We don’t know everything about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and, despite the release of a ton of new documents, we never will.

Practically all of the participants in that tragic event that day in Dallas sixty-two years ago are dead.

The latest to pass was Clint Hill, the hero Secret Service agent who leaped on the back of the open presidential limousine to protect First Lady Jackie Kennedy as bullets that hit JFK whizzed by.  Hill, 93, died last week.

Pretty soon everyone with a living memory of that tragic event shown millions of times on television will be gone as well. And in 2063 it will be recalled and commemorated the way President Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination was recalled and commemorated in 1965.

Under the direction of President Donald Trump, the U.S National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) last week released a stunning amount of confidential information about the JFK assassination.

And while it will take historians, reporters and conspiracy theorists weeks to go through the huge volume of information contained in the documents, there is no indication that the basic findings of the assassination will change.

And that finding, buttressed by previous investigations, is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, as Kennedy rode in an open car in a motorcade in downtown Dallas.

If Oswald acted alone, it was an individual act. If there was another gunman involved it would have been a conspiracy.

Oswald was shot to death two days later while in Dallas police custody by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby to allegedly keep him from revealing a conspiracy.

Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting trial.

And while the documents reveal various roles and machinations about Oswald’s life and associates, the FBI, the CIA, Vietnam, the Mafia and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that almost led to war with the Soviet Union, there is little information about the killing to date that has not already been made public.

In short, there are no bombshells in the documents that challenge the lone gunman finding.

And that was that Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy with a World War II Italian bolt action rifle with a scope from the sixth floor of the then called Texas Book Depository Building, where he worked. It is a museum now.

That building overlooked the Kennedy motorcade as it passed below from Elm St to Dealey Plaza in Dallas that day.

My Boston Herald newspaper assignments over the years have taken me to many places around the country and the world, including Dallas. I have visited the Kennedy assassination site several times.

On each occasion I stood by the Book Depository Building and looked down where the Kennedy motorcade passed below. I have walked the distance.

I have marveled how Oswald could fire three shots from a bolt action rifle in an estimated 8.6 seconds at a moving target 80 to 100 yards away and hit Kennedy in the head, as the lone shooter advocates have maintained.

I am no expert, but I fired a lot of different weapons during my military service, and common sense told me that it could not be done with any accuracy. No way.

There had to be another shooter, possibly firing from the grassy knoll to the right of the Kennedy motorcade. One of the shots in the film of the assassination has Kennedy’s head going backwards as though shot from the front.

If true, another gunman would make it a conspiracy, involving other people, organizations, governments, or countries who wanted Kennedy dead. The U.S. did not want to travel down that road.

It may be true that Oswald acted alone.  It may be true he did not.

There is a fine line between what is true and what people believe is true. So far, they believe in the latter. And the documents will not change that belief.

We’ll never know.

Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

A trove of recently declassified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy assassination were released by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration last week. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Surrounded by detectives, Lee Harvey Oswald is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station, Nov. 23, 1963. (AP Photo/File)