Hall says JFK work was his most important ever
Utah State University President Kermit Hall encouraged audience members at the annual Library Week lecture Wednesday to take a look at the information at the John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection in the National Archives if they are interested in solving the mystery surrounding the former president’s murder.
From 1995 to 1998, Hall was a member of the five-person John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency that was created to locate and review documents related to Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
The product of the board’s work is a collection of 6 million records in the National Archives, and the promise that any postponed records defined as assassination-related will be open to the public by 2017.
“The single most important thing I’ve done in my life is making this information available so the public can go to the library and find out what they believe for themselves,” Hall said.
Hall focused his lecture on the information the board uncovered concerning the “secret state” that operated during the Cold War. That topic is the reason the Kennedy archive is the busiest archive in the national library, Hall said.
“How many of you believe that President Kennedy was murdered through a conspiracy that involved the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Mafia, Cuba and Soviet Agents?” Hall asked audience members. He said that was what almost all students at the high schools the board visited as part of its research believed.
Hall attributed the conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s assassination to the 1991 film “JFK” by director Oliver Stone, which Hall calls “a great work of fiction.”
“It’s crucial that you understand why so much material was not disclosed at the time of the assassination. You must appreciate that the assassination occurred at the apogee of the Cold War,” Hall said.
Hall said even the Warren Administration, which investigated the assassination under President Lyndon Johnson, was not made privy to many of the documents the board uncovered. That was because a lot the information related to the murder risked intelligence operations, military and national defense and the safety and privacy of government officials and informants, Hall said.
Hall pointed to examples in the photocopied packet of selected documents that each audience member received.
A top-secret memo from the Chief of Staff of the United States Army in 1963 lists, “Ideas to Exploit Cuban Vulnerabilities.” Idea No. 2 suggests the government could “remove Castro and/or other key political leaders by assassination, kidnapping, bribery or by placing a bounty on them.”
Hall explained this type of document might lead some people to believe that Fidel Castro would have reason to kill the president because the United States was attempting to do the same in Cuba.
Other documents that were also secret before the board opened them pointed to Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone when he shot Kennedy, Hall said.
“The Kennedy assassination industry was fueled in part by the absence of information and fueled in part by the resistance of government agencies to [answer questions],” Hall said.
Hall said the American people have a right to be interested in what their government is doing.
But, he said, “secrecy does have a legitimate role in our society. One of the greatest quests of our society is to come to terms with [that fact].”
A government does not need to disclose certain things when a security issue takes precedence over freedom of information, Hall said.
“Think about what’s going on in China, and you can quickly grasp the issues here,” Hall said.
At least six appeals were made to the president from the ARRB’s request for certain pieces of information, and the board won in all six cases.
Hall related several examples of federal agencies resisting the openness of documents, including an incident when the former man in charge of CIA South American operations set his revolver on the table of the ARRB’s meeting and said, “People like you are going to get a lot of good Americans killed.”