DONALD Trump has form with his tweets so your correspondent Mr Roberts may well be correct in asserting that Trump was attempting to divert attention from his political difficulties when he tweeted that he would be releasing all of the last of the Kennedy assassination files (about 2,800 of them with more to follow) into the public domain.

As for Mr Roberts' notion that "the US State continues to cover-up of the truth" about the assassination and his contention that requests made mainly by the CIA and FBI to permit redactions on certain of the files were made on spurious grounds of "national security," it was simply inevitable that Trump's subsequent decision to withhold about 300 of the files and grant 180 days for every single redaction to be provide legitimate would help sustain any number of conspiracies.

180 days – plenty of time, Mr Roberts concludes, for the intelligence and law enforcement agencies to get busy blocking out things and doctoring "these highly incriminating documents."

The files are held by the US National Archives.

They decide whether a redaction complies with criteria enacted by Congress in 1992 and, now, whether it also complies with an instruction from Trump, integral to the postponement, for the criteria to be interpreted as requiring the fullest possible disclosure.

What scope the CIA and FBI have for doctoring the files is anyone's guess.

It will, though, be interesting to see which of the permitted redactions causes the conspiracy theorists to plunge deepest into a mire of conjecture, concoction, conflation and congenital distrust when files are released next year.

The Oliver Stone film which Mr Roberts credits with having exposed "the CIA and US military conspiracy that lay behind this murderous coup d'etat" was admittedly an award-winning blockbuster.

However "the hard facts" as Mr Roberts describes them, on which the film was based were debunked long ago.

Sadly, this is all a far cry from the sickening reality of the killing by a misfit armed with a $12 rifle of a youthful president who had everything to live for, whose sexual peccadilloes remained private in what was then a very different world, and who seemed to me at 20 to have that world at his feet.

Andrew Holmwood, Wallasey.