Naturally, most comments speculate about embarrassment to people who want to hide our government's stupidity or culpability. One sympathizes; the government seems to generate surpluses of those.
“When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before."
60 years is quite a while. I assume all the most deeply involved players, known and unknown, are either dead or far into at least their 80's and not active movers and shakers any longer. I'd think that close enough for Kipling's rule to apply.
Given that very different presidents were persuaded that there actually were national security interests at stake in revealing all the evidence and ways it was acquired, let's pretend that's true. What sort of reasons could there be?
One obvious reason isn't quite so critical now that the Soviet Union is no more, and since 9/11 told of one limit. Suppose Oswald was closely enough directed from Moscow to lead people to believe this was ordered by the Kremlin. We obviously didn't go to war over that, but we don't want the discussions about that to become public (or even be discussed much)--how much can an enemy get away with before we go big?
Others pointed out that individual spies of the time are no doubt dead, but the channels they used may still exist. It seems unlikely, given the number of moles we've heard about, but weirder things have happened.
Or perhaps it is very simple: the default of generations advisors has been "We might use that method again someday, so keep it secret".
2 comments:
I dropped a comment there, generally along the embarrassment lines.
It escaped me at the time I was commenting but upon reading those on the thread that discussed Russian connections, I was reminded that Oswald also had Cuban connections and tried to defect to Cuba as well but was rebuffed. IIRC he was involved in a group pushing 'fair play for Cuba' around the time of the assassination. It is a long time but I wouldn't be surprised if there could be some concern for long time Cuban assets that might still be living, or their families, or current intelligence operations in Cuba.
I have read the suggestion that the second bullet was accidentally fired by a Secret Service agent. I don't in any way know this to be true, and don't know how likely I think it is. Ross Perot did insist that if he were president he would hire his own security detail and sent the Secret Service off to do other things.
But it is at least an explanation that holds together, that a few people might still be harmed by the story. And vast conspiracies do sometimes turn out to be small, stupid mistakes that could nonetheless get people in trouble.
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