Documents / FOIA release
This is a Central Intelligence Agency release dated 2025-06-12 under the JFK Act. It collects 1975 newspaper and magazine clippings. They include Mark Harris's New York Times Magazine essay on a UCLA "Conspiracy in America" conference and the conspiracy-theory mindset, a Jack Anderson column on stalled CIA reform, and wire reports of Richard Helms calling CBS newsman Daniel Schorr "Killer" after he testified to the Rockefeller Commission. There is also an essay on power and a publishing item about Philip Agee's book.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Reopen the JTK ## By SMITH HEMPSTONE WASHINGTON - One of the consequences of the Watergate disaster, like the fall of Vietnam, clearly is going to be a reopening of the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. This is less a matter of the availability of new evidence than the simple fact that, after Watergate, even reasonably normal people are no longer prepared to believe what their government or its creatures - in this case, the Warren Commission - tell them. And while there have been kingkillers ever since there have been kings, the enormity of the crime of regicide — the killing of the man who personifies the state — still fills us with awe and horror. Something deep inside us makes it difficult for us to accept the Warren Commission's finding that the assassin Each of us can remember where we were on that fateful morning of Nov. 22,1963. was Lee Harvey Oswald and that he acted alone. Why? It is true that there are flaws, gaps and unanswered (ahd perhaps unanswerable) questions that arise out of the supposition that Oswald was the killer, that he acted alone and that he was in no one's pay. Very little, for instance, has been done to establish a motive. There have been nearly 30 books written on the subject of the Kennedy assassination. Many of them seem plausible if you are prepared to substitute theory for fact, supposition for evidence. But it is equally true that there are similar and in most cases greater flaws, gaps and unanswered questions in all the other mutually contradictory hypotheses: one of several killers in the pay of the CIA, the FBI, Big Oil, the family of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Mafia or the KGB. The Warren Corunissien, upon which President Ford served, almost certainly was well-intentioned, clearly was unwieldly and probably, in an effort to lay a national tragedy to rest, acted too hastily. Despite the enormous difficulties in establishing the truth, particularly after Oswald's own murder at the hand of Jack Ruby, the commission completed its bulky, disorganized 25-volume report within 10 months. And especially in the light of the Watergate cover-up (which it, of course, could not anticipate), the Warren Commission, out of a humane consideration for the sensibilities of the Kennedy family, committed a terrible crime in allowing evidence derived from the autopsy to be sequestered. This combined with some of the admittedly bizarre aspects of Oswald's history - his sojourn in the Soviet Union, his alleged visits to Cuba, the fact of an FBI agent's name appearing in the notebook he was carrying when arrested in Dallas - only served to trigger the various conspiracy theories. There is no real reason to believe that a new investigation will bring us any closer to the truth about what happened and why on that sad and brilliant day in Dallas a dozen years ago. But the gnawing cynicism about government and of Watergate makes it important that the case be reopened. Sea Henry Gonzalez of Texas, who is asking for just that, ought to have his way, even if in the end we know very little more than we do at present.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 83 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.