Into the Heart of Darkness: Reckoning with the “Deep State” of the Kennedy Era in Light of the Complete Release of the JFK Assassination Records

By the time of the next AHA meeting, it is highly likely that the few remaining documents and sections of documents still withheld under the JFK Assassination Records program will be publicly available because of the Trump JFK/MLK/RFK declassification Executive Order. For most scholars, understandably, this collection may seem like a collection of rabbit holes without any larger historical significance

This paper seeks to explain, from the perspective of an historian of the Kennedy presidency and of the international affairs of that era, the important new insights that these materials have brought on the use of the intelligence community by John F. Kennedy, especially his energetic use of covert action. These insights strengthen the argument that rather than being its victim, John F. Kennedy was a master of the institutions that some call “The Deep State.”

The materials should form the basis of a set of new questions about how the NSC policy of “plausible deniability,” which was how the Executive Branch from the Truman presidency onwards sought to cloak covert action, produced the unintended and toxic consequences of encouraging conspiracy theories and mistrust in government.

The paper will discuss the larger historical significance of the collection, besides its status being an important barometer of official transparency, and will seek to explain why these materials took so long to reach the public in an unredacted form and why their greatest historical contributions come not from any long-withheld documents on the events in Dallas in November 1963 but from other documents swept up in the investigation of conspiracies—CIA, Cuban, Soviet, Organized Crime-- alleged to be behind Lee Harvey Oswald.