Politics & Power Quote by Louis Stokes

A sentence like this is built to do two jobs at once: deny wrongdoing and preempt the obvious follow-up question. Louis Stokes, a seasoned politician and chair of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, isn’t offering information so much as managing suspicion. The phrasing performs innocence while quietly admitting the act that needs excusing: sealing the records. If there were no optics problem, there’d be no need for this kind of prophylactic clarification.

The key move is semantic judo. “Not to conceal them” is almost comically circular: sealing is, in practice, a form of concealment. Stokes tries to separate motive from outcome, asking the public to accept that the same action can be trusted if the intention is pure. The line is also carefully addressed “from the American people,” implying a benevolent custodianship: we’re not hiding it from you, we’re safeguarding it for you. That’s the paternal posture of institutional credibility.

Context sharpens the subtext. The assassination ecosystem of the 1960s and 70s had metastasized into a national paranoia, turbocharged by Watergate and intelligence-agency scandals. In that climate, transparency wasn’t just good governance; it was the currency of legitimacy. Stokes’ sentence is a defensive down payment on trust, drafted in the language of reassurance rather than evidence.

It works rhetorically because it speaks to two audiences: skeptics who hear “seal” and smell cover-up, and insiders who know secrecy can be bureaucratic, legal, or protective. The problem is that the line can’t help sounding like what it insists it isn’t: concealment, with better PR.