Can Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tell us more about the JFK assassination? | Opinion

Sixty-plus years later, we still don't know everything the U.S. government knows about President John F. Kennedy's death on Elm Street.

But we do have a flimsy promise from a busy president-elect and a wigged-out Kennedy nephew.

That is, if the nephew has time between railing against vaccines and for raw milk.

Bobby Kennedy Jr. was 9 and in elementary school when his uncle was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. He was 14 when his father, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated campaigning in Los Angeles.

Now 70, RFK Jr. has grown up as the odd duck of the family, so skeptical of the U.S. government that he joined the bull-returns-to-the-china-shop campaign of President-elect Donald Trump.

Kennedy is "in orbit — who knows what he'll do?" political scientist Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia replied by email.

Trump promised Kennedy on Aug. 23 that he would name a commission to release the 3,000 or so remaining National Archives records on the assassination.

So, he probably won't.

Trump promised the same thing in 2016. But he never finished, and since then, President Joe Biden has released about 17,000 more pages.

This time, though, Trump himself has survived a would-be assassin's bullet. The shooting July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killed a man in the crowd and injured two more.

The remaining documents are only a fraction of what was left after the federal government began opening files to dissuade claims that Kennedy's death involved the CIA, the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, government contractors or others beyond disgruntled U.S. Marines-marksman-turned-defector Lee Harvey Oswald.

In that Cold War era of Soviet and Cuban threats and duck-and-cover drills, Texas was so wrapped up in spies and espionage that it was tough to believe, as CIA Mexico City bureau chief David Atlee Phillips of Fort Worth coyly said, that Oswald was just "kind of a loony fellow who decided to shoot the President."

Oswald had been under surveillance for four years. He defected in 1959 to what is now Belarus and returned in 1962, and that country also holds unreleased records.

But if there were much of a back story to Oswald's specific movements or motive on Nov. 22, 1963, we would have heard by now.

He was killed two days later. Bumbling Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him.

Oswald, a resident of Benbrook and Fort Worth for nine of his 24 years, is buried in what is now Shannon Rose Hill Cemetery in east Fort Worth.

Since we haven't learned anything definitive in 61 years, we probably won't until 2063, Sabato wrote.

"My guess is that the next time we learn anything significant about 11/22/63 and related matters will be in the run-up to 11/22/2063, the 100th anniversary of the assassination," he wrote.

"That assumes we don't know all the relevant toplines already. Everyone who had involvement or even a living memory of the assassination will be dead by then. It will be pure history at that point."

It's clear that Oswald had conversations with intelligence agents in the U.S. and in Mexico City , and that he was upset because nobody would give him a visa to Cuba.

But the Dallas motorcade was not planned until days before Kennedy's visit.

It fatefully took the president past Oswald's perch at what was then the Texas School Book Depository, now the Sixth Floor Museum .

Oswald was able to take his perch on the sixth floor — wide open during a lunchtime motorcade — because TCU trustees had voted Nov. 1 against a proposed late-morning Fort Worth ceremony and giving Kennedy an honorary degree. If not for the schedule change, the Dallas motorcade might not have been extended or happened during Oswald's lunch hour, when the sixth floor was empty.

It's not clear whether there was more to Oswald's story, or how far federal agencies went to destroy assassination records.

Students at the University of Virginia have pored over the records released so far and found "nothing earth-shattering," Sabato said, "but some interesting items that we will publish in time."

Nov. 22 will come and go quietly this year, and probably next.

If there's more story to tell, nobody has told it for 61 years.