WASHINGTON _ Half-a-dozen 2017 releases of long-secret documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have given plenty of new leads to those who don't believe alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
President Donald Trump promised via Twitter this fall that all the JFK assassination documents will be public by the end of April 2018 "to put any and all conspiracies to rest."
Instead, the 34,963 documents released so far in 2017 have fed the fire tended by researchers and others who believe there is much more to the story how a U.S. president was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago.
"To this point, as expected, we haven't had a document that lists the conspirators in the murder of President Kennedy," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and author of "The Kennedy Half Century." "What we have gotten is a lot of rich material, not just about the Kennedy assassination but the times."
It was a 1991 movie, Oliver Stone's "JFK," that led Congress to require the secret documents to be released more than two decades later after they were reviewed for national security purposes and to protect past informants. The film, which challenged the official version of the assassination, brought conspiracy theorists into the mainstream and led other Americans to question the official version of events.
McClatchy's Washington bureau, the Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have pored over thousands of newly released JFK documents. Here are some of the new or bolstered leads revealed thus far by the new material.
