Is it not a little strange that the assassination files which have been withheld from the American public across eleven administrations, four wars, and the entire run of Meet the Press, have suddenly, this week, become the sort of thing a president can declassify between lunch and a helicopter ride? I am only asking. I am, as ever, simply putting the question on the table and stepping back while the rest of the commentariat clears its throat and pretends it was about to say the same thing.
At dinner Friday at Eliza’s, before the soup was even cleared, a bipartisan lobbyist I have known for twenty years and will not name because he still has to lobby set down his fork and said, quite calmly, “They were always going to release them. The only question was which president would be bored enough to sign the order.” Eliza, who has a framed letter from Sargent Shriver on her powder-room wall and does not joke about the Kennedys, put her napkin down and said nothing. That was the most damning part. In thirty years in this town I have learned to read the Washington silence, and Friday’s was the kind that means he’s right and we all know it.
So let us actually ask the question, out loud, the way adults are supposed to. If the files on the killings of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. could be released by executive order on a Thursday in January of 2025 — a slow Thursday, incidentally, sandwiched between a TikTok stunt and a birthright-citizenship injunction — then what precisely was the argument for sitting on them in 1978? In 1992? In 2017, when the last president to promise their release performed the peculiar magic trick of releasing them while not releasing them?
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives longer than some of the boxes have existed, once told me that the most carefully protected documents in the federal government are almost never the ones you would guess. “The truly sensitive material,” she said, stirring her tea with the grim patience of a civil servant who has watched four administrations lose the same keys, “is sensitive because of who is embarrassed, not because of who is endangered.” I have thought about that sentence for ten years. I am thinking about it harder this week.
Because let us be honest about the class of person who has spent six decades insisting these files must remain sealed for the good of the Republic. They are not, by and large, the widows. They are not the children who grew up without fathers. They are not the Memphis sanitation workers or the Ambassador Hotel busboy or the millions of Americans who simply wanted to know what their own government knew and when. They are, almost to a person, men who rose through agencies that have since been renamed, restructured, and in two cases mercifully dissolved. They are men protecting reputations of men who are already dead. And we indulged them. For sixty-one years, we indulged them.
I do not know what is in the files. Neither, I suspect, do the breathless people on cable this week assuring us it will be everything or nothing. What I know is that the American public has been told, on a rolling basis across my entire adult life, that it is not yet ready to see what was done in its name. I am sixty-seven years old. I covered three presidencies as a staffer before I ever wrote a column. At what age, exactly, does the country graduate from the children’s table?
There is a particular Washington cowardice at work here, and it is worth naming it because nobody else will. It is the cowardice of the career official who believes the public cannot be trusted with the truth, and the cowardice of the elected official who agrees because disagreeing would require him to actually read the file. It is the cowardice of the think-tank fellow who writes four thousand words on “institutional trust” without once conceding that institutions earn trust by telling the truth on Tuesday instead of hoarding it until Thursday. I have sat across from these men at more dinners than I care to count. They order the fish.
And I notice — I am just noticing, you understand — that the order came down the same week the administration declared a kind of shock-and-awe on the federal workforce, the same week a judge had to remind the executive branch that the Fourteenth Amendment is, in fact, still there, the same week a billionaire’s cost-cutting task force began gleefully circling agencies whose records rooms would be, shall we say, of considerable historical interest. Is it paranoid to wonder whether the declassification is the meal, or the garnish, or the thing being waved in one hand while the other hand is doing something else entirely? I am, as always, just asking.
Eliza said something else Friday night that I keep turning over. She said that her father, who knew Bobby, used to say that the cruelest trick the government ever played on the grieving was not killing the men. The men were killed by the men who killed them. The cruelest trick was convincing three generations of Americans that knowing how and why was a privilege to be earned, rather than a right to be exercised. I do not know if her father actually said that. I know Eliza well enough to know that if he didn’t, he should have.
So here is the question I will leave you with, and I will leave it unsoftened, because softening is how we got here. If a president can declassify these files on a whim in 2025, then every president who refused to do so between 1963 and now made a choice. Not a necessity. A choice. And the country they made that choice on behalf of — the country that was told, over and over, that it could not handle the truth — deserves to know which of its leaders decided it couldn’t, and what exactly they thought we might do if we found out.
We are about to find out a great many things this year. We are about to find out, I suspect, things about our own government that will make the careful custodians of the postwar consensus wish they had retired earlier. I am not celebrating. I am not mourning. I am watching a door open that should have been opened decades ago by braver people, and I am asking, quietly and without any particular hope of an answer, what else is behind the doors we are still being told not to touch.