nov 22, 1963 - Kennedy Assassinated

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On November 21, 1963, the day before his assassination, U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy accompanied by his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and U.S. Vice Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson undertook a two-day five-city trip to Texas. 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. On the morning of November 22, Kennedy and his party flew to Dallas. At Dallas’s Love Field airport, the president and the first lady boarded an open limousine to ride with Democrat Texas Gov. John B. Connally, Jr., and his wife to the president’s next stop, the Trade Mart, where the president was scheduled to deliver a speech. At 12:30 PM, President Kennedy was struck by two shots apparently fired from an open window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He was rushed to nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:00 PM. His accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested at 1:50 PM. Pres. John F. Kennedy believed that his Republican opponent in the 1964 U.S. presidential election would be Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Kennedy was convinced that he could bury Goldwater under an avalanche of votes. One obstacle to his success was a feud in Vice Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s home state of Texas between Gov. John B. Connally, Jr., and Sen. Ralph Yarborough, both Democrats. To present a show of unity, Kennedy decided to tour the state with both men. Kennedy began the tour with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Johnson on November 21, 1963, in San Antonio, with visits to Houston and Fort Worth that same day. The next day they flew to Dallas. While Kennedy was riding in an open limousine in downtown Dallas on his way to give a speech, he was shot and killed. Although Kennedy did not survive to see the presidential election of 1964, his prediction was correct: Goldwater did, in fact, run for president. Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused murderer of the U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy. Oswald was a former U.S. Marine who embraced Marxism and defected, for a time, to the Soviet Union. Oswald never stood trial for the murder because on Sunday, November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner with connections to the criminal underworld, in the basement of Dallas City Hall. A special President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, better known as the Warren Commission because it was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, investigated the assassination from November 1963 to September 1964. Its report concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby “was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.” However, in March 1979, after a two-year investigation, a special House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that a second assassin may also have fired a shot and that there may have been a conspiracy. The evidence remains highly debatable.The assassination of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy was the most notorious political murder of the 20th century. Kennedy was the fourth U.S. president to have been assassinated while in office. Almost from the beginning, the killing of the popular young president was thought to have been the result of a conspiracy rather than the act of an individual, despite findings to the contrary by the Warren Commission. The assassination and its aftermath played out through the newly dominant mass medium of television, which made it a uniquely immediate and shocking experience for many Americans. Kennedy’s death also brought an abrupt end to his supporters’ sense of optimism about the country’s future, which had been fueled by his broad popularity.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy | Summary, Facts, Aftermath, & Conspiracy | Britannica

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