The release of about 64,000 documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Tuesday started a race to find a revelation, as journalists, historians and amateur sleuths scoured the pages in hopes of finding something, anything, that could be considered consequential.

Instead, the big reveal was that there wasn’t much of a reveal at all. Here are the biggest takeaways of the blockbuster that wasn’t.

For years, as the government has declassified and published documents related — some very tenuously — to the Kennedy assassination, the assumption expressed by conspiracy theorists and some historians has been that anything still being withheld must be big. Even Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the nation’s top health official, had long called for the release of all the documents related to his uncle’s death.

But with the release of nearly 64,000 pages by the National Archives, including some that had previously been rendered opaque by redactions, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decades of secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unsavory practices of U.S. intelligence operations.

Rather than reveal what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed was “overwhelming evidence” that the C.I.A. was involved in the Kennedy assassination, the files are filled with details about the agency’s agents and informants, covert actions and budget lines. The secrets, it seems, were the small details, not any big news.

While the documents revealed little to challenge the known facts about the assassinations of Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this might not be the end of declassifications.

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