In an article titled “Newly released JFK documents point to what the CIA was hiding,” Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo! News, states that much of what they contain relating to President Kennedy’s assassination is relatively insignificant: No “bombshells that prove an elaborate conspiracy to kill” him.

That’s no surprise to me.

Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, a misfit through and through, was the last person the CIA would have selected to kill him. It certainly wouldn’t have supplied him the rifle he used to murder him; there’s proof positive that weapon was Oswald’s own — purchased through mail order at the mere cost of $19.95.

Conspiracy theorists can’t abide the idea that someone of Kennedy’s stature could have been done in by a loser like Oswald acting alone. But Presidents Garfield and McKinley both were assassinated by lone gunmen cut from the same cloth.

It’s true that Jackie Kennedy believed her husband was murdered by a conspiracy, but his brothers Robert and Edward did not. Neither did his son, John Jr. Neither did Oswald’s siblings, Robert and John.

And neither did Oswald’s wife, Marina — until the conspiracists came a-calling.  But what she had to say about the matter for the record will always ring true: His eyes betrayed his guilt. Had he been innocent, she said, he would’ve exploded with rage.

His mother? She insisted Lee was innocent, but then, she was an entitled loon her sons abhorred. As for his father, he died before Lee was even born.

William LaRochelle, Lewiston