Here’s a little more on the distressing declassification story of John F. Kennedy’s March 1961 secret directive on Laos called NSAM-29. The Archive recently posted our Electronic Briefing Book (No. 342) on “The Last NSAM Standing,” describing how different copies of this document had been treated quite arbitrarily by government censors over a period of many years. Courtesy of an alert reader we now have yet another example of the excess secrecy that has been applied to this presidential directive.
Author and historian William J. Rust found his copy of NSAM-29 at the National Archives while doing research for his forthcoming book The American Experience in Laos, 1954-1961. Rust encountered the document in the records of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. Created by statute (PL 102-526) to gather and open to the public all manner of government documentary evidence pertinent to Kennedy’s presidency and his assassination, the Review Board existed through the middle 1990s and completed its work in 1997. The copy of NSAM-29 in the Review Board’s files was taken from the Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (known at the National Archives as “Records Group 218” or RG-218).
