With President Trump’s order to release files on JFK’s death, consider my 1983 ABC NEWS report on public concerns back then that The Feds were hiding the truth

By Peter Lance March 18th 2025 ABC News reports that Trump’s promise to release thousands of declassified pages on the JFK assassination had sent the DOJ’s National Security Division into a “scramble.”

Trump’s revelation Monday came weeks after the NYT reported that, “President Trump told security agencies to develop plans to make public all documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”  Jr.

In light of that story and the 2022 release by The National Archives of new files on the assassination of JFK, I share this piece that I produced and reported on the 20th anniversary of his death when I was a correspondent for ABC NEWS NIGHTLINE. You can screen it on

YOUTUBE.

During the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, I spent more than a month reading the entire Warren Commission Report and every book on the subject to report on the aftermath of  “the crime of the century.”

Initially, only a small percentage of the public believed in a conspiracy to kill the President, but 20 years later, the number had grown to 80% as illustrated in this graph.

That came following a series of scandals beginning with Watergate, followed by blockbuster disclosures from House and Senate committees re: multiple CIA plots to use The Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. That evidence was intentionally withheld from the Warren Commission, even though CIA Director Allen Dulles was a Commission member.

Other evidence relating to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was hidden from the Commission by J. Edgar Hoover and various FBI agents.

By 1968, following the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy the public became even more skeptical and the word “conspiracy” was woven into the fabric of recent American history.

From Irish statesman Edmund Burke to Spanish philosopher George Santayana to Winston Churchill, each of them made a prediction that amplifies the significance of The January 6th Committee’s groundbreaking disclosures: “Those who forget history are destined to relive it.”