MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – In 1993, Minneapolis Federal Judge Jack Tunheim was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton to head the assassination records review board with the sole purpose of finding all the secret records.
Five million pages were made public. Most of the records that were still secret were at the CIA.
“So we had a long relationship with them, that was somewhat tense at times, but we released most of the documents that they had,” Tunheim said.
The FBI had a lot of law enforcement records that related to the assassination.
“They fought us for a while,” Tunheim said.
The controversial Oliver Stone movie JFK from a few years earlier prompted the creation of the board.
The FBI had been tailing Lee Harvey Oswald for some time
“They were listening to conversations that Oswald had between the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City. They knew he was up to something,” he said.
Now 50 years after the assassination, there are still many who believe it was a conspiracy, including former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura.
“I’m a judge I deal with real evidence, hard evidence, provable evidence, and it all points to Oswald is the lone shooter,” Tunheim said.
Why do people still have such fascination with his death? Tunheim said the assassination embodies “the sense of the loss of the promise, the expectation, the hopes that people had of a more innocent era.”
