The Assassination Records Review Board

The Board consisted of five citizens trained in history, archives and law who were not government employees but could order agencies to declassify records. The 1992 law gave it three years; delays in appointing it meant 18 months had already passed, and its work was extended to four. [1]

Its report lists what it did: it reviewed and voted on more than 27,000 previously redacted records and got agencies to release more than 33,000 more. It ensured the Zapruder film “belonged to the American people” and arranged the first known authenticity study of it. It released 99 percent of the Hardway/Lopez report on Oswald in Mexico City. It recorded a three-day interview with FBI agent James Hosty. It found the original notes of Oswald’s interrogation taken by Hosty and Dallas police captain Will Fritz, which had been thought not to exist. It deposed 10 people from the Bethesda autopsy and five Parkland doctors. [1]

Its legacy, it said, was “more than four million pages of records” in the National Archives. [1]

The Board reported that in January 1995, after the JFK Act had passed and while the Secret Service was supposedly complying with it, the Service destroyed presidential protection survey reports for some of Kennedy’s trips in the autumn of 1963. The Board learned of it about a week later. It thought the records would have been relevant and asked the Service to explain; the Service did so in letters and a briefing. For the Secret Service’s performance in Dallas, see the Secret Service file. [1]