Long-sealed JFK Assassination Files Won't End Conspiracy Talk

WASHINGTON — As the National Archives awaits final word from President Donald Trump on which Kennedy assassination files to release Thursday, one scholar who's already looked at the material sealed for 54 years says there's nothing to contradict the official conclusion: one shooter, acting alone."Count on it, there's no one else," said Hank Graff, a retired Columbia University historian. "We weren't the Warren Commission but we read so many of these documents, and you must know that Lee Harvey Oswald is the sole assassin."Graff, now 96, was one of five members of the Assassination Records Review Board, the panel created by Congress in 1992 to dig through nearly 5 million pages on the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and assess which to keep classified for another quarter century.The deadline to unseal all remaining files is Thursday, unless the president — who happens to be spending Wednesday afternoon in Dallas to raise campaign funds — deems them a threat to national security, intelligence gathering or foreign relations.Like many serious scholars, Graff is resigned to seeing conspiracy chatter persist. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has long pushed the idea that Texan Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice president, was part of the plot because he wanted to become president.It's nonsense, said Graff, who wrote a book on Johnson."I spent days with him in the White House. Don't you ever doubt that he was scared to be president and had nothing to do with the assassination. ... Don't believe it," he said. "We don't want to believe that there are nuts out there, or that history is full of accidents. We have to think that there was a conspiracy in the government."  Continue reading...