President Trump has delivered on another promise and released all the documents -- some 80,000 -- relating to the JFK assassination. So, the nation and the world will finally discover what happened on that November Friday over sixty years ago.

Fat chance!

The death of President Kennedy marked the end of innocence for our nation if, indeed, a nation having fought in two world wars and the Korean conflict, survived the Depression, and was a major player in an ongoing cold war could claim innocence.

Despite those occurrences, Americans did see themselves as a chosen people, destined for greatness and great fortune. But, regardless of how we saw ourselves or how others saw us, the events in Dallas that fateful Friday changed our national psyche in devastating ways.

Thoughts of a Camelot existence, characterized by the confidence and joy Kennedy brought to our citizens, ended with his death at Dallas Parkland Hospital. Self-doubt became a national affliction. We began decades of senseless wars and even more senseless social programs designed to make life better for all Americans but which succeeded only in making our daily lives less rewarding and less filled with accomplishment. This plague of self-doubt continues to prevail in our nation to this day.

In my mind, the enormity of what happened to JFK and our nation on November 22, 1963 was the genesis of the multitude of conspiracy theories surrounding the event. Think about it. How could some lowly, dissatisfied little non-entity like Lee Harvey Oswald change the world to the degree which Kennedy’s death did? To accomplish such an earth-shattering event would require the participation of someone or something of great strength and power, like an enemy foreign nation, a conspiratorial internal intelligence service, powerful but jealous political enemies, or even organized crime.

Horror vacui. Nature detests a vacuum. The events surrounding Kennedy’s death created a massive vacuum of unknowns and uncertainties that was soon stuffed with conspiracy theories of all shapes and forms. It must have been the enemy, those Godless Russians, or the vengeful Cubans, smarting over the Bay of Pigs invasion and attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. It must have been that power-mad LBJ, lusting for the office Kennedy had denied him. It had to have been the CIA, protecting dark secrets which Kennedy wanted to divulge. Who else but the Mafia, offended by the Kennedy brothers’ attempts to rid our nation of their vile influence, could have been responsible? And on and on. The conspiracies have been never-ending.

Time travel, allowing investigators to go back in time and watch the crime unfold, would give us the answer. I don’t see that happening. It also seems likely to this writer that a conspiracy of this magnitude would have resulted in at least some credible leak. There have been leaks, but none that qualify as a likely explanation.

I have no theory of my own. Like in the song, maybe an ant did move a rubber tree plant. Maybe the little p**- ant Oswald did change the world all by himself, thus qualifying himself for Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. I certainly would like to know. But I don’t believe there will be a smoking gun in these released documents. They are more likely to present a dozen or so guns of varying degrees of plausibility, solving nothing. Some questions are destined to never be answered. The events of November 22, 1963 are most likely in that category.

Bill Hansmann is a dentist and dental educator with over fifty years in the profession. He continues to teach and write political blogs and semi-mediocre novels while living with his wife and cats in Georgia.

Image: Victor Hugo King