One week after the latest JFK archive release, the question everyone keeps asking is also the wrong one: Is there a smoking gun? Veteran journalist Jefferson Morley has spent decades inside these records, and his answer remains stubbornly consistent. History, he insists, does not reveal itself through cinematic confessions or neatly labeled villains. It emerges through patterns—through contradictions, silences, and decisions that refuse to make sense unless power itself is the missing variable.

The newly released documents do not rewrite the story of November 22, 1963 in a single stroke. Instead, they do something far more dangerous: they clarify it.

At the center of this new clarity is a memo that remained hidden for more than six decades. Written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, the document exposes a level of fury and distrust between Kennedy and the CIA that had long been rumored but never fully proven. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy was livid. He believed the CIA had manipulated him, had attempted to impose its own foreign policy over that of an elected president. In a moment of rage, he famously told a journalist he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

The memo explains why.

Schlesinger warned Kennedy that the CIA had embedded itself deeply inside the machinery of American diplomacy. Nearly half of U.S. political officers stationed overseas were, in fact, CIA operatives under official cover. In Paris alone, over a hundred CIA officers worked inside the American embassy. This was not intelligence gathering—it was policy control. The agency was no longer advising presidents; it was shaping outcomes.

The memo recounts a chilling episode in France: an attempted coup against President Charles de Gaulle. On the night the coup unfolded, lights burned late into the upper floors of the U.S. Embassy—where the CIA station was located. De Gaulle never believed the CIA’s denials. When he later survived an assassination attempt, his suspicions hardened. Kennedy knew these stories. He understood what they implied. And for the remainder of his presidency, his relationship with the CIA was defined by mistrust.

That mistrust now frames the second—and arguably more explosive—revelation from the archives.

Lee Harvey Oswald was not a mystery.

For four years before Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald was known to a small group of senior CIA counterintelligence officers. Forty-two documents, spanning 180 pages, now show that the agency tracked Oswald across continents. From his defection to the Soviet Union, to his return to the United States, to his movements through New Orleans, Mexico City, and Dallas, Oswald was never lost. At multiple points, top CIA officials knew his home address.

This fact alone shatters the myth of Oswald as an obscure, unstable loner who slipped through the cracks. The cracks, it turns out, were under surveillance.

James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary—and deeply feared—chief of counterintelligence, personally maintained an extensive file on Oswald. Angleton was not careless. He was obsessive. Paranoid. Revered by allies and loathed by critics, he was widely considered one of the most formidable intelligence minds of the Cold War. And yet, for reasons never adequately explained, Angleton devoted years of attention to a man the public was later told did not matter.

The newly released documents reveal something even more troubling: Angleton lied under oath to investigators after Kennedy’s death. He denied knowledge of Oswald’s involvement in CIA-linked projects—claims that now appear demonstrably false. Two FBI reports detailing Oswald’s recent activities in Dallas landed on Angleton’s desk just days before Kennedy traveled there. No explanation has ever been offered.

When intelligence officials lie during a homicide investigation involving a president, incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation.

The story grows darker with Jack Ruby.

Ruby’s execution of Oswald on live television was described by the Warren Commission as an act of spontaneous patriotism. Yet Ruby was deeply embedded in organized crime—connections the commission carefully minimized. Those who knew him best told a different story. Ruby worked for people. He followed orders. And according to multiple accounts from within the criminal underworld, silencing Oswald was understood as a necessary step.

Oswald, it seems, was never supposed to survive.

His arrest created a crisis. A man under CIA observation for years was now in custody, alive, and capable of talking. Ruby solved that problem. Whatever larger forces were in motion, organized crime’s role appears brutally simple: eliminate the witness.

What followed was not just a cover-up, but a course correction in American history.

President Lyndon B. Johnson moved swiftly. Within days of the assassination, he insisted the investigation conclude Oswald acted alone—before the investigation had even begun. Johnson later confided that he did not believe the Warren Commission’s findings. Neither did Richard Nixon. Secret recordings reveal Nixon’s fear of confronting the intelligence agencies. He believed they were capable of destroying him.

That belief changed how presidents governed.

When Kennedy died without accountability, Morley argues, American power shifted. The national security apparatus emerged untouchable. Wars expanded. Secrecy hardened. The United States drifted toward what Kennedy himself had warned against: a Pax Americana enforced by covert power rather than democratic consent.

This, ultimately, is why the assassination still matters.

Not because it fuels conspiracies—but because unresolved truth breeds distrust. The CIA’s refusal to fully comply with declassification orders today only deepens that wound. Secrecy, once justified in the name of security, has instead become a corrosive force—undermining faith in institutions and empowering cynicism across the political spectrum.

The JFK story now unites unlikely allies. On the left, it resonates with anti-war idealism and the memory of a president who sought détente over domination. On the right, it speaks to suspicion of entrenched bureaucracies and foreign entanglements. Different language, same unease.

History did not end in Dallas. It fractured there.

And as more documents emerge, one thing becomes increasingly clear: the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not just a crime. It was a turning point—and America has been living with the consequences ever since.