What if I'm six degrees of separation from who really killed JFK? | Opinion

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 23 to "finally release all records related" to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., he said, "And everything will be revealed."

Good luck with that.

After the National Archives released on Tuesday night more than 63,000 pages in nearly 2,200 PDF files, historians, journalists, scholars, hobbyists and conspiracists are scouring them for new details that might change the narrative: Gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. 

Now, I don't qualify as a member of serious historians, nor do I run with conspiracy hounds. I wish them all happy hunting. The quick after the dead. Yet I doubt they'll find what I found while writing a novel about my kids' great-grandmothers. A family nugget led me to some dates and places that sparked a delicious question: Could I ‒ a journalist and suburban mom in Northern Virginia ‒ really be six degrees of separation from the real killer of JFK?

Guffaw, right? I know! But why can't I have a conspiracy theory, too?

My mother's uncle went to school with the future first lady of South Vietnam

Though I was born in South Vietnam and fled to America as a child war refugee with my family when Saigon fell in April 1975, my mother's family was from the north.

One of my grandmother's brothers was a well-known author, Vu Bang. You can still find his novels these days in bookstores in Vietnam or anywhere in the world with a big Vietnamese population.

In the late 1930s in Hanoi, under French colonial rule, Vu Bang attended Lycée Albert Sarraut, a high school where the better-off Vietnamese families sent their sons. Female students were rare, but among them was a girl named Tran Le Xuan.

Xuan was born and bred into the role that awaited her: wife to an elite named Ngo Dinh Nhu. In 1955, a year after the Geneva Accords split Vietnam in two and my mom's family members were among a million people who fled south to escape the communism of North Vietnam, Nhu's brother Ngo Dinh Diem would defeat King Bao Dai in a sham referendum and become the president of the newly created South Vietnam.

President Diem never married. He lived like a priest, deeply committed to his Roman Catholic Church. He even had an older brother who was a bishop.

My ancestor's classmate Xuan, now known as Madame Nhu, moved with her husband into the presidential palace in Saigon and de facto was the first lady. They were responsible for a lot of new laws, crackdowns on everything from freedom of the press to moral conduct. 

Their Catholic family waged war against Buddhist leaders. The South Vietnamese had thought they were done with the Nguyen dynasty and kings, but instead, they got the corrupt Ngo regime. President Diem even appointed Madame Nhu's father ‒ his sister-in-law's father ‒ ambassador to the United States.

November 1963 marked the assassination of more than JFK

Just think, it's 1963: The Ngo regime sends troops to shoot at Buddhist demonstrators, then a monk dies by setting himself on fire on a busy street to denounce President Diem and his family's violations of human rights. 

That's how desperate things were. And people thought they had fled North Vietnam to get away from oppression.

By then, you didn't have to be a Buddhist, a communist or a journalist to rebel against the South Vietnamese government. Even business people thought the Ngo regime had to end. But the Ngos wouldn't leave; they were so powerful that even Washington couldn't control them. 

On the other hand, the Ngos' underlings, tired of the corruption and the crackdowns, must have let the Americans know they were ready to do their part.

South Vietnamese generals staged a coup on Nov. 1. The next day, President Diem and his brother Nhu were captured and fatally shot.

If you were the power-drunken Madame Nhu, infuriated and threatened by the assassination of your husband and your brother-in-law, what would you do? Well, yes, first you’d escape to France; people used to snicker that she was more fluent in French than Vietnamese anyway. But then what? Wouldn't you want to teach somebody a lesson?

Twenty days later, JFK is assassinated. Think about that number; that's not even a month. Yet even now, Americans are still investigating who killed President Kennedy. Well, it's still a mystery because everyone's been looking in all the wrong places.

And Madame Nhu, who more than earned the moniker "Dragon Lady," died in Rome in 2011 at the age of 86.

Since the release of the JFK files Tuesday, those studying the documents report mostly nothing-burgers. They say it'll take months and even years to scour through all those newly unredacted records, let alone understand them.

The biggest complaint has been from former government employees or contractors who ‒ surprise! ‒ suddenly found their Social Security numbers publicly dumped among the files. That's an unexpected and unfortunate twist: In a rush to try to expose the guilty, the Trump administration sloppily exposed the innocent.

Whatever will be revealed next, this is my story. Humor me. I'm sticking with it.

Thuan Le Elston, a USA TODAY Opinion editor, is the author of "Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia."