assassination of John F. Kennedy

assassination of John F. Kennedy, mortal shooting of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. His accused killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had embraced Marxism and defected for a time to the Soviet Union. Oswald never stood trial for murder, because, while being transferred after having been taken into custody, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a distraught Dallas nightclub owner.

Almost from the beginning, the killing of the popular young president was thought by many Americans to have been the result of a conspiracy rather than the act of an individual, despite findings to the contrary by the Warren Commission (1964), which was established by Kennedy’s successor, U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, to investigate the assassination. The circumstances surrounding the assassination remain the subject of widespread speculation.

The assassination

On November 21, 1963, President Kennedy—accompanied by his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Vice President Johnson—undertook a two-day, five-city fund-raising trip to Texas. The trip was also likely intended as an attempt to help bring together a feuding Democratic Party in a state that was vital to Kennedy’s chances for reelection in 1964. Although Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a liberal icon, had been confronted by highly agitated protesters a month earlier during a visit to Dallas—a city with a right-leaning press and the locus of much anti-Kennedy feeling—the president was warmly welcomed at his first two stops, San Antonio and Houston, as well as at Fort Worth, where the presidential party spent the night of November 21.

The next morning, after making a speech in a parking lot in front of the hotel in which he had stayed and then speaking again at a Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast, Kennedy and his party made a short flight to Dallas Love Field airport. (After Dallas, the final stop on the trip was scheduled to be Austin.) At the airport the president and first lady shook hands with members of a hospitable crowd before boarding the backseat of a customized open convertible to ride with Democratic Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife (who sat in jump seats in front of the Kennedys) to the president’s next stop, the Trade Mart, where Kennedy was scheduled to deliver another speech. An estimated 200,000 people lined the roughly 10-mile (16-km) route to the Trade Mart.

As the motorcade turned southwest on Elm Street and began traveling through Dealey Plaza on the edge of downtown Dallas, the president’s convertible passed the multistory Texas School Book Depository building. Moments later, at about 12:30 pm, shots rang out. A bullet pierced the base of the neck of the president, exited through his throat, and then likely (according to the Warren Report) passed through Governor Connally’s shoulder and wrist, ultimately hitting his thigh. Another bullet struck Kennedy in the back of the head. The motorcade rushed to nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital, reaching it quickly; however, doctors’ efforts were futile. Kennedy was officially declared dead at 1:00 pm. Connally survived his wounds.

The capture and death of Oswald

Over the next hour, as a shocked country and world learned of Kennedy’s death, the drama of the pursuit and capture of his alleged assailant unfolded. Bullet casings were found near a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building overlooking the plaza; a rifle (later proved to have been owned by Oswald) was discovered elsewhere on the sixth floor. An accounting of the building’s employees indicated that only two were missing: one was a man who had stepped outside to watch the motorcade and was barred by police from reentering the building, and the other was Oswald, who had been working there for about a month. Oswald had been seen on the sixth floor about a half hour before the shooting and had also been encountered in the building by its superintendent and a policeman just after the shooting. Law enforcement circulated a description of him. Meanwhile, Oswald made his way to the boardinghouse where he had been staying. Some 15 minutes after leaving the boardinghouse, he was confronted by a Dallas policeman, J.D. Tippit, who is thought to have believed that Oswald matched the description. Oswald shot and killed Tippit with a .38 revolver in the presence of a number of witnesses and was later seen entering the Texas Theatre, where at 1:50 pm he was apprehended by police.

As those events unfolded, Johnson, fearing that the assassination of the president was just the first step in a much broader effort by the Soviets or other enemies of the United States to destabilize the American government, sought to effect a quick transition of executive authority and to seek safety by leaving Dallas by plane. At 2:38 pm, before takeoff, with Kennedy’s corpse aboard, Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One. Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing blood-spattered clothes, stood at his side.

Questioned by both law enforcement officers and the press, Oswald protested his innocence, claiming that he was “a patsy.” He requested to be represented by (but was never able to contact) John Abt, the staff attorney of the Communist Party USA, who was well known for his defense of communists. After being held for two days and two nights, Oswald was being transferred from Dallas City Hall (which contained the headquarters and jail of the Dallas Police Department) to the county jail on the morning of November 24, an event broadcast live on television, when Jack Ruby—a familiar face around the police station and known to police who frequented his club—was able to enter the basement parking garage of City Hall. There he shot Oswald with a handgun as the cameras looked on. Ruby later said that he had shot Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy from having to testify at Oswald’s trial. Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where previously Kennedy and now Oswald, too, died. Ruby would be tried, found guilty of murder (March 14, 1964), and sentenced to death; in October 1966, however, a Texas appeals court reversed the conviction, though Ruby died (January 3, 1967; also at Parkland) before a new trial could be held.