CONSPIRACY WATCH : 29 Steps

The controversy over the recent film “JFK,” whose story line posits a sweeping right-wing conspiracy behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, raises anew old questions of fact and interpretation even as it reminds the thoughtful that some information relating to the tragedy is still being kept in sealed files.

Whether that information would convincingly contradict the basic findings of the Warren Commission in 1964--foremost that a single assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was responsible for the murder and that no evidence of a conspiracy could be found--is problematic. But it is possible that some hitherto unpublished information might at least help resolve some of the inherent ambiguities and contradictions around which, for nearly three decades, conspiracy theories have been spun.

In 1979 a House select committee concluded a two-year investigation into the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., publishing 29 volumes of findings but withholding other files that the House, seeking to protect the innocent from possible defamation, ordered sealed until 2029. Now the chairman of that committee, Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), says he is willing to consider recommending that the secret files be opened. He should do so, and the House should accept the recommendation, subject to proper safeguards of legitimate individual privacy.

The files aren’t the last word on the assassination--there can be no final word in such cases--but they do touch on a matter of vital public interest, where the right to know must be supreme.