Secrecy adds to mistrust of government

WASHINGTON — Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy 40 years ago this week. But unwise federal secrecy with documents about that assassination helped kill — or, at least, deeply wound — Americans' trust in their government.

That was the conclusion of a speech last week by Utah State University President Kermit L. Hall, who is a historian, to the National Archives.

He's an expert on the JFK assassination because he was on a commission that Congress set up in the mid-1990s to sift through 4.5 million documents about it and release as much as possible. Pressure for that came after the 1991 hit movie "JFK" by Oliver Stone suggested the government itself conspired to kill Kennedy.

After going through all those documents — and helping to release 99.8 percent of them, and order the rest released by 2017 — Hall says the JFK movie's theories are flat wrong. But he sees how unwarranted government secrecy fueled them and others.

It's a speech I wish all federal officials would read. Secrecy leads to imagination that is worse than the truth, even when truth is bad. It destroys trust. For example, ask Utahns if they trust anything the federal government says about chemical, germ and nuclear testing in their state. I bet few do.

Secrecy, often unwarranted, is a big reason why. Utahns had to fight for decades for data about such tests through the Freedom of Information Act, and what we found was often bad. But the constant secrecy made us imagine that even worse information still lurked.

Hall said that in the case of JFK documents, secrecy made what were actually innocuous documents look bad — and fuel bizarre conspiracy theories.

For example, he showed a Dec. 16, 1963, FBI document as originally released through the Freedom of Information Act. It was entirely blacked out, except for the date and place.

"If you're a researcher and you look at this document, what do you conclude? You immediately conclude that the explanation for the murder of John F. Kennedy is behind those redactions," he said.

But it merely reported a cocktail party in Wheeling, W.Va., where members of the American Communist Party disclaimed any ties to the assassination to potential recruits.

Hall said the reason the FBI had blacked out everything was that it showed that five of the 10 people in attendance were FBI operatives, and that would reveal how deeply the FBI had infiltrated the Communist Party. But he said enough of it could have been released to show that the document had little to do with the assassination.