Final secret files are coming out on the murders that shattered the 60s. What we may learn on JFK, MLK and RFK

By Andy Rose, CNN

When President Donald Trump announced an executive order to release the remaining government files in three of the country's most notorious assassinations, it immediately grabbed public attention and raised intrigue.

"And everything will be revealed," Trump said as his Sharpie applied his famously angular signature.

The announcement was the fulfilment of a Trump campaign promise, giving the public access to all the federal government knows about the murders of President John F Kennedy in 1963, as well as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. But the new information may not satisfy people hoping to fully clear the veil of mystery that has surrounded the killings in one of America's darkest times in history, spinning up decades of conspiracy theories.

"The records will not reveal any smoking gun," Tom Samoluk told CNN affiliate WCVB Thursday.

Samoluk is one of the people to actually see the secret JFK files, having reviewed them in the 1990s as part of the government panel to see what could be released. He is now a board member of John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

"There will be some puzzle pieces that will be put back in that will tell a more robust and rich story," Samoluk said.

Here's what we know so far:

Past promises to declassify were delayed

The process of making the enormous mountain of federal investigative documentation on the John F. Kennedy assassination available to the public was put into motion in 1992, when Congress passed a law requiring release of the papers unless the president determined it would undermine national interests.

The original deadline to unseal the documents was in 2017 during Trump's first term. At the time, he ordered a six-month review of the national security implications of a full release and then announced some documents would continue to be secret, citing national security, law enforcement and foreign affairs concerns.

Trump's new executive order does not immediately release the files, but gives the director of national intelligence and attorney general 15 days to "present a plan to the president for the full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F Kennedy". A similar review for the MLK and RFK files is due within 45 days.

Many still don't believe a lone gunman killed JFK

The official government investigation of the JFK assassination by the Warren Commission was intended to close the book on the murder that ended America's Camelot presidency. But its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone has never satisfied some Americans' hunger for a more meaningful answer about his death.

Conspiracy theories have flourished in the six decades since President Kennedy's murder, inspiring an Oscar-nominated film and countless books and websites. The percentage of Americans who believe others were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president has never dropped below 50 percent, according to Gallup polls taken through the years.

The assassination of three beloved public figures in five years shocked the nation, leading many to question how they could all be killed by a lone gunman. Alternative explanations had grown so fierce by 1976 that the House of Representatives formed its own committee to investigate the killings of JFK and King.

The committee's final report, released in 1979, determined Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," although the panel could not come up with any conspirators. A later analysis by the National Academy of Sciences disputed the acoustic evidence the committee used to draw their conclusion that there was a second gunman.

Journalist Gerald Posner, who formerly believed a JFK conspiracy theory but became a lone gunman theory defender after researching his book "Case Closed," said he's not expecting to have his mind changed a second time.

Posner believes the release will be more embarrassing than revealing for the government. Partially redacted documents suggest the Central Intelligence Agency had been monitoring Oswald when he visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City several weeks before the assassination, he said.

"Did they know how unhinged and unstable he was?" Posner told CNN Friday. "Then the question becomes, 'Hey, you guys knew he was a powder keg. Why didn't you tell the FBI when he came back to the US?'"

Since 2017, more than 70,000 documents relating to the JFK assassination have been released and are posted on the National Archives website. In 2023, 99 percent of classified documents related to the JFK assassination had already been released, the White House said.

Posner doubts the lack of a smoking gun in the final documents would fully extinguish the other theories of how and why Kennedy was killed.

"I've talked enough to conspiracy theorists over the years to understand that they will say either it must have been destroyed or it's somewhere else," Posner said.

Most RFK records already released

Exactly what will be released on the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy - which was not independently investigated by Congress - is much murkier.

In theory, all the RFK assassination documents were released from several local agencies and the FBI to the California State Archives in the late 1980s, said Tim Tate, a British author who cowrote a book on the assassination after investigating it for more than a quarter-century. "If there are remaining undisclosed documents, that represents enormous bad faith by whichever agency withheld them."

The Los Angeles Police Department has acknowledged it destroyed some evidence that was not used at trial following the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan - who is still serving a life sentence in a San Diego prison - including a door frame and ceiling tiles that may have been damaged by bullets in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Kennedy was fatally shot.

"The destruction of these relevant materials … reflects a serious lack of judgement by the authorities who destroyed such material," a 1977 report by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said.

The only relevant agency that has not turned over documents on Robert F. Kennedy is the CIA, Tate said. "If these are indeed the documents Trump intends to declassify, they could prove revealing: there is ample evidence of both animus from the Agency towards RFK (and vice-versa) and of its alleged involvement in the assassination," he told CNN via email.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the slain senator's son and Trump's current nominee to head the department of Health and Human Services, has said in multiple interviews he didn't believe Sirhan killed his father, instead blaming one of his father's security guards.

"Thank you, President Trump for trusting American citizens and for taking the first step down the road towards reversing this disastrous trajectory," Kennedy said in a post on X Friday, a day after the announcement.

Sirhan, who initially confessed to shooting Kennedy before later saying he had no memory of what happened, was recommended for parole in 2021 after 15 denials, but Governor Gavin Newsom denied it, saying, "He has failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy."

MLK's family wants to delay the release

Publicly, the family of Martin Luther King Jr. released a statement Thursday saying it hopes to see the documents before they are released. "For us, the assassination of our father is a deeply personal family loss that we have endured over the last 56 years," said the statement. "We hope to be provided the opportunity to review the files as a family prior to its public release."

But a source with knowledge of discussions to declassify documents related to King's assassination tells CNN the family would prefer the government wait to release them. The source said the family wants to uphold a previous agreement with the government to keep them classified until a later date.

King's younger son, Dexter King, announced in 1997 that he believed his father's killer was not James Earl Ray, who was serving a 99-year prison sentence for King's murder. In a prison face-to-face with Dexter King, Ray said he didn't commit the murder, although he added, "Sometimes these questions have difficult answers."

Ray - a drifter and recidivist felon - fled the country after King's death and was captured in England. He entered a guilty plea to King's murder in 1969 but recanted it almost immediately after his sentencing.

Ray died in Tennessee in 1998 while serving in prison. Dexter King died of cancer last year.

The House Select Committee on Assassination's report also said there was "probably a conspiracy" in King's death, without naming any other suspects. But the federal investigation was not satisfactory to many of King's family members and associates, who knew of the FBI's years-long investigation of the minister, and Director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with him as a potential communist influence.

Hoover called King "the most notorious liar in the country", and documents later declassified showed Hoover had authorised the wiretapping of King's home and office, including "efforts to intimidate him, to break up his marriage, and the explicit and implicit efforts to blackmail him".

Ironically, some of the wiretaps of King were approved by Robert F Kennedy himself when he was serving as attorney general, something Robert F Kennedy Jr has since defended.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young, one of King's closest associates, told CNN in 2008 he believed a government conspiracy was at the heart of the assassination, whether Ray pulled the trigger or not.

"I think that there was a determination in very high places that our movement had to be stopped," said Young. "It certainly went as far as the FBI."

Whether the last stack of documents on the killings of King and the Kennedys shows new evidence of a conspiracy - or only more mystery - is a question whose answer now appears to be only weeks away.

- CNN