Rex Bradford of the Mary Ferrell Foundation made some important points about the JFK files in this conversation with Jeff Schectman of WhoWhatWhy Radio.
Bradford on the sheer volume of the JFK historical record.
5,000,000 pages in the JFK collection of the National Archives, which is a whole lot for a murder supposedly carried out by some guy in a window in a building.
On what public pressure has wrought:
the good news is, we’re approaching the point where what’s being redacted are what was sort of touted all along as being the reason, like agent or informant names, name of a person in a foreign government or would be embarrassing to the CIA just to acknowledge a liaison, that sort of thing. We’re not there yet. But it’s being reduced to a smaller collection of withheld information than where we were even a few months ago
On what we have learned from the new files:
a big misconception people might have is that this thing [JFK’s assassination] was honestly investigated, or at least semi-honestly investigated in the first place, and I think that’s the biggest thing that these documents have proven to be false, that both major investigations, the House Committee as well as the Warren Commission, basically were set up not to find out the truth.
How the truth might emerge:
I know a very wise person named Peter Dale Scott that some of your listeners may know of, and way back when he wrote Deep Politics and the Death of JFK in the early ’90s before all these declassifications, he put in the preface of that book that first of all the government records will tell us more about pre-assassination intelligence operations and post-assassination coverup than they do about the murder conspiracy itself. But he wrote that, quote, “This oblique path of the truth about the murder is the best hope which the documents give us.” And I think that’s been born out in spades.
The still-secret JFK files are themselves a clue to what the U.S. government seeks to hide.
the more of these documents come out, the more pattern emergence of what should be there and is missing. And those are actually interesting clues for the murder.