Assassination of John F. Kennedy

On 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead as his limousine passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Official inquiries named Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine firing from an upper floor of the Texas School Book Depository, as the gunman. The killing of the president at the height of the Cold War shocked the world and remains one of the most investigated crimes in American history.

Kennedy, elected in 1960, had faced the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. In 1963 he travelled to Texas partly to calm a quarrel inside the state's Democratic Party, and partly as an early start to his re-election campaign for 1964. The route of the Dallas motorcade was fixed on 18 November.

Oswald, born in 1939, had left the Marines in 1959, gone to the Soviet Union and worked in a factory in Minsk before returning to the United States in 1962. After spells in the Dallas area and New Orleans, he returned to Dallas in October 1963 and took a job at the book depository.

The limousine, carrying Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline, Governor John Connally of Texas and his wife Nellie, entered the plaza at about 12:30 pm. As it moved down Elm Street, shots rang out; most witnesses remembered three. One bullet struck Kennedy in the upper back and left through his throat, and a later shot hit him in the head. Connally was badly wounded but survived. Kennedy was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead at 1:00 pm. At 2:38 pm, with Jacqueline Kennedy beside him, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One at Love Field.

Deputies found an Italian Carcano rifle on the depository's sixth floor. Oswald had left the building; he shot dead a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippit, and was arrested in a cinema, the Texas Theatre, roughly 70 minutes after the assassination. He was charged with both killings.

On 24 November, as police moved Oswald through the basement of their headquarters, the nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped forward and shot him, live on television. Oswald died that afternoon in the same hospital as Kennedy. Ruby was convicted of murder, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, and he died in 1967 before he could be retried. On 25 November Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

President Johnson set up a commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren on 29 November. Its 888-page report, handed to Johnson on 24 September 1964, found that Oswald alone had shot Kennedy and Connally, and that Ruby had likewise acted on his own. It judged that three shots had been fired and that a single bullet had caused Kennedy's back and throat wound and all of Connally's injuries, a finding that three of the commission's members privately doubted.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, set up in 1976, reported in 1979. It agreed that the shots that struck Kennedy came from behind and supported the single-bullet finding, but concluded that he had probably been killed as the result of a conspiracy, judging there to be a high probability of a second gunman whose shot missed. That conclusion rested chiefly on acoustic analysis of a police radio recording. A later review by a National Academy of Sciences panel rejected the acoustic evidence, and the Justice Department found no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy.

Polls show that most Americans believe in a conspiracy, and many conspiracy theories have circulated, but no official inquiry has identified any alleged plotters. Under a 1992 law, millions of pages of government records have since been released, with further large releases in 2022, 2023 and 2025. Kennedy was the fourth US president to be assassinated; his death was followed in the same decade by the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

Our 1960 map shows the United States in the years of the Kennedy presidency.