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 incident remained 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’s 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.
Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.
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.
Kennedy’s funeral
The protocols for the funeral of another assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln, were followed for Kennedy’s funeral. Kennedy’s body, in a flag-draped casket, lay in repose in the East Room of the White House on November 23 and then was transferred to the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol to lie in state, where it was visited by some 250,000 people. On November 25 a mourning country watched on television as a sombre parade conveyed the casket—carried on a caisson pulled by six horses, accompanied by a seventh riderless horse with black cavalry boots pointed backward in the inverted stirrups—through the streets of Washington, D.C., to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, site of the funeral mass. As the cortege left the cathedral, Kennedy’s son, John, Jr., who had just turned age three, movingly saluted the casket, which was interred in Arlington National Cemetery.
Just over a week later, Jacqueline Kennedy summoned author-journalist Theodore H. White to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. In their conversation she sought to guide him to casting the legacy of her husband’s presidency in terms of the “brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” White used that characterization—borrowed from a popular Broadway musical about the knights of the Round Table that Jacqueline had said was much loved by her husband—in the widely read essay White wrote for the December 6 issue of Life magazine.
The Warren Commission
Johnson—convinced that a conspiracy was at the root of the assassination but not wanting the country to be pushed into rash action against either the Soviet Union or Cuba by the growing suspicion among Americans that the killing was a communist plot—moved toward closure with the creation on November 29, 1963, of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That body—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—was charged with ascertaining, evaluating, and reporting the facts relating to the assassination and to the death of Oswald.
After some 10 months of investigation and closed-door hearings, the commission—drawing on a lengthy FBI report, eyewitness and expert testimony, Kennedy’s autopsy, physical evidence, sophisticated analysis of home movies of the assassination shot by Orville Nix, Marie Muchmore, and especially Abraham Zapruder, and scientific reenactments—found that Oswald had acted alone. The resulting 888-page Warren Report concluded that Oswald, who had become a skilled marksman as a marine, had fired three shots: one that entered Kennedy’s neck and exited through his throat before hitting Connally, one that hit Kennedy in the back of the head (the fatal shot), and one miss. (The conclusion drawn about the first shot, known as the “single bullet theory,” was dismissed by doubters, who saw it as predicated on what they saw as the unfathomable movements of a “magic bullet.”) Many disagreed with these findings and argued instead that there had been a second shooter on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza that the motorcade had been approaching, and there were witnesses who thought they had heard shots coming from the direction of a railroad yard beyond the knoll. The commission, however, determined that there had not been a conspiracy involving either Oswald or Ruby.
Conspiracy theories
Those who questioned the findings of the Warren Commission and began positing alternative theories spawned a cottage industry of books, documentaries, and, later, Web sites that continued to thrive into the 21st century. Among the first books to challenge the Warren Report were Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald (1966) and Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966).
Cuba is central to a number of conspiracy theories. One theory, that the Cuban government was responsible, gathered steam after the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had made several attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In denying the allegations, Castro argued that such an action would have posed too great a risk of retaliation by the United States. This line of thought finds great significance in a trip that Oswald made in late September 1963 to Mexico City, where he remained until early October and made repeated attempts to contact the Cuban and Soviet consulates.
At the other end of the Cuban political conspiracy spectrum were theories that attempted to tie the assassination and Oswald to anti-Castro groups who were angry at Kennedy for his decision to withhold U.S. military support for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. (Kennedy’s lack of support for the invasion is also cited as a motive by those who hold that vindictive elements within the CIA were behind the assassination.) These theories emphasize Oswald’s efforts on behalf of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans in April–August 1963 and his encounters with individuals from both pro- and anti-Castro groups.
Cuba is also on the margins of the theories that blame the assassination on organized crime, tangentially connected because of the CIA’s efforts to recruit the Mafia, through Chicago syndicate boss Sam Giancana, to help kill Castro, whose revolution had ousted organized crime from Cuba. More central to the motive proposed for the mob wanting to kill President Kennedy were the aggressive efforts by his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to investigate and eradicate organized crime. Ruby also figures into some of these theories because of his connection with organized crime as a result of his involvement with gambling.
One of the most-developed theories was pushed by Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans, who alleged that anti-Castro and anticommunist elements within the CIA were behind a conspiracy that involved Oswald and a coterie of rabid New Orleans anticommunists—businessman Clay Shaw, private detective and former FBI agent Guy Banister, and David Ferrie, who had been in the same Civil Air Patrol squadron as Oswald in the 1950s. Banister and Ferrie died before Garrison brought his case to trial, but Shaw was found not guilty in 1969. The book Garrison later wrote about his pursuit, On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (1988), was a touchstone for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK (1991).
Yet another theory put Johnson at the centre of a plot to kill Kennedy to clear his own path to the presidency. Evidence for this theory was supposedly provided by a statement by convicted Watergate conspirator and former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, who claimed that Johnson had ordered CIA agents to kill Kennedy.
Subsequent congressional responses
While still frames from the Zapruder’s 8-mm footage had been published in November 1963 in Life (which had purchased the rights to the film), the footage itself did not receive a wide viewing until 1975, when it was shown on the Good Night America television program. In showing Kennedy’s head jerking backward, the film seemed to indicate that a shot had come from in front of the president and not from Oswald’s sniper’s nest, adding seeming support to those who argued that there had been a second shooter on Dealey Plaza’s grassy knoll. The uproar generated by the American public’s response to the film and by the revelations that the CIA had withheld pertinent information from the Warren Commission contributed to the establishment in 1976 of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which investigated not only the assassination of Kennedy but also that of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Although the HSCA’s findings were largely in line with those of the Warren Commission (including the conclusion that a shot by Oswald had killed the president and that a single bullet had hit both Kennedy and Connally), its bombshell revelation was a Dictabelt audio recording made from a Dallas motorcycle policeman’s microphone that was said to provide evidence of four shots—that is, three by Oswald and a fourth by another shooter. That fourth shot, a miss, was thought to have come from the grassy knoll. As a result of this acoustic evidence, the HSCA concluded that there had been two shooters and that the assassination was likely the product of a conspiracy. The committee also concluded that neither any U.S. security or intelligence agencies (including the CIA) nor the government of Cuba or the Soviet Union had been involved. It did not rule out the involvement of organized crime or anti-Castro groups, but it could not prove it. Not long after the committee published its report, however, the reliability of the acoustic evidence and the conclusions drawn from it came under broad criticism, greatly undermining the HSCA’s assertion that there had been a conspiracy.
The release and popularity of Stone’s JFK in 1991 sparked a new round of conspiracy speculation, to which Congress responded with the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (the members of which were not sworn in until 1994). From 1994 to 1998 this independent board reviewed, declassified, and made available millions of pages of previously sealed or secret documents from the Warren Commission, the HSCA, the FBI, the CIA, and scores of other governmental organizations. The board also conducted some new interviews.
The act required that the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) release all of the related documents within 25 years. As the October 26, 2017, deadline for the release of the remaining undisclosed documents approached, U.S. Pres. Donald Trump effusively anticipated the disclosure. At the 11th hour, however, the White House was inundated with requests from the CIA and the FBI to redact several hundred documents in the interest of national security. It was thought that some of the intelligence agencies’ concerns related to fears that the remaining documents included the identities of U.S. intelligence sources who might still be living and at risk of retaliation. After some hesitancy, Trump complied with the agencies’ requests, placing some 300 files under further classified review, which was to be completed within six months, but authorizing the release of nearly 2,900 other unseen documents. In so doing, Trump advised the intelligence agencies to be “extremely circumspect” in any request for further delays, noting that the “need for continued protection can only have grown weaker with the passage of time.”
Historians were dubious that any of the newly released documents would provide conclusive evidence for any of the conspiracy theories. Some pundits cautioned against cherry-picking supportive information. Among the documents released were a minutely detailed account of Oswald’s trip to Mexico City and memos from high-level intelligence officials, including one in which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover bemoans the Dallas Police Department’s failure to heed FBI warnings of the need to protect Oswald during his fatal transfer from the Dallas Police jail. Another Hoover memo describes the Soviet government’s response to the assassination and the KGB’s conviction that Johnson was involved.
As the April 2018 deadline for the reevaluation of the files that had been held back drew near, NARA released additional batches of documents, some which had never been seen. Most of the documents released, however, already had been made public but were re-released with fewer redactions. In all, during 2017, NARA released nearly 35,000 documents related to the Kennedy assassination, including some 16,000 that were released in full. On April 26, 2018, the Trump administration surprised many observers by announcing a three-year extension of the deadline for the release of some documents, which it had deemed needed to remain confidential because of “identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.” The new deadline for the further release of documents was set for October 26, 2021.
All of the attempts to make previously classified information public were taken in the belief that removing the government’s veil of secrecy from the assassination would help bring closure. However, decades after the event and the investigations, speculation continues and conspiracy theories still abound.Jeff Wallenfeldt