over time, secrecy abroad has helped foster mistrust at home, said Greg Grandin, a history professor at Yale and an expert on U.S. foreign relations. Mr. Schlesinger’s memo shows that Cold War leaders who helped establish the national security state knew that was a danger, he said.

“These foreign policy conspiracies can’t help but contribute to a sense that the government is somehow perverse,” he said.

While the government kept this information classified for decades, the memo makes clear that it was hardly a secret at the time.

“C.I.A. occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals’ revolt in Algeria, passers-by noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights,” he wrote.

The United States was not the only world power that used diplomatic postings as cover for its spies during the Cold War. But Schlesinger’s memo argued that the “secret activities” of the C.I.A. abroad could threaten American “principles and practices.”

The redacted section may have been particularly sensitive because the C.I.A. didn’t want it “on record” that its officers were posing as State Department staff, Professor Grandin said.

Jefferson Morley, the author of several books about the C.I.A., said that while most of the memo discussed principles and policy ideas, the previously redacted section went into detail about the C.I.A.’s covert activities.

Rather than protect sensitive national security information, he said, the redactions were “to save the C.I.A. from embarrassment and criticism.”

The memo was written shortly after the agency organized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Mr. Schlesinger indicates that he was concerned that the C.I.A. was effectively making foreign policy, rather than following orders. The agency’s own report on the fiasco found that Kennedy, who had been in office for three months when it happened, may not have understood the details of the raid.

Tim Weiner, a former New York Times reporter and the author of a 2007 history about the C.I.A., said that the agency has nearly always followed the orders of presidents, including when Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion.

“The straw man that Schlesinger creates is of a C.I.A. that does things of its own accord,” Mr. Weiner said.

Mr. Weiner said he saw no compelling reason for the section of the memo about the State Department to have remained classified for so many years.

Keeping such things classified, he said, “pumps the paranoid fear of a deep state.”

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A supporter of President Trump, Barga said the inclusion did not impact her support. “I am very happy with our current administration,” she said, while noting that the leak was “not good for anybody.”

“I have no comment other than: People’s private information should be kept private.”

The Justice Department asks a court to release surveillance records of Martin Luther King Jr.

The request represents a sharp reversal for the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which have blocked or slow-walked the release of investigative files for decades under presidents from both parties. President Trump, who ordered the move, has floated alternative theories about political assassinations, stoking doubts about the role played by the bureau in perpetuating those theories.

A federal judge in Washington has yet to schedule a hearing on the motion.

In his filing, Mr. Martin said the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization based in Atlanta that Dr. King used as his base of operations, “currently opposes” the motion.

Mr. Martin, a far-right political activist who recently compared government diversity programs to the decades-long campaign of racist oppression and terror in the Jim Crow South, said he was following through on an executive order by Mr. Trump.

Dr. King’s relatives have raised questions about the federal investigation into his death, which concluded that it was the work of a lone racist assassin, James Earl Ray.

But they have also expressed concern that the Trump administration would dump all of the files in the case into the public domain, possibly airing biased or fabricated accounts of his private life to smear him.

Some supporters of Mr. Trump — whose administration is rapidly dismantling federal civil rights initiatives championed by Dr. King — have questioned his status as an American hero.

“For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years,” his children wrote in a statement in late January, after Mr. Trump announced that he was pushing to quickly release the material. “We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release.”

It is not clear if the Trump administration agreed to that accommodation. Mr. Martin said the material would be reviewed by his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, before it was made public.

The King family did not respond to a request for comment. But the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is close to Dr. King’s son Martin Luther King III, said the family had asked the administration for a meeting to go over the contents of the disclosure before they were released, and had yet to hear back.

“There is a concern that not everything in those files will be truthful,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview.

The president has ordered the release of previously undisclosed investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual assault case and jailhouse death as well as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy.

Already, the administration has released files related to Mr. Epstein and John Kennedy, though the revelations have been modest. Many of the Epstein files had already been made public. And while there might be new information embedded in the tens of thousands of documents on the Kennedy assassination released since late Tuesday, most of the material has been available through other sources for years.

The King records might be different. In 2019, David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, examined a trove of previously unreleased documents at the National Archives that provided salacious details about Dr. King’s sex life. The material had been gathered in bugged hotel rooms as part of a campaign by the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover to destroy the reputations of civil rights leaders in the 1960s.

Mr. Garrow was sharply criticized for publishing the material. Critics accused him of airing details that had been illegally obtained and curated by Mr. Hoover’s team to make Dr. King and other civil rights leaders appear in the worst possible light.

The effort to publicly release the files began in the mid-1970s. Bernard Lee, Dr. King’s longtime assistant, filed suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia against the F.B.I. and several agents for unlawfully monitoring Dr. King’s conversations, seeking monetary damages. The period covered 1963 to 1968, when he emerged as the country’s most powerful proponent for racial equality.

The case was dismissed. But in 1977, tapes, transcripts, wiretap logs and other records were transferred to the National Archives “pursuant to an apparent compromise” between Mr. Lee and the government, Mr. Martin wrote in his motion. The surveillance included conversations recorded at offices used by Dr. King and at his residence in Atlanta.

As part of that deal, the judge in the case — who, along with Mr. Lee, is now dead — ordered the files sealed for 50 years, until Jan. 31, 2027.

Mr. Martin downplayed the significance of his request, arguing that he was asking the court to hand over the materials only “about one year and nine months” early.

“The records have remained shielded from the public for long enough,” he added.

Audra D. S. Burch contributed reporting from Hollywood, Fla., Rick Rojas from Atlanta and Maggie Haberman from New York.

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Weiner said he could see an argument for permanently redacting the names of foreign agents to protect their family members, but argued most of the new information should have come to light decades ago. “The fact that we’re still doing this” in 2025, he said, “is yet another proof of how broken the system of declassification is.”

As with many of these files, it’s unclear how much is new. This same gargantuan document was also included in the 2022 Kennedy assassination files release under President Biden, which included more than 13,000 documents – far more than this one (at least so far).

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Still, he found intriguing nuggets, like a summary of a 693-page secret C.I.A. report from 1975 on instances where the agencies operations “may have exceeded its mandate.” It refers to break-ins, illegal surveillance and various “extremely sensitive” operations, like a 1967 C.I.A. takeover of an F.B.I monitoring post at the United Nations. “It’s such a catalog of agency ‘bad acts,’” Garrow said.

J.F.K.’s grandson slams the release of the files, and the news media’s reaction.

In a series of posts on X that were fiery even by Mr. Schlossberg’s standards, he said that the Trump administration did not give anyone in President Kennedy’s family a “heads up” before the documents were released. “A total surprise, and not shocker!!” he wrote.

The Trump administration did not immediately reply to a request for comment about Mr. Schlossberg’s assertion that the Kennedys had not been advised on the release ahead of time.

Beyond his own online thread about the files, Mr. Schlossberg also took issue with a post on X from Mike Lee, the senior senator from Utah and a Republican, who asked the question, “Why did it take so long to release the JFK files?” Mr. Schlossberg responded, “You really care about JFK’s legacy? You’re dismantling it.”

Mr. Schlossberg, who was hired last July as political correspondent for Vogue, was also critical of the news media’s extensive coverage of the decades-old documents. Standing in front of a wall-mounted TV tuned to CNN, in which the political correspondent Harry Enten and the anchor Erin Burnett were discussing the J.F.K. files as breaking news, Mr. Schlossberg said in a video post, “There’s so much actual news. Why are you covering this? … Stop.”

Mr. Schlossberg saved his harshest criticism for President Trump. He said that Mr. Trump has an “obsession” with his grandfather’s death but not his life or his policies. For instance, Mr. Schlossberg noted that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D, the agency the Trump administration has recently dismantled through job cuts and the freezing of foreign aid, was created by President Kennedy, in 1961.

Reached on Wednesday, Mr. Schlossberg declined to comment beyond what he had said on social media.

The American public has long had a fascination with the Kennedy assassination. In 1992, after the Oliver Stone film “JFK” led to a surge of interest (and conspiracy theories), Congress passed a law directing the National Archives and Records Administration to gather in one place all known U.S. government records relating to the Kennedy assassination. The law required all documents to be released within 25 years. About 99 percent of the known Kennedy papers have since been publicly disclosed, according to the National Archives.

For Mr. Schlossberg, the assassination of his grandfather is both a national tragedy and an ongoing distraction.

“For decades, conspiracies surrounding his death have shifted focus away from the important lessons of his life and the critical issues of the moment,” Mr. Schlossberg once wrote. “They continue to do so today.”

Mr. Schlossberg didn’t write those words on X yesterday, but in Time magazine — in 2017.

Another document, from 1976, discusses Szulc’s daughter’s collaboration with Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who wrote an exposé of the agency. Szulc, who died in 2001, is well known to have been of keen interest to the C.I.A., who saw him as “anti-agency” and circulated innuendo that he was a “hostile foreign agent.”

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Only a few documents mention King’s murder, and they offer little insight.

The details, several of which appear to have been previously disclosed, mention that sources in Mexico City and Nigeria believed they had seen someone who resembled King’s assassin, James Earl Ray. The documents also describe two American citizens who were detained in Panama City in connection with the murder but ultimately were not charged. A Berkeley physician also came under suspicion, having been “a chronic letter writer to the Central Intelligence Agency criticizing them and the government,” according to one memo in the tranche.

Jonathan Eig, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “King: A Life,” began reviewing a few of the newly released pages on Tuesday, and didn’t anticipate they would reveal new insights into the civil rights leader’s assassination. “I would be very surprised if there was some kind of smoking gun, or revelation of an alternate assassin,” he said.

On Wednesday, it remained unclear if a second tranche of documents released late on Tuesday included any new information about the civil rights leader.

The documents reflect both the F.B.I.’s and the C.I.A.’s previously known fixation on King and his association with left-wing activists, which came at a time when J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F.B.I., was trying to undermine the civil rights movement. For example, a 1964 memo from the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Rome discusses King’s meetings with Italian “leftist personalities,” in addition to his private meeting with Pope Paul VI.

The new release also includes an internal F.B.I. memo from 1966 that describes the apparent surveillance of a hotel where King was staying and alludes to King having discussed on the phone “several miscellaneous sex experiences.”

Another C.I.A. document written shortly after King’s assassination analyzes the Cuban media’s close attention to the ensuing riots in American cities.

Once President Trump ordered in January for the documents to be released, the King family expressed disappointment and concern. King’s surviving children had asked to review the files before the documents were released, but their request was denied.

The release and the publicity surrounding it, the family said, inflame their lasting pain. “For us the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years,” they said in a statement in January.

The family has declined to speak further about the release.

A report from 1968, titled “Martin Luther King Jr.: A Current Analysis,” that was unsealed in 2017 as part of a cache regarding the Kennedy assassination offered a glimpse at the kind of information that might have been released on Tuesday. The analysis included claims about King that are dubious but salacious, including allegations of extramarital affairs.

Some historians argued that the report should be viewed with deep skepticism since the F.B.I. was not an objective observer of King. The documents do underscore the lengths the bureau went to aggressively dig into his life to discredit him and the movement he led.

The unnamed author of the report wrote that it had been compiled to gain insight into King’s objectives and tactics, arguing such information was vital because of his expansive influence.

“The course King chooses to follow at this critical time could have momentous impact on the future of race relations in the United States,” the report said.

Audra D. S. Burch contributed reporting.

That led to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, housed at a National Archives facility in Maryland, which now includes some six million pages of records. Most were released long ago, but thousands were held back or redacted. In 2017, President Trump ordered the archives to release the rest, in keeping with the 1992 law’s 25-year deadline. Between 2017 and 2023, there were four releases. Last night’s drop was the latest, but it remains unclear if it will really be the last.

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“In the Paris Embassy today, there are 128 CIA people,” Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy. “CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals’ revolt in Algeria, passers-by noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.”

Historians take a wait-and-see approach to the latest trove of Kennedy documents.

It could take months, if not longer, for scholars to parse and digest the nearly 2,200 documents posted online in two separate batches on Tuesday, totaling 63,400 pages. In previous Kennedy assassination releases, documents were labeled with serial numbers, according to the originating agency’s filing system. The documents in the latest release appeared to come with even less identifying information.

Some may turn out to be full versions of documents previously available with only light redactions, adding a name or two to the record. Others, scholars say, are likely to be duplicates or variants of memos and reports that have long been available from other sources.

David J. Garrow, the author of “The F.B.I. and Martin Luther King” and numerous articles about the intelligence agencies, predicted that the release would probably be a “a big nothingburger” when it comes to the assassination itself.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be interesting details, particularly for scholars of the byzantine workings of the intelligence agencies.

In 1992, responding to a surge of interest in conspiracy theories after the Oliver Stone film “J.F.K.,” Congress passed a law directing the National Archives and Records Administration to gather in one place all known U.S. government records relating to the Kennedy assassination.

The law required all documents to be released within 25 years. In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump ordered the release of all outstanding documents, setting the stage for what became four document releases. After the last release, in 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a “final certification,” though roughly 5,000 documents remained unavailable, in part or in full.

Among the previously released documents that have drawn serious attention are those related to Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit in September 1963 to Mexico City, where he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies.

“We know he met with Cuban diplomats and with Soviet diplomats, and had a plan to defect,” Professor Logevall said. “If the documents include more concrete knowledge about what was said, to whom he said it and what was said in response, that would be historically both interesting and important.”

It would also be helpful, he said, to know more about what the C.I.A. knew about Oswald — and how much of that information it shared, or failed to share, with the F.B.I.

Judging by past releases, much of the new information will most likely be previously redacted names of low-level organized crime figures who served as informants or other bit players.

“Most of what remains, and what the agency and bureau have fought to keep closed, deals with human informants,” Mr. Garrow said.

The new documents could shed light on why the intelligence agencies have been keen to keep many of these documents partly redacted, or entirely secret, for so long.

Past releases have opened useful windows on agency operations. The 2018 release, for example, contained material related to Cointelpro, the secret program that the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, began in 1956 to undermine the domestic Communist Party and later expanded to include civil rights groups, anti-Vietnam War organizers and other “subversives.” (It ended in 1971 after it was publicly exposed.)

Some of those documents, the Yale historian Beverly Gage said, suggested that presidents, starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower, and members of key congressional committees knew about the program and had seen parts of Hoover’s off-the-record testimony about it.

The new Kennedy releases could also yield more information on matters only tangentially related to the assassination but of great interest to scholars and the public, such as the F.B.I.’s infamous wiretapping of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Those wiretaps were installed in King’s office, home and hotel rooms, and sometimes recorded him with sexual partners. Associates of King have sued to keep the material private, and much of it is now under a court seal until 2027, but some has seeped out through the Kennedy assassination records.

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Trump set off a 24-hour scramble among national security officials to release the documents.

By Tuesday evening, when about 64,000 files were made public — fewer than Mr. Trump had estimated — some of the country’s top national security officials had spent hours trying to assess any possible hazards under extreme deadline pressure.

John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been emphasizing to senior administration officials that some documents had nothing to do with Mr. Kennedy and were developed decades after the assassination, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. He wanted to make sure that other officials were fully aware of what the files contained and would not be caught off guard, but he was clear that he would not seek to impede any files from being released, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.

Soon after Mr. Trump spoke on Monday afternoon, officials at the National Security Council quickly convened a call to map out a plan to take stock of which documents still needed to be unredacted. The release had to be coordinated with the National Archives and Records Administration. Some officials raised concerns about unintended consequences of rushing the release of the files, including the disclosure of sensitive personal information like the Social Security numbers of people who were still alive, the people said.

Officials involved in the process of declassification said the number of files had expanded greatly over many decades because, with each investigation into Kennedy-related material, information that had nothing to do with the assassinated president has come under that umbrella. In some cases, that includes documents created decades after his death, according to one person with knowledge of the process.

“President Trump made a promise to release all of the J.F.K. files — and he is delivering on that promise,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Anyone surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention or has been willfully ignorant.”

When asked on Monday whether he knew what was in the files, Mr. Trump said that he had “heard about them” but that he had not received an executive summary.

“I’m not doing summaries,” he said.

Spokesmen for the N.S.C. and C.I.A. declined to comment. A National Archives spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

For decades, historians and conspiracy theorists alike have clamored for more information on Kennedy’s death. A 1992 law required the government to release documents related to the killing within 25 years, except documents that could harm national security.

In 2017, Mr. Trump released some additional documents, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the files and include redactions. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality and associate of Mr. Trump, said the president came to regret that decision, and Mr. Trump has cast his effort to release the documents as the fulfillment of a long-held promise to the American people.

Just a few years ago, Mr. Trump said he did not have much interest in the files, which historians and many of his associates have wanted to see for decades. In an interview with a New York Times reporter in September 2021, Mr. Trump said that he was “not that curious” about the papers.

“The reason I did that was because I thought it was appropriate,” he said, explaining why he sought to declassify the files during his first term. “When you have something that’s so sacredly secret, it really makes it sound very bad. I think they maybe got it right, probably got it right. Let people examine it.”

But many people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including Mr. Carlson and Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., have lobbied the president for years to order the release of all the files.

“The guy who sat at his desk was murdered, and every subsequent president has hidden why and by whom,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview on Tuesday. “How could you live like that?”

Kennedy’s assassination has long fueled conspiracy theories, including some that Mr. Trump himself has indulged. He has also used the interest around the assassination when it was politically expedient.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father was also assassinated, endorsed Mr. Trump in August, Mr. Trump renewed his promise to release all the documents related to the killings of both Kennedys and to set up an independent commission to study assassination attempts, including the one on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., last year.

“This is a tribute in honor of Bobby,” Mr. Trump said.

He added: “I have never had more people ask me, ‘Please sir, release the documents on the Kennedy assassination,’ and we’re going to do that.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump at one point alleged that the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had been with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before President Kennedy was killed.

“You know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot,” Mr. Trump told Fox News in an interview in May 2016, as he was running against Mr. Cruz for the Republican nomination. “I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right? Prior to his being shot, and nobody brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible.”

On Monday, Mr. Trump attended a board meeting at the Kennedy Center, an institution he overhauled by making himself chairman and installing loyalists, including Richard Grenell, who briefly served as acting director of national intelligence in the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term. As he was leaving, Mr. Trump said that he had a “big announcement to make.”

“While we’re here, I thought it would be appropriate,” he said. “We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files. So — people have been waiting for decades for this.”

Why the newly released documents won’t put out the fire for conspiracy theorists.

Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.

By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.

Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)

That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.

Versions of the counternarrative percolate through novels and movies from the late ’60s on, picking up steam in the ’80s and ’90s. Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View” (1974), while not explicitly about J.F.K., paints a bleak, cynical picture of an American elite devouring its own, devoted to nothing beyond the preservation of power and the weaponization of deceit. Condon’s “Winter Kills,” published in 1974 and made into a movie five years later, runs a darkly comic variation on this theme, ascribing a Kennedy-like figure’s death to the moral rot and congenital dishonesty of a ruling class he had both embodied and betrayed.

The disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, along with revelations about the covert activities of the C.I.A. and F.B.I., fed a distrust of the state that would fester on the left and the right. The assassination was seen from both sides as the central event in the secret history of our times, a loose thread that, when pulled, would unravel a skein of sinister plots involving intelligence agencies, the Mafia, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson and various clandestine organizations and shadowy actors. The cumulative moral of these stories was that nothing was ever what it seemed, and that American institutions were warrens of treachery and deceit.

In the 1988 baseball comedy “Bull Durham,” Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis, in a character-defining monologue, declares: “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” That’s what a smart, sexy, grown-up romantic lead played by an up-and-coming movie star would say. Three years later, Costner starred in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” as Jim Garrison, the real-life New Orleans district attorney pursuing a case that implicated a vast web of conspirators, including Kennedy’s successor, Johnson. “We’re through the looking glass here, people,” he said. “White is black and black is white.” In 1991, that was what a righteous warrior for truth played by a double Oscar winner would say.

The conspiracy zeitgeist was shifting. Between “Bull Durham” and “JFK,” Don DeLillo published “Libra,” his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald; Norman Mailer published his 1300-page “Harlot’s Ghost,” intended as the first volume in a chronicle of modern American espionage that would stitch the Kennedy assassination into a larger history of covert operations and double-crosses; the Soviet Union collapsed.

Now everything was an inside job. The Kennedy assassination would continue to be a source of fascination in its own right — it anchors James Ellroy’s synoptic Underworld U.S.A. trilogy and figures as a plot point in numerous fictions about espionage and organized crime — and it would also become a template, a model for explaining everything.

At the end of the ’90s, the internet blossomed, “The Matrix” opened in theaters and the normalization of conspiratorial thinking accelerated. The online, post-9/11 world is teeming with “truthers,” free-range skeptics who reflexively doubt what seems to be the obvious account of events. That, say, Al Qaeda operatives flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center; that a gunman slaughtered teachers and children at a school in Connecticut; that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square; that followers of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Elaborate, preposterous alternative scenarios — involving false flags, black ops, hacked voting machines and Deep State machinations — proliferate on social media where they become the basis for algorithmically fueled pseudo-research.

Spurious theories can be refuted over and over again — in the news media, in sworn congressional testimony, in the civil and criminal courts — but such fact-checking often has the effect of amplifying the falsehoods. It isn’t just that we disagree on the facts or what they mean; we lack a common definition of what a fact even is. Generalized mistrust of authority and expertise turns us into epistemological free agents, making up the world as we blunder through it. We’re just asking questions, doing our own search engine-optimized investigations, huddling in ad hoc Warren Commissions of our own devising.

Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.

Richard Hofstadter warned that “there is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy.” Recent history includes a lot of people saying exactly that, in ways that make the old paranoid style look downright sensible.

To change the metaphor, it can seem as if the civic landscape is nothing but rabbit holes. The rabbits will never go back into the hats. Paranoia, in Hofstadter’s definition — in a phrase he borrowed from the British historian L.B. Namier — involved the lack of “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen,” a sense that history unspools within knowable parameters. That grounding in reality has been grievously undermined, and no cache of documents is going to restore it.

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Socks, suits and slippers: The Kennedy archive holds more than just documents.

Others have a more obscure connection to the crime: There’s a blue handbag that Oswald carried on a trip to Mexico, a contraption used for abdominal exercises and a set of curtain rods.

The archives, of course, are better known as the home of hundreds of thousands of documents — some of which are now being released in full for the first time. But the catalog of objects gathered by investigators seems to reflect the nation’s obsession with an event that remains mysterious — no matter how many times one might squint at Oswald’s bath slippers.

While the National Archives has published photographs of many of the objects online, it generally requires researchers who wish to see the actual items to submit a written request, explaining why viewing pictures or descriptions isn’t enough for their needs.

To professional archivists, it’s no surprise that the collection includes such materials. Objects can tell a story in a way that documents alone cannot.

“You’re able to interpret it in a different way and kind of visualize and place yourself at that scene,” said Derek Mosley, the president of the Society of American Archivists and an archivist at a research library in Atlanta.

Objects can also help people think about the historic event on a personal level, said Yvonne Eadon, an assistant professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky. Professor Eadon has researched how people responded when a cache of documents about Kennedy’s death was declassified in 2017, which incited a host of new questions and frustrations over redactions and poor scanning.

Like many Americans, she has watched the video of the assassination again and again, and was particularly affected by the image of Mrs. Kennedy crawling to the back of the car after her husband is shot.

“I’ve found myself wondering, what does the suit look like? What does it feel like?” she said. “There’s so much information that is contained in tactility around these objects.”

R.F.K. Jr. celebrated Trump’s order to declassify the documents.

On Tuesday, his call was answered when the National Archive declassified a new trove of documents in response to an executive order issued by President Trump on Jan. 23.

But those files may not answer many lingering questions about the assassination of President Kennedy, as most of the government records surrounding the event have already been released. In 2023, the National Archives estimated that more than 99 percent of the records in its collection of approximately five million pages had been made available to the public.

Still, in January Mr. Kennedy celebrated the executive order demanding the release of more documents and thanked Mr. Trump.

“The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about J.F.K.’s assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises,” Mr. Kennedy posted on X.

Mr. Kennedy has cast doubts on the findings of the Warren Commission, which was established in 1963 to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. The investigation found that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was arrested after the crime, acted alone.

In an interview in 2013, Mr. Kennedy said his father had believed the report to be “a shoddy piece of craftmanship.”

“He publicly supported the Warren Commission report but privately he was dismissive of it,” he said of his father.

“The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman,” he added. He did not elaborate on what he believed had happened.

Over the years, the findings of the Warren Commission have been questioned in some circles as conspiracy theories about the assassination gained a foothold in America’s collective psyche and popular culture.

Mr. Kennedy repeated those claims about the commission when he ran as an independent in the 2024 presidential race. In a 2023 radio interview, Mr. Kennedy claimed there was “overwhelming evidence” that the C.I.A. was involved in his uncle’s murder.

“I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point,” he said.

And in a May 2023 interview with Fox News, he claimed that Allen W. Dulles, a C.I.A. director fired by President Kennedy, helped cover up evidence of the organization’s involvement when he served on the Warren Commission.

“It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother,” he said.

Most members of the extended Kennedy family have not publicly expressed doubts about investigation of the assassination.

But Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, offered his view of the executive order.

“JFK conspiracy theories — The truth is alot sadder than the myth — a tragedy that didn’t need to happen. Not part of an inevitable grand scheme,” he posted on X, hours after Mr. Trump signed the order in January.

“Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back,” he said. “There’s nothing heroic about it.”

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Read The Times’s 1963 coverage of the Kennedy assassination.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was riding in the third car behind Mr. Kennedy’s, was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States 99 minutes after Mr. Kennedy’s death.

Mr. Johnson is 55 years old; Mr. Kennedy was 46.

Shortly after the assassination, Lee H. Oswald, who once defected to the Soviet Union and who has been active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, was arrested by the Dallas police. Tonight he was accused of the killing.

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