President Trump, Give Us the Full Story on the JFK Assassination

By Larry J. Sabato and Philip Shenon, The Washington Post

26 July 17

ater this year — unless President Trump intervenes — the American people will get access to the last of thousands of secret government files about a turning point in the nation’s history: the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The National Archives this week released several hundred of the documents, which come from CIA and FBI files, and of course, JFK researchers are scrambling to see whether they contain any new clues about the president’s murder. But many more documents remain under seal, awaiting release by this October, the 25-year deadline set by the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.

The law gives only one person — the president — the ability to stop the release from happening. He can act only if he certifies in writing that the documents would somehow endanger national security.

We know we speak for an army of historians, political scientists, journalists and concerned citizens who have studied the JFK assassination when we say that it is time for the federal government to release everything in the custody of the Archives. This is the moment for full transparency about a seminal event that cost many Americans’ trust in their government.

The 1992 law has already brought some welcome transparency. It resulted in the release of millions of pages of documents regarding the assassination, including the 441 files from the CIA and FBI made public Monday. But about 3,150 other documents remain totally under seal, along with tens of thousands of pages that have been only partially unsealed because intelligence and law-enforcement agencies opposed their release in the 1990s.

Those are the documents that Trump could try to keep secret. And sadly, he appears to be under pressure to do so. Both of us have written books about the assassination and have a keen interest in what the president decides. Congressional and other government officials have warned us in confidence in recent weeks that at least two federal agencies will make formal appeals to the White House to block the release of some of the files.

Which agencies? Which files? The officials would not say, but it is already known that the CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department prepared most of the still-secret documents. If they’re the agencies objecting, is the president prepared to overrule them in the name of openness?

When it comes to JFK’s murder, what secret can be worth keeping nearly 54 years after those shots rang out in Dealey Plaza? In the 1990s, intelligence agencies might have been able to argue legitimately that some documents needed to stay under seal because they revealed the identity of American spies and law-enforcement informants who were still living and could be in danger if their cover were blown.

But decades later, logic suggests that almost all those people are now dead; if a handful are still alive, provisions can be made to protect them, if necessary. What lingers today is the widely held belief among Americans that the truth about a landmark moment in the nation’s history is still being hidden.

Almost as soon as the Warren Commission issued its September 1964 findings that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and there was no evidence of a conspiracy, it became apparent that the investigation led by Chief Justice Earl Warren was seriously flawed. In large part, this was because the CIA, the FBI and other agencies had withheld evidence from the commission and its investigative staff, apparently to cover up their own bungling before the assassination.

The evidence did not necessarily point to a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death — at least not the sort of dark, tangled plot imagined by many theorists. But the commission should have dug more deeply into Oswald’s mysterious six-day trip to Mexico City two months before the assassination, when he met with high-level Soviet and Cuban embassy personnel. While 21st-century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas, it’s possible that people at home or abroad knew he was plotting to kill Kennedy and might have encouraged him — by definition, possible co-conspirators. Or at a minimum, they did not try to stop Oswald.

By the late 1960s, opinion polls showed that, largely due to the Warren Commission’s shortcomings, most Americans had rejected the official story. What happened in the decades since is both understandable and toxic. Much of the public came to assume that if their government would not tell the truth about the murder of the president, it could not be expected to be honest about anything else — for example, human-caused climate change or the safety of childhood vaccines.

Trump, no stranger to promoting conspiracy theories, has a chance to show that he is committed to resolving some of the biggest conspiracy theories in American politics. We hope he welcomes the opportunity. If the documents in the National Archives are released in full, the president will receive credit for having struck a blow for transparency and, at least on this issue, attempting to show that the government no longer has anything to hide.

John McCain's Tragic Contradictions

By John Cassidy, The New Yorker

26 July 17

fter seven years and four months, the Republican quest to repeal Obamacare has taken on vampiric qualities. A number of times since March, it has appeared to be dead, but each time it has resurrected itself. The latest occasion came on Tuesday afternoon, when Vice-President Mike Pence broke a tie in the Senate on a procedural motion that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority leader, had put forward.

If this motion, which called on the Senate to take up discussion of the health-care bill that the House of Representatives passed in May, had been defeated, the repeal effort would likely have been finished. But McConnell and his colleagues managed to cobble together just enough votes to keep their ambitions alive.

The swing vote was cast by Shelley Moore Capito, the junior senator from West Virginia, who, last week, had joined with two of her Republican colleagues, Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, to block McConnell’s idea of having a vote solely on repealing the A.C.A., without putting in place any replacement measures. If Capito had stuck with Collins and Murkowski, both of whom voted against the procedural motion on Tuesday, it, too, would have failed. But, after meeting with Donald Trump in her home state on Monday, Capito put party loyalty before the interests of her constituents, about a third of whom are on Medicaid.

The vote was also marked by the dramatic appearance of John McCain, who returned to the Senate for the first time since being diagnosed with brain cancer. After receiving a standing ovation from his colleagues, McCain cast a vote in favor of McConnell’s motion, and then spoke from the floor of the Senate with great passion. After referring to his thirty-year career in the Senate, and his work with politicians of widely divergent views from both parties, he went on:

I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to coöperate, on our dependence on each other to learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us. Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood.

Let’s trust each other. Let’s return to regular order. We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. That’s an approach that’s been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires.

We’re getting nothing done. . . . We’ve tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the Administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it’s better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don’t think that is going to work in the end. And it probably shouldn’t.

These were stirring words, and they contained a lot of truth. But what good did this verbal tour de force do? In voting for McConnell’s motion, McCain participated in precisely the sort of cynical partisan political maneuver that he inveighed against. For months now, McConnell has been scheming to shove through a monumentally consequential reform without any hearings, markups, or efforts to reach out to Democrats. After last week, when this scheming looked destined to fail, he called for Tuesday’s vote on the “motion to consider”—even though he had not made clear what sort of measure the members would be taking up.

McCain supported McConnell’s motion. In doing so, he helped enable the Majority Leader to pursue his fallback strategy: getting practically any sort of measure passed and tossing the details of reform over to a Senate-House conference, which would deliberate in secrecy, with little input from anyone outside the G.O.P. leadership.

The Senate is now set to vote on three bills that have practically no chance of getting fifty-one votes: a repeal-only bill; the “repeal-and-replace” bill that McConnell originally proposed; and a revised version of the McConnell bill that includes an amendment from Ted Cruz, of Texas, which would allow insurers to sell cheap catastrophic-insurance policies outside of the Obamacare exchanges. After these votes are held, McConnell is expected to propose a so-called “skinny” repeal bill, which calls for the repeal of the individual and employer mandates but leaves everything else to be decided by the House-Senate conference.

If he had been following his own advice, McCain would have broken with McConnell and voted against the motion. If the motion had failed, the Republican leadership would have had little choice but to start talks with the Democrats about patching up the Obamacare insurance exchanges and, perhaps, making modest changes to Medicaid. Indeed, earlier this month, after McConnell’s repeal-and-replace bill failed to garner the support of fifty-one Republicans, Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Senate health committee, announced plans to convene bipartisan hearings on ways to stabilize the individual-insurance markets. Now that McConnell’s motion has passed, such plans are in abeyance.

To be sure, this is only an interim victory for the Republican leadership: the ultimate outcome of their repeal efforts remains uncertain. Even if McConnell succeeds in punting the ball over to a House-Senate conference, the full Senate will eventually have to vote on a final piece of legislation, which will have specific terms that can be analyzed and discussed. Getting a final bill passed won’t be easy.

For now, though, the G.O.P. campaign against Obamacare is still alive, and it owes its life to subterfuge. In the House, Speaker Paul Ryan managed to assemble a majority for his bill only by persuading his colleagues that any flaws it contained would be fixed in the Senate. That didn’t happen. Instead, McConnell now wants to abdicate the Senate’s deliberative responsibilities and kick things back to the House.

As McCain noted, these “responsibilities are important, vitally important, to the continued success of our Republic. And our arcane rules and customs are deliberately intended to require broad coöperation to function well at all. The most revered members of this institution accepted the necessity of compromise in order to make incremental progress on solving America’s problems and to defend her from her adversaries.”

For his long record of service to the country, his bravery, and his acerbic streak, McCain is himself widely revered. It is a great pity, indeed a tragedy, that he and many other Republican senators didn’t act upon his words.