The ARRB

Chairman Tunheim was the first to address the conference. "It's important to us that the Review Board have a good, solid working relationship with the research community," he said at the outset. "These kinds of gatherings give us the opportunity to report to you on what we've been doing for the past year, year-and-a-half.

"Part of our effort, really, is in opening windows and opening doors that have not been open before," Tunheim said. "Sometimes, we need a little extra push, and the research community has been very helpful in giving us that extra push when we needed it, and we thank you very much." This comment drew several laughs, as no doubt it was intended to.

"We've made it a priority to try to keep you informed of what the Review Board is doing, and also to make use of your years of experience, in our search for assassination records. None of us on the Review Board have a great deal of experience with research into the assassination of President Kennedy. We've been working hard in remedying that over the past year.

"I should also note that our funding for this current fiscal year...appears to be secure---if anything can be secure these days in Congress. I do want to thank all of you who spoke out on our behalf when things were a little bit more in doubt earlier this year," he said, referring to a coordinated effort by the research community in response to threatened funding cuts by GOP leaders in June. "Having our funding at least relatively secure for the second of our three years of existence is a source of great comfort to us."

Tunheim reviewed the ARRB's structure and purpose: The Board was created by the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. It is an independent, five-member panel with the mandate and the authority to identify and make available all records related to the assassination of President Kennedy. "It's up to the Board to determinations about which records are to be made public immediately, and which ones will have postponed release dates," Tunheim said. "The purpose of the law and of the Board's work is to provide a full record to the American public, to make that record available at the National Archives, and to allow all interested parties to draw their own conclusions as to what happened in Dallas 32 years ago.

"The Board is not reinvestigating the assassination of President Kennedy," he went on, commenting on what is a common misconception. "It's important to keep reminding people of that." Their objective, he said, is to collect as many assassination records as possible, especially those still withheld by various federal agencies. Tunheim said the Board is also interested in records held by state and local authorities (see City of Dallas: The Other Archives, below), as well as those that are held privately and by foreign governments. "We are doing everything possible to fulfill that mandate, and to make the record complete."

Tunheim said that with the power the Board has been given by Congress, he expects they will be able to meet their goals. But he cautioned, "While the vast majority of these records will be released in full, there will be some information or identifications that will be postponed for a relatively short period of time. We're not interested in postponing anything forever, but we have to apply the law, and the law really requires us to postpone some identities for a period of time."

Tunheim concluded his portion of the address by noting, "I believe that the controversy surrounding the Kennedy assassination is unlikely to disappear, even after the Board's work is completed. But I do hope the American public will believe that no information about the assassination is continuing to be held, and hidden, by the government."

Next up was ARRB Executive Director David Marwell. He began by saying the Board had made tremendous strides over the last year in establishing itself as a fully staffed and functioning government agency. But he said they also learned that "the same law that required us to establish the Review Board imposed some very difficult restrictions on us. We were not placed underneath another federal agency. We couldn't go to the procurement section and say, 'Buy us some computers.'...We couldn't hire...federal employees from other agencies, because the law says you can't hire current federal employees. We couldn't move into [just] any office space because the law says we have to move into office space that has an area that allows you to hold classified documents. We couldn't simply start working without having security clearances for all the staff.

"If you combine these restrictons, and all these special conditions, on how to set up the office, you can imagine that it took us about six months before we had a critical mass in place, before we had offices, and before we were able to get down to the actual work of reviewing documents."

Marwell said that as they were getting the Board's physical environs in order, they were also figuring out what their job was all about. "The law says you have to review these documents. It doesn't say how you have to review them," he said. "The law says agencies have to provide evidence---it doesn't say how...the law says that the Review Board has to meet and review, but it doesn't say how they're supposed to review---are they going to review them together, review them separately...all of these separate decisions and separate issues had to be worked out and decided on in the last year." Marwell said he hoped he wasn't trying to sound defensive. "I want to just give you some sense of the complications of setting up the Review Board and staff, and really to pat ourselves on the back that we were able to get this done and were able, in the beginning of June, to actually begin the review of documents."

The ARRB has 27 employees, Marwell said, divided into several sections: Research and Analysis, which is divided into CIA, FBI, and Military teams; and Investigators, which locates records held privately and by state and local governments. The Board has, since June, released over 100 documents, Marwell said, and that rate is expected to increase. "As we proceed through the year, I'll be disappointed if we can't maintain that pace---several hundred documents, on the average, per meeting." Here Marwell seemed to be using the terms review and release interchangeably. Obviously, a document can be reviewed but not released, so his exact meaning was not clear.

Marwell then discussed state and local records, which he said was, for many people, the most interesting part of their work. "We have a very active program to seek out records in private hands and in state and local government hands," he said. A number of private collections, Marwell said, have already been identified and donated to the Board.

Thomas Samoluk then got up before the audience. Samoluk is the Board's Associate Director of Communications; he said he wanted to focus on the Board's public relations front. "Let me start with how we handle our correspondence. We have got a lot of letters over the last year, and we have tried to set up a system that allows for everyone to get a response." When those letters contain leads for the Board to follow, Samoluk said, the leads are prioritized and the information stored in a computer. So, he said, "it means that we may not be as far along as some things as we are on others---but remember, we have two years, and we have a lot of things going on besides the review of federal records." He asked that everyone who has provided a lead to the Board to be patient; the prioritizaton process must continue.

"The other thing we try to do is notify people of everything the Board is doing. That means we are sending notfications out to people when the Board votes on records, when records are released, we send out notifications on when there are public hearings in different parts of the country..."

Perhaps the Board is improving its notification capabilities. But in an article that appeared in the July-August issue of Fair Play, contributor Joseph Backes singled out this particular area as being one of the ARRB's weaknesses. He wrote:

Chairman Tunheim said, "...We are developing a mailing list which is getting larger all the time, and we do intend to send all of our notices to our mailing list contacts as well, so that you would not have to subscribe to the [Federal] Register."

They have not been doing this. I wrote to Thomas E. Samoluk, the ARRB's Associate Director for Communications, pointing this out. His response...said, "The Review Board is in full compliance with all requirements regarding notification publication in the Federal Register. The Board has determined that it will go beyond those minimum requirements regarding notification and directly mail to interested parties substantive information regarding the Board activities. The Board is under no obligation to send out every notification that appears in the Federal Register."

Mr. Samoluk, you need to read your own transcripts. Your boss, the Chairman, said, "...We do intend to send all of our notices to our mailing list contacts as well, so that you would not have to subscribe to the Register." [emphasis added.]

...In fact, the Federal Register notice of the [June 28] hearing was published Wednesday, June 21, 1995. (Federal Register, Vol. 60, No. 119.) A one week notice.

During the question and answer period that followed Samoluk's talk, the question was raised whether the Board could establish a presence on the Internet. "We have been intererested in working through the Internet," Tunheim said. "And I understand there are some problems in setting up the necessary security arrangements with it."

"About two weeks ago," said David Marwell, in taking up the question, "we finally got our domain on the Internet. We are jfk-arrb.gov...you can reach any staff member by using their first name, then underscore, their last name, the 'at' sign, then jfk-arrb.gov." It would look like this: