Collection History | jfkarc.info

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC) was established by Congress in 1992, through Public Law 102-526, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, or the JFK Act for short.¹

The goal of the JFK Act is to preserve, “for historical and governmental purposes,” all governmental records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

To achieve this goal, the Act designated the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to create and hold the JFKARC.

The Act also established a limited term agency, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to oversee the assembly of the collection and the release of classified material in collection records. The Board operated from 1994 to 1998, and is the subject of several notes on this blog.²

Understanding the history of the Collection is important for understanding the Collection’s overall content and current state. It is also an interesting and significant part of the deep and continuing influence that the assassination has had on United States history and politics.

The description of the Collection’s history below is based primarily on the Board’s records and Final Report.³ (A separate page on the ARRB and its role in shaping the ARC is coming soon.)

The JFK Act: round one

Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK is often cited as the primary reason for the passage of the JFK Act.⁴ In fact, a close reading of Congressional hearings on the Act shows that Congress was motivated by a number of reasons.

The timing of the hearings in 1992, however, certainly reflected the release of Stone’s movie. The first Congressional resolutions calling for release of documents from the assassination investigations were introduced in early January 1992, when JFK was still playing in theaters.⁵ These resolutions were short on specifics of the records to be released and means of releasing them.

The first proposals for systematic review and release of JFK assassination documents came in mid-January. Representative Louis Stokes, former chairman of the HSCA, and Senator David Boren, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence both told reporters they favored release of assassination investigation files.⁶

An important boost to review and release came from former President Gerald Ford, the last living member of the Warren Commission, who called for release of the Commission’s remaining classified documents in a letter to House leaders in late January. The remaining Warren Commission staff lawyers immediately endorsed Ford’s call in their own open letter.⁷

Further impetus toward review and release came from the CIA and FBI, the two agencies with the most substantial number of unreleased assassination records.

In late February, Acting Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates announced the formation of a CIA Historical Research Group (HRG) to handle declassification of records relating to major historical events, including the Guatemalan coup d’etat and the Bay of Pigs invasion as well as the JFK assassination.⁸ By mid-September, the HRG released a redacted version of the first half of CIA files on JFK assassin Lee Oswald.

In mid-March, FBI director William Sessions also announced the formation of an FBI Historical and Executive Research Unit that would examine and open files from major cases, including the JFK assassination investigation.⁹

The JFK Act: round two

On March 26, 1992, Congressmen Stokes and Boren followed through on their earlier statements by sponsoring a joint resolution to establish the Collection and Board.¹⁰ Unlike earlier resolutions, this one went into careful detail on records and means of release.

House hearings on the resolution began on April 28, before the Subcommittee on Legislation and National Security of the Committee on Government Operations (CGO). Senate hearings were held before the Committee on Government Affairs on May 12.¹¹

The hearing statements and appendices are interesting reflections of the state of the assassination debate at the time. The hearings also produced reports on the legislation which provide useful summaries of the status of assassination records prior to the passage of the Act.¹²

The eventual result of the hearings was two different versions of the Act in the House and Senate. A key difference between these was that the House version, championed by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jack Brooks, had the Assassination Record Review Board appointed by a judicial panel under the independent counsel act. The Senate version had the Board nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

The Senate version of the Act was passed on July 27. With time running out in the legislative session, the House finally dropped its own version and passed the Senate bill on September 30.¹³ The Act was signed into law by President George Bush on October 26, 1992.

Establishing the Collection

The establishment and early history of the Collection followed the timetable and procedures set out in the JFK Act. Acting U.S. Archivist Dr. Trudy Peterson gave a short but clear description of these in a House oversight hearing a year after the Act’s passage. ¹⁴

The Act first required NARA to design standard identification forms for each document in the Collection within 45 days of the Act’s passage, and to establish an electronic database providing indexing and access to the identification forms. The government agencies and offices holding assassination records were responsible for inputting the forms electronically.

This part of establishing the Collection involved many meetings and notices and training sessions for the rather Rube Goldberg-ish software and system which NARA developed. The Kennedy Assassination Records database and data collection system was officially established as required by the Act on December 10, 1992.¹⁵

The document identification forms created for this system are referred to as Reader Identification Forms (RIF). The database created from the RIFs is now dubbed the Assassination Collection Reference System (ACRS).¹⁶

The final step was to establish the Collection on December 28, 1992 by announcement in the Federal Register.¹⁷ As Acting Archivist Peterson observed, this was simply a “technical act” which defined NARA’s open records on the assassination as a collection.¹⁸ These records included:

Records of the Warren Commission (363 cu. ft).
Secret Service records (11,000 pages)
Department of Justice Criminal Division Case File (65,000 pages)
the first part of the CIA’s 201 (Personality) file on Lee Harvey Oswald (22,000 pages)
Personal papers and donated materials in the Presidential library system

Following the establishment of the ARC, NARA began accepting assassination related records from government agencies which had gone through the tedious and time-consuming job of filling out the identification aids. The Act set a 300 day deadline to turn these records over to NARA, on August 23, 1993.

Materials added to the collection during this period included documents from the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), the State Department, the Justice Department, addition documents from the CIA including the remainder of the CIA 201 file on Oswald, and approximately 12 cubit feet of material from NARA itself. According to Peterson’s oversight testimony, as of November 1993, approximately 840 cubic feet was open in the collection, with 66,000 records listed in the database.¹⁹

Expanding the collection, 1995-1998

The progress of the collection can be traced during this period through several reports to the Board from Steve Tilley, the archivist in charge of the ARC, and also NARA liaison to the ARRB.²⁰

By December 1994, in a report to the Board, Tilley estimated that the total collection size was now 1500 cubit feet. The large increase came primarily from two sources: 1) 70,000 pages of CIA documents released in September 1994. Among the documents the CIA supplied to the HSCA were 72 rolls of microfilm which CIA reviewers printed out to determine which were assassination related. This release represented about half of the total pages on microfilm.²¹ 2)

An even bigger boost came from the FBI files on Oswald and the assassination. The FBI had missed the August deadline for submitting its records to NARA. It was only in December that it deposited the huge HQ file on Oswald.

Further collection growth under the ARRB came in two directions. Documents continued to come in from the HSCA “segregated collections” held by the FBI and CIA. Second, the ARRB identified areas where it requested the FBI, CIA, and other selected agencies to make further record searches outside the segregated collections.

The actual deposition and cataloging of the segregated collections was a very labor intensive process, and both the FBI and especially the CIA were left with a great deal of material not yet processed when the ARRB reached the end of its term in September 1998. According to the ARRB’s final report, an estimated 4.5 million pages of material were designated as part of the collection by the Board. This did not include the Board’s own records. These became part of the collection as required by the JFK Act, with the vast majority, approximately 400,000 pages, opened to the public in November 1998.²²

Footnotes

1
The ARC is thus one of the few archival collections in the U.S. created by public law. One of the few other examples of such a collection is the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018 (see here).
2
See the blog’s ARRB category
3
Copies of the Final Report are available at NARA (here) and the Mary Ferrell Foundation (here).
4
See the ARRB Final Report,p. xii. Also see Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, endnote to page 379, which gives several other relevant citations.
5
See the ARRB Final Report, p. 12, endnote 22 (here).
6
See Clifford Krauss, “Move to Unseal the Kennedy Files.” New York Times, January 22, 1992, p. A1 and “Boren Seeks Opening of Assassination Papers,” Washington Post, January 22, 1992, p. A22.
7
See ARRB Final Report, p. 6 (here). The statements from Stokes, Ford, and the WC staff all included strongly negative commentary on Stone’s movie; their support for release of the JFK documents was at least in part because they felt that the documents rebutted Stone’s inaccurate portrayal of the assassination and investigations.
8
Reference forthcoming.
9
Reference forthcoming.
10
Adam Clymer, “Widely Backed Bill Would Open Most Records on Kennedy Killing”, New York Times, March 27, 1992.
11
There were actually multiple House hearings. A second hearing before the House CGO was held on May 15. The Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law of the House Judiciary Committee also held a hearing on the resolution on May 20. This led to a third hearing before the Subcommittee on Legislation and National Security on July 22.
12
Records of Congressonal hearings and reports on the JFK Act are available online at the Hathitrust website.
13
The legislative history of the act is summarized in the ARRB Final Report, pp. 6-7 (here).
14
This is available in “The Effectiveness of Public Law 102-526, The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992: A Hearing Before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives November 17, 1993. See also p. 135 of the Hearings.
15
Notice was published in the Federal Register on December 15 (57 FR 59362).
16
The ACRS is usually available online at NARA (here), but is now off-line undergoing maintenance. I have done a number of notes on the RIF identification aids and the ACRS; a partial list of these is available here.
17
Acting Archivist Peterson’s statement says the announcement was published in the Register on December 21, but it was actually published on December 24 (57 FR 61461), available here.
18
Peterson’s comments and the list below come from p. 14 of the House oversight hearings.
19
The figures comes from Peterson’s testimony at the House oversight hearings, pp. 18-19.
20
A list of Board meetings, and links to the transcripts for some of the meetings, is available here. There are a number of other sources documenting the growth of the collection and release of the documents in it. The electronic records of the ARRB, released in 2017-2018, have extensive documentation on the process. I have a note on these records here.
21
See the page on collection content (here) for more on these complex files.
22
There is a NARA press release on the transfer and opening of Board records here.