A book called THE JESUS PAPERS makes the (wild, admittedly) claim that there currently exists a document written by Jesus that discusses his being charged with blasphemy for claiming to be the son of God, but that he is only a son of God in the same sense that all of us are sons of God.
The conspiracy to suppress information may not have gone that far or it may have. The document may not actually exist, but it may or it may have in the past.
The established 4 gospels don't even fully agree on things, let alone the additional writings found later that were probably destroyed by the Roman Catholics or others trying to keep the stories out of their history.
The point is similar to what you said about Kennedy. The tales grew taller after the facts. Perhaps we need to examine the possibilities from the more rational viewpoint that he was a wise MAN.
Perhaps a better example would be a bit older. The Haulocaust is actually denied several decades later. One group (the JW's) tries to highlight how their members were such tragic victims of the haulocast and they virtually ignore the Poles or the Gypsies, those groups possibly doing the same. Abraham Lincoln became the saviour of the slaves and most African Americans became Republicans back then. There is overwhelming evidence that his main concern was political and had little to do with freeing slaves, yet history won't let the truth stand in it's way. Columbus discovered America, despite the fact that he wasn't first, didn't know what he found.