JFK documents still tantalise

You could paper-mache´ a new face on Mt Rushmore with the pulpedup printouts of official and unofficial investigations on the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy.

The first assassination of the television age has never been completely laid to rest.

Now President Donald Trump is indicating that he may release more than 3000 reports that the CIA would really rather he wouldn’t, on top of a tranche of more than 30,000 many of which have already been previously released, but with redactions.

He is not being gratuitously meddlesome. These are papers whose secret status has rolled around for review and it falls on the sitting president to make a decision one way or the other.

Trump asserts that, unless he can be persuaded otherwise within the next few days, he is minded to release them.

At which point we find ourselves, with some discomfort, saying good on him.

Even if there is a mass drop of information there is not, as yet, any guarantee that the newly disclosed material wouldn’t still be at least partially censored.

And therein lies a real potential problem.

The more sober end of the spectrum of Kennedy investigators out there seem to doubt that there’s much, if anything, in the way of legitimately startling information in the new material.

The implication might be that the release would serve no real purpose other than to give the more barking conspiracy theorists fresh material to misinterpret madly, setting their own industry into overdrive once more. A condescending view.

It’s not only the way-out-there zealots who want to know more.

Even among the mainstream there’s an almost hardwired interest that will always exist in anything officialdom seems to want to hold close. Especially after all this time. Realistically, this will continue as long as there’s a single piece of unreleased official information about the assassination.

Perversely, the more the stack of suppressed information diminishes, the more the remaining stuff will be seen as radioactive with implications.

These will be seen as the most sensitive, most telling, most gol’darned interesting, of the material gathered either at the time and through the passing decades.

Adding to the tantalisations, perhaps, is that the ultimate decision now rests with a man who, himself, has forayed into conspiracy realms when it suited him.

Campaigning for the presidency, Trump assailed a rival for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz, on the basis his father was with assassin Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the shooting.

Remember Cruz’s reply? ‘‘Yes, my dad killed JFK. He is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.’’