Judicial Watch lawsuit seeks 7 JFK records in RFK’s papers

Who says the government can’t keep a JFK secret?

Author Max Holland and the watchdog group Judicial Watch sued the National Archives earlier this month for seven records related to the JFK’s assassination that are held in the unreleased papers of Robert F. Kennedy. Like my lawsuit for CIA JFK records, Holland’s complaint shows the government is very capable of keeping JFK secrets.

A Judicial Watch press release has the details.

The group, which describes itself as “a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, [that] promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law,” filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the National Archives last fall after the Boston Globe reported that the JFK Library was in possession of more than 60 boxes of records from Robert F. Kennedy’s tenure as the U.S. Attorney General.

Judicial Watch says that RFK’s papers include seven records that the Assassination Records Review Board deemed “assassination-related” in the 1990s. These records “include some of the president’s personal records; documents describing Central Intelligence activities in Cuba; a Cuban Information Service message dated 1/26/63 entitled, “THE PLANES THAT WERE NOT THERE;” a State Department incoming cable from Mexico; and a document entitled, “Information on Lincoln Bubble Top Automobile sinse [sic] returning from Dallas.” (A Lincoln Continental with a removable bubble top was the presidential limousine used by President Kennedy.)

“Over a six-year period in the 1990s, the U.S.government spent millions of tax dollars and untold man-hours in an effort to gather in one place all assassination-related documents,” Holland said in the release. “It was and remains outrageous that relevant government documents in the papers of the attorney general at the time are somehow out of reach.”

Holland is controversial among JFK scholars for his ardent defense of the “lone gunman” theory of JFK’s assassination, and for winning a Studies in Intelligence Award from the CIA in 2001, the first writer working outside the US government to be so recognized. But the lawsuit is worthy of support. If he is successful, all JFK researchers and the general public will benefit from records that should have been made public long ago.