Release the files! After 62 years, why hide JFK assassination info? | Opinion
America wants to see the files.
Not only the Epstein files. The Kennedy assassination files.
It has been 62 years. Between Nov. 22 and Nov. 25, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Elm Street in Dallas and laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. Within days, accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered in Dallas and buried on a bleak, gray day in east Fort Worth.
We now know more. Documents released this year show the Central Intelligence Agency lied to us and knew all about Oswald before the assassination.
But nothing explained what — if anything besides anger and frustration at home — spurred Oswald to kill Kennedy.
At least 2,000 more documents have yet to be released despite decades of political promises.
That’s after 62 years.
The federal government coughed up another batch of records this year. But they didn’t tell us much about Oswald, a resident of Benbrook and Fort Worth for nine years off and on and a former student at seven different Fort Worth district schools including the current Stripling Middle School and Arlington Heights High School.
The files did tell us that a Miami-based CIA officer assigned to “psychological warfare,” George Joannides, bankrolled a Cuban student group in Miami to oppose Prime Minister Fidel Castro.
That group later clashed with Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba pro-Castro faction in New Orleans in August 1963.
At one point, according to the Washington Post, Oswald even supposedly wrote a letter to a New Orleans clothing store owner offering to secretly “help” the anti-Castro group.
In an interview with the Post, onetime Cuban exile Jose Antonio Lanuza described the letter as a handwritten, two-page rant. He called it just another of many “letters from gringos who wanted to dress up in military garb.”
That might go along with the idea that Oswald felt rejected by the CIA and took revenge on Kennedy.
Or it might mean a renegade CIA has kept even more secrets about Oswald.
Lanuza has told the Miami Herald, a McClatchy Media corporate cousin to the Star-Telegram, how he hoped the files would confirm that the CIA used JFK’s death to gin up demand for an attack on Cuba.
The letter itself has yet to turn up in records.
As it happens, Joannides went on to be appointed to quite a job with the CIA.
In 1978, he was the agency’s liaison to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations.
None of this solves any mysteries in Fort Worth.
But it does raise curiosity about the best-known occupant of Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery.
This is important because Oswald is all around us.
He is at his seven childhood and adult addresses all over south and west Fort Worth and Benbrook.
He is in the elementary schools where students whisper, “Did you know he went to our school?”
He is on Camp Bowie Boulevard, where he went to elementary school in third grade, lived a half-block down Collinwood Avenue as a Heights student and later came back to rest in a funeral home on the corner at Halloran Street.
He is on Carroll Street, where he and Marina lived in a now-gone duplex on Mercedes Street. He walked to work on North Vacek Street off what is now Westside Drive.
He is on East Lancaster Avenue, where late Star-Telegram reporters Jerry Flemmons and Jon McConal were among those pressed into service by Fort Worth Police Chief Cato Hightower as pallbearers to carry Oswald’s casket to the grave.
Two pastors scheduled to preach both canceled. A Disciples of Christ pastor, the Rev. Louis Saunders, had to step up and fill in.
“We’re not here to judge,” Saunders told the family and a smattering of onlookers.
“We’re here to lay this man away into the hands of an understanding God.”
When the day came to an end, the mysteries were only beginning.
This story was originally published November 20, 2025 at 11:05 AM.
