JFK Assassination
John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, while riding through Dealey Plaza in a presidential motorcade.
Friday, just after noon time in Texas, Kennedy was in the vehicle with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie. He was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack, though he would recover. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead around 1 p.m.
Much like September 11th, 2001, many Americans remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that Kennedy had been killed in Dallas.
About an hour after Kennedy and Connally were shot, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested by the Dallas Police Department and charged under Texas state law with the murders of Kennedy and of J. D. Tippit, a Dallas police officer.
At 11:21Â a.m. on November 24, 1963, as live television cameras covered Oswald being moved through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, he was fatally shot by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Like Kennedy, Oswald was also taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he soon died.
Ruby was convicted of Oswald's murder, though it was later overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.
Conspiracy and speculation of all kinds have long plagued the Kennedy Assassination. Speculation began almost immediately that his murder was part of a larger plot with broadcasters speculating about right wing involvement in Ruby’s murder of Oswald. The Zapruder film was one of the first examples of a film with a cult following.
Inconsistencies in the investigation, along with circumstantial evidence of a cover up, have lent credence to all manner of conspiracy theories in the decades since the killing, with theories implicating: the CIA, the military-industrial complex, organized crime, the government of Cuba led by Fidel Castro, Cuban exiles, Lyndon Johnson, George H. W. Bush, Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, J. Edgar Hoover, Earl Warren, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service, the John Birch Society, far-right wealthy Texans, the KGB and Nikita Khrushchev, Aristotle Onassis, the government of South Vietnam, and international drug lords like a French heroin syndicate.