Anthony Summers - Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

A fter fifty years, does the assassination of President Kennedy still matter? It is now as far from us in time as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was for people living during World War I. Nevertheless, the murder still haunts America and the wider world. For those who were adults at the time, the killing of President Kennedy is a generational milestone. For those much younger, what happened in Dallas persists as a spectral presence even in this new century.

There are multiple reasons why the assassination lingers in the public mind. No other death of a single individualand one so young, embodying the hopes of a new generationso traumatized an era. It stays with us in part because John F. Kennedy was killed during the Cold War, at a time when nuclear war seemed a real and constant threat; and in part, too, because November 22, 1963, signaled an end to the sense of cozy security of the previous decade, the waning of public trust in authority. Above all, though, the assassination stays with us because of a perception by millions around the world that there is a mysterythat the full truth of what happened remains unknown.

The idea that the murder of the 35th President of the United States was the result of a conspiracy, not the act of a lone assassin, was there from the start. Who might have been behind such a plot depended on a persons political view, on what they read, on what broadcast made an impression at any given time. Had one or both of Americas Communist foes, the Soviet Union or its upstart protg Cuba, had a hand in the assassination? Had anti-Castro exiles killed Kennedy? Or the Mafia? Or the CIA, or the military industrial complex? Or two or more of the above combined?

What the polls have consistently shown is that millions do not believe what the official inquiry that followed the assassination, the Warren Commission, told them happenedthat a loner named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had no known motive, killed the President. 74 percent of those Americans polled in a January 2013 study believedto the contrarythat there had been a conspiracy. A 2009 CBS poll put the figure as high as 76 percent. 74 percent of respondents, according to the same poll, believed there had been an official cover-up to keep the public from learning the truth about the assassination. The vast majority, 77 percent, thought the full truth would never be known.

This book was first published three decades ago as Conspiracy , a title deriving not from any fixed view of mine but because a new probe, by the House Assassinations Committee, had found there had probably been a plot. Four editions later, when I updated the book in 1998, a new publisher agreed to the title it now carries Not in Your Lifetime . I should explain.

In early 1964, as the Commission began its work, Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked if all the investigations information would be made public. He replied, Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime [authors emphasis]. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public. Warren was thinking of alleged assassin Oswalds visits to the Soviet Union and Mexico, he explained later, and there may indeed have been national security ramifications at that time.

The Soviet, Mexican, and Cuban aspects of the case certainly were hypersensitive at the timeand in some respects may have implications today. Step by step down the years, however, and to the chagrin of some federal agencies, millions of pages of documents have been released. The JFK Act of 1992more properly the President John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Collection Actbrought an avalanche of material into the public domain.

Fifty years on, however, we do not have it all. Some Army Intelligence and Secret Service records have been destroyed. There are questions about the whereabouts of some Naval Intelligence material. In 2012, the National Archives stated that rather less than its 1 percent of assassination-related recordsout of a total of some five million pageswill not be made public until 2017. It is not clear, and the Archives administration has not counted, just how many documents are actually involved. It is known, though, that the Central Intelligence Agency has withheld 1,171 documents as national security classified. Some of them, we know, are records that researchers very much want to seein particular, documents relating to former CIA officers whose activities have aroused justifiable suspicion.