The Kennedy Files

 Given the daily degradation of our democracy—not merely its practice but its symbols and forms, which matter, too—it seems merely worth a baleful look that more of the so-called Kennedy files, which the National Archives released last week, on Donald Trump’s order, turn out, so far, to contain what is technically called bupkes: nothing of consequence or revelation. Whispers about such obvious hoaxes as an alleged letter written by John F. Kennedy, Jr., calling Joe Biden a traitor—a document long ago revealed and debunked by the F.B.I.—created some excitement on social media, including on Elon Musk’s X, but the files mostly inspire the same old rumors of the same old kind—the C.I.A., Israel’s intelligence agency, George H. W. Bush, the same horses revolving on the same carrousel, with the paint peeling from them by now. Trump’s motive in releasing the files seems to have been to appease the Alex Jones wing of his base—and likely also his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—which clings to conspiracy theories as rational conservatives once clung to the Constitution. But most of the records had long been available; the big difference here is that some of the (mostly self-evident) names and sources are revealed. (And, with the usual Trump chaos, the names and even the Social Security numbers of various bystanders to the story have now been inadvertently released, creating the possibility of brand-new lawsuits.)

The reality, as confirmed by the Warren Commission, in 1964, remains as it has been ever since that November afternoon: that Lee Harvey Oswald, an unhappy man in his early twenties, whose absurd sense of self-aggrandizement oscillated with an unappeasable sense of grievance—the very type of a political assassin—acted alone. His motives for killing Kennedy remain uncertain—though he may perhaps have simply intended to impress Fidel Castro. (Assassins’ motives are often confused: Mark Chapman killed John Lennon out of a toxic compound involving an Esquire article about Lennon’s wealth and an obsession with “The Catcher in the Rye.”)

-Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker