Special to the AARC.
On January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural speech in which he delivered the line: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Two days after President Kennedy’s assassination his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot by Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. That same evening, Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, drafted a memo to Bill Moyers. A portion of that memo said “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. …”
“I think, however, that a statement that all the facts will be made public property in an orderly and responsible way should be made now. We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.”
On September 27, 1964, “The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy,” a.k.a. Warren Report, was submitted to President Lyndon B. Johnson with 26-volumes of evidentiary material following weeks later.
It did not take too long before patriotic Americans, followed exhortation to “ask what you can do for your country.” They read the Warren Report, they scoured the twenty-six volumes of evidentiary materials; they published their “findings;” indexed primary materials to aid others in exploring the contradictions of the official findings with the government’s own “facts.”
In the decades that followed, private groups, a New Orleans district attorney, House and Senate select committees investigated the “facts” of the assassination and fomented public speculation that undermined the credibility of the original findings. The creation of an Assassination Records Review Board would result in the release of investigative records, but did not result in “head[ing] off public speculation.
President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order directing the declassification and release of added documents that further undermined public confidence in the government’s policy position: “nothing to see here.”
With greater than sixty years having happened and the first- and second- generation JFK assassination investigation critics passing on to their rewards, it is time for their records to be preserved and made accessible. It is time for historians to have full access to both government and critics’ records, to explore the impact the JFK controversy has had on the public confidence in its government.
Critics, entrust your investigative records, papers, books, and indexes to institutions that will make them accessible through internet search engines, rather than confining them to museum-like archives available only to visitors. Demonstrate that your work is more transparent than a government that extols openness while releasing records only partially, both digitally and in person.
You, the critics, did more than ask what you could do for your country, you performed the tasks that your country would not do for you. Now is the time to ask institutions and historians to follow your lead and make your records available to the public, not in records archives that function as museums, but as universally accessible libraries.
Clayton Ogilvie, AARC Board member, archivist extraordinaire, is responsible for creating the Harold Weisberg Archive Digital Collection (under renovation), home of more than two dozen researchers' collections of assassination-related materials.
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