Assassination of John F. Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza in Dallas at 12:30 on 22 November 1963 while riding in an open car through the city on a trip intended to reconcile feuding Texas Democrats before the following year's election. Two bullets struck him, in the upper back and the head. Governor John Connally, sitting in front of him, was seriously wounded. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital half an hour later, aged forty-six. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned in 1962, was arrested that afternoon in a cinema, having also shot a police officer. He worked at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the plaza, from whose sixth-floor window a rifle he had ordered by mail was recovered. He denied everything and was shot dead two days later by the nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, on live television, before any trial. Lyndon Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in a bloodstained suit. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone. A House committee in 1979 concluded there was probably a conspiracy, on acoustic evidence later discredited. Polling has consistently found that most Americans disbelieve the official account, and the assassination is generally treated as the beginning of the modern collapse of trust in the United States government. Johnson used the shock to pass the Civil Rights Act. The remaining sealed federal records were released in stages, the last tranches in 2017 and 2025, and contained nothing overturning the finding.
- Category: Social
