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Congressman who befriended JFK: Document release won’t stop theories

by Molly K. Hooper - 10/26/17 6:19 PM ET

A long-serving congressman who befriended John F. Kennedy during the civil rights movement six decades ago said Thursday he doesn’t believe the release of the last secret documents about the 35th president’s assassination will end questions about his death.

“I think there will be people — be historians or scholars and writers — [who] would raise some questions about what happened and how it happened,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) told The Hill.

“There will be people saying, like they were saying 50 years ago, ‘Why did [Kennedy] go to Texas, why Dallas?”

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Lewis was a young civil rights worker and protege of the late Martin Luther King Jr. when he began corresponding with Kennedy. He recounted the last time he met with Kennedy and King a few months before Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination in Dallas.

The date was Aug. 28, 1963, when Lewis, then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, met with the nation’s young president shortly after a successful March on Washington.

“[Kennedy] was very proud and pleased that everything had gone so well, and he got to Dr. King he said ‘you did a good job and you had a dream,’ that was the last time I saw President Kennedy,” Lewis said.

When Kennedy was gunned down a few months later, the congressman said, “Like so many others, especially those of us in the movement, we didn’t know what to believe, we feared for the future.”

The Georgia lawmaker said he has accepted the findings of the Warren Commission, whose report declared that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill Kennedy.

Lewis’s comments came Thursday as the Trump administration moved to release thousands of previously classified documents about the assassination.

Tags Assassination of John F. Kennedy John F. Kennedy John F. Kennedy John Lewis John Lewis Lee Harvey Oswald