President Donald Trump’s executive order to declassify all remaining documents pertaining to the 1963 assassination has attracted considerable attention from the popular media. Timothy Naftali contends that serious historians should also examine the documents, but for different reasons. The so-called Deep State did not murder the president; it would have had no reason to do so. Instead, Kennedy had employed the Deep State in cover actions abroad, as the documents indicate. No study of JFK can be complete if it excludes the intelligence apparatus inherited from his predecessors of the early Cold War.

By resisting the calls by his generals to bomb the Soviet missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president effectively averted nuclear war. Yet, Lubna Qureshi suggests that if Kennedy had taken a purely diplomatic approach, the United States would not have approached radioactive conflict as closely as it did. Before the imposition of a naval quarantine against Cuba, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council probably did not fully consider all options.

Although Jeremy Kuzmarov credits Kennedy for his backchannel diplomacy with the Soviet Union and, and to some extent, with Cuba, he takes the president to task for his opposition to nationalist movements in countries such as Vietnam, the Congo, and Cuba itself. Kennedy, according to Kuzmarov, was in many ways a traditional Cold War conservative.

Historical defenders of Kennedy, like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., praised the Alliance for Progress, the president’s new policy toward Latin America. This praise still seems warranted. Élodie Giraudier suggests that the president conducted productive diplomacy with Chile in particular. Kennedy persuaded Chilean President Jorge Alessandri, who had declined to support sanctions against Castro’s Cuba, to join the anti-Communist Alliance for Progress. Nevertheless, Alessandri also supported the U.S. response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This panel would inspire more substantial scholarly debate.