Assassination of John F. Kennedy

• 1. Introduction

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  At 12:30 pm on the 22nd of November 1963, a presidential limousine turned from Houston Street onto Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, and the world changed. John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was riding through Dealey Plaza in a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible with the top down, waving to crowds lining the street. Beside him sat his wife Jacqueline. Moments earlier, Texas Governor Nellie Connally had turned and told him, "Mr. President, they can't make you believe now that there are not some in Dallas who love and appreciate you, can they?" Kennedy's reply was brief. "No, they sure can't." They were his last words.

  Within seconds, multiple shots rang out. Kennedy was struck twice. Governor John Connally, sitting forward of the Kennedys, was also wounded. The motorcade sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Kennedy was pronounced dead thirty minutes after the shooting.

  What followed was one of the most investigated, argued over, and debated events in American history. Who pulled the trigger? Was there only one gunman? Did a lone, troubled former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald act entirely alone, or was something larger at work? The questions planted in that few seconds on Elm Street have never fully settled. This is the story of what happened that afternoon, what the investigations found, and why the argument has never really ended.

• 2. The Two Men in Dallas

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  Kennedy had come to Texas for reasons that had nothing to do with assassination. Friction between liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough and conservative Governor John Connally had threatened to fracture the state's Democratic Party. Kennedy, Johnson, and Connally had agreed on the visit during a meeting in El Paso in June. Kennedy also viewed the Texas trip as an informal opening move in his 1964 reelection campaign. The motorcade route through Dallas was finalized on the 18th of November and published in the newspapers days before the visit.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was twenty-four years old and had spent the previous weeks working at the Texas School Book Depository, the building that overlooked the planned route. His path to that job was tangled. Born in 1939, he had enlisted in the Marines, served in Japan and the Philippines, been court-martialed twice, and had espoused communist beliefs since reading Karl Marx at the age of fourteen. In 1959 he sailed from New Orleans to France, traveled to Finland, and defected to the Soviet Union. In January 1960 he was sent to work at a factory in Minsk, Belarus, where he met and married Marina Prusakova. By 1962 he was back in the United States on a repatriation loan from the U.S. embassy, settled in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and socializing with Russian emigres, notably George de Mohrenschildt, a CIA informant.

  In March 1963, a bullet narrowly missed General Edwin Walker at his Dallas home; the Warren Commission later attributed the attempt to Oswald. By April, Oswald had returned to New Orleans and established a one-man chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was arrested after scuffling with anti-Castro Cuban exiles while distributing literature. In late September 1963 he traveled to Mexico City and visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. On the 3rd of October he returned to Dallas, found the job at the depository, and on the morning of the assassination carried a long package into the building, telling coworkers it contained curtain rods.

• 3. Dealey Plaza

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  From a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, multiple shots were fired as the motorcade moved down Elm Street. About eighty percent of the witnesses recalled hearing three shots. Many in the crowd initially interpreted the sounds as firecrackers or a car backfire, and few reacted immediately.

  Governor Connally, an experienced hunter, recognized a rifle shot at once. He turned sharply to the right, saw nothing unusual, and was beginning to turn back forward when a bullet struck his upper right back. He shouted, "My God. They're going to kill us all!" According to the Warren Commission's single-bullet theory, that same round had already passed through Kennedy's upper back and exited below his larynx. The bullet then struck and destroyed several inches of Connally's right fifth rib, punctured and collapsed his lung, shattered his right wrist, and lodged in his left thigh.

  As the limousine passed the grassy knoll, Kennedy was struck a second time, by a bullet to the head. The Warren Commission described the resulting wound as a large, roughly ovular hole on the rear right side of the skull. Brain matter and blood reached as far as the Secret Service car following immediately behind.

  Secret Service agent Clint Hill was riding on the running board of that car. He heard the first shot, jumped to the street, ran forward, and reached Kennedy's limousine approximately five seconds after the shot he heard first. He boarded the trunk as the car accelerated. Jacqueline Kennedy had climbed partially onto the trunk; Hill believed she may have been reaching for a fragment of her husband's skull. As the car raced out of Dealey Plaza, both Governor and Mrs. Connally heard her repeating, "They have killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand."

  Bystander James Tague received a minor wound to the cheek while standing near the triple underpass, either from a bullet fragment or concrete debris. Nine months later the FBI removed the curb section where the mark appeared; spectrographic analysis found metallic residue consistent with the lead core of Oswald's ammunition.

  Among the 178 witnesses who testified to the Warren Commission, 49 believed the shots came from the depository, 21 thought they came from the grassy knoll, and 78 were uncertain. Lee Bowers, watching from a two-story railroad switch tower 120 yards behind the knoll, had an unobstructed view of the only route a shooter could have used to flee that position. He saw no one leave.

• 4. Flight and Capture

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  At 12:36 pm, a teenager named Amos Euins approached Dallas police sergeant D.V. Harkness and reported seeing someone with a rifle leaning from a sixth-floor depository window during the shooting. Harkness radioed to seal the building. Witness Howard Brennan described a white man in khaki clothing in that same window; his description was broadcast at 12:45 pm. Witness James R. Worrell Jr. reported seeing a gun barrel emerge from the window. Bonnie Ray Williams, working a floor below, said the rifle's report was so loud that ceiling plaster fell onto his head.

  When deputies searched the sixth floor, they found an Italian Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle. Oswald had purchased the used weapon the previous March under the alias "A. Hidell" and had it delivered to his Dallas post-office box. The FBI found his partial palm print on the barrel, and fibers on the rifle were consistent with those of his shirt. A bullet recovered from Connally's hospital gurney and two fragments from the limousine were ballistically matched to the weapon.

  Oswald had already left the building. He traveled by bus to his boarding house, retrieved a jacket and a revolver, and was on foot in the Oak Cliff neighborhood when police officer J. D. Tippit spotted him and called him to his patrol car. After a brief exchange, Tippit stepped out of the vehicle. Oswald shot him three times in the chest and then fired a final shot into his right temple as he lay on the ground.

  At 1:36 pm, police were called after Oswald was seen sneaking into the Texas Theatre without paying. With the film War Is Hell still playing, Dallas officers arrested him after a struggle in which Oswald drew his fully loaded revolver. He denied shooting anyone and claimed he was being made a "patsy" because he had lived in the Soviet Union. His supervisor at the depository, Roy Truly, had already alerted police that Oswald was absent from a roll call of employees.

• 5. The Days After

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  Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:00 pm at Parkland Memorial Hospital. CBS host Walter Cronkite broke the news on live television. Johnson, urged by Secret Service to leave Dallas immediately, refused to depart without proof of Kennedy's death and refused to leave without Jacqueline Kennedy, who would not leave without her husband's body. At 2:38 pm, federal judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes administered the oath of office aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing at Johnson's side, two hours and eight minutes after the shooting.

  Kennedy's autopsy was performed that night at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, a site Jacqueline chose because her husband had been a naval officer during World War II. Three physicians conducted the procedure: naval commanders James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, with assistance from ballistics wound expert Pierre A. Finck. The Warren Commission later received a scathing assessment: the HSCA forensic pathology panel called the autopsy's failings "extensive," noting that the two lead doctors were not qualified to conduct a forensic autopsy. Panel member Milton Helpern, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City, compared selecting Humes to "sending a seven-year-old boy who has taken three lessons on the violin over to the New York Philharmonic and expecting him to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony."

  On Sunday the 24th of November, at 11:21 am, Oswald was being moved through the basement of Dallas Police headquarters when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped forward and shot him at close range. The killing was broadcast live on television. Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald photographed the moment; his photograph, titled Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Photography. Oswald was taken by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he died at 1:07 pm, treated by the same surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy.

  Ruby told the Warren Commission he had been distraught by Kennedy's death and that killing Oswald would spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of returning for a trial. He insisted he acted on impulse when the opportunity arose. His lawyer Melvin Belli argued that Ruby suffered from psychomotor epilepsy and bore no criminal responsibility. Ruby was convicted, the verdict was overturned on appeal, and he died of a pulmonary embolism, secondary to cancer, in 1967 while awaiting a new trial. Like Kennedy and Oswald, he was declared dead at Parkland Hospital.

  Kennedy lay in repose in the East Room of the White House for twenty-four hours. A quarter million mourners passed through the Capitol rotunda during eighteen hours of lying in state. His funeral was held on the 25th of November at St. Matthew's Cathedral, with a Requiem Mass led by Cardinal Richard Cushing and about 1,200 guests including representatives from over ninety countries. Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia; an eternal flame was lit at his burial site in 1967.

• 6. Investigations and Their Limits

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  On the 29th of November, President Johnson established by executive order what became known as the Warren Commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Its 888-page final report, presented to Johnson on the 24th of September 1964 and made public three days later, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that Ruby acted alone. Three of the eight commission members privately found the single-bullet theory improbable, but their reservations were not included in the final report.

  Walter Cronkite identified a structural problem: although the commission had full authority to conduct its own investigation, it allowed the CIA and FBI to investigate themselves. A total of 169 FBI agents worked on the case, conducting over 25,000 interviews and writing more than 2,300 reports. Director Hoover sent Johnson a preliminary report identifying Oswald as the sole culprit within twenty-four hours of the killing. A 2014 report by CIA Chief Historian David Robarge concluded that then-CIA director John A. McCone had engaged in a "benign cover-up" by withholding information from the commission.

  In 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison charged businessman Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. The 34-day trial in 1969 was the only criminal prosecution ever brought for the assassination. Garrison played the Zapruder film and argued that the backward motion of Kennedy's head after the fatal shot indicated a shooter in front of the grassy knoll. The jury acquitted Shaw after a brief deliberation. Jury foreman Sidney Hebert told playwright James Kirkwood, "I didn't think too much of the Warren Report either until the trial. Now I think a lot more of it than I did before."

  In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Kennedy was likely killed as a result of a conspiracy, based primarily on acoustic analysis of a police Dictabelt recording that suggested a high probability of a fourth shot from the grassy knoll. The Justice Department subsequently found that "reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman" and concluded that "no persuasive evidence can be identified to support the theory of a conspiracy." The HSCA's central justification had been undermined by the very agency asked to review it.

  From 1994 to 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board gathered and unsealed about 60,000 documents comprising over four million pages. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order to declassify the remaining documents within fifteen days; more than 60,000 documents were released on the 18th of March.

• 7. The Camera That Saw Everything

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  Standing on the pergola wall about sixty-five feet from the road, tailor Abraham Zapruder recorded twenty-six seconds of silent 8 mm film. Frame 313 captures the exact moment Kennedy's head was struck by the fatal shot. Life magazine published enlargements from the film shortly after the assassination. The footage itself was not shown publicly until the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, and did not appear on television until 1975, when Geraldo Rivera broadcast it. In 1999, an arbitration panel ordered the federal government to pay $615,384 per second of film to Zapruder's heirs, placing the complete film's value at $16 million.

  Zapruder was one of at least thirty-two people in Dealey Plaza known to have made film or still photographs during the shooting. Mary Moorman photographed Kennedy with a Polaroid camera, capturing an image less than one-sixth of a second after the headshot. Charles Bronson, Marie Muchmore, and Orville Nix also filmed the assassination, though from greater distances. Of the three, only Nix, filming from the opposite side of Elm Street, actually recorded the fatal shot. In 1966, Nix claimed that the duplicate the FBI returned to him after processing had frames "missing" or "ruined"; the original film has been missing since 1978.

  Some footage captured an unidentified woman apparently filming the assassination. Researchers nicknamed her the Babushka Lady for the shawl she wore. In 1978, Gordon Arnold came forward claiming he had filmed the event from the grassy knoll and that a police officer had confiscated his film. Author Vincent Bugliosi pointed out that Arnold does not appear in any photograph taken of the area and called this "conclusive photographic proof that Arnold's story was fabricated."

  Previously unknown footage filmed by George Jefferies was released in 2007. Recorded a few blocks before the shooting, it captured Kennedy's bunched suit jacket, which helped explain a discrepancy between the bullet hole in Kennedy's back and the corresponding hole in the jacket.

• 8. Legacy and Ongoing Debate

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  Five days after the assassination, Johnson delivered his "Let Us Continue" speech to Congress, calling for the realization of Kennedy's civil rights agenda. That effort materialized as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The legal confusion surrounding presidential succession led directly to the Twenty-fifth Amendment, adopted in 1967, which formally established that the vice president becomes president upon the president's death.

  President Johnson issued Executive Order 11129 on the 29th of November, renaming Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy; the NASA launch facility on the cape became the Kennedy Space Center. The Secret Service was overhauled: open limousines were eliminated, specialized counter-sniper teams were established, and the agency's budget rose from $5.5 million in 1963 to over $1.6 billion by the fiftieth anniversary in 2013.

  For the American public, Kennedy's killing mythologized him into a heroic figure. Public opinion polls consistently rank him the most popular post-World War II president, even as scholars typically place him in the good-but-not-great category. Journalist Dan Rather compared the debate surrounding his death to the Iliad: "Different people read Homer's description of the war and come to different conclusions, and so it shall be for Kennedy's death."

  Some one thousand to two thousand books, mostly favoring conspiracy, have been written about the killing. Bugliosi estimated that a total of forty-two groups, eighty-two assassins, and two hundred and fourteen people have been accused in various theories across the decades. The grassy knoll, the magic bullet, the Babushka Lady, and the missing brain have each generated small industries of speculation.

  The assassination has shaped American culture in lasting ways. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Executive Action, the first feature film to dramatize the events, released in 1973. Don DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra imagined Oswald as a CIA agent. Stephen King's 2011 novel 11/22/63 built a time-travel narrative around the date itself. Igor Stravinsky composed his Elegy for J.F.K. in 1964. Phil Ochs wrote "Crucifixion" in 1966, a song that reportedly brought Robert Kennedy to tears. Bob Dylan addressed the event directly in "Murder Most Foul," released in 2020.

  Dealey Plaza was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1993. The Sixth Floor Museum in the former depository draws over 325,000 visitors each year. The gun Jack Ruby used to kill Oswald was sold in 1991 for $220,000. Kennedy's limousine sits at the Henry Ford Museum. Jacqueline Kennedy's pink suit, the autopsy X-rays, and Kennedy's blood-stained clothing remain in the National Archives, with access controlled by the Kennedy family, as the questions that began on Elm Street continue to circle without final resolution.