JFK Assassinated: Dallas Shocks the World

Twelve seconds of gunfire in a Dallas motorcade shattered the American presidency and fractured the nation's sense of invulnerability. President John F. Kennedy was struck by bullets while riding in an open limousine through Dealey Plaza at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, dying at Parkland Memorial Hospital thirty minutes later. He was 46 years old, the fourth U.S. president killed by assassination and the youngest to die in office. Kennedy had traveled to Texas to mend a rift within the state's Democratic Party ahead of the 1964 election. The motorcade route through downtown Dallas was published in advance. Governor John Connally, seated in front of Kennedy, was severely wounded in the same attack. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, sitting beside her husband, was splattered with blood and brain matter. She climbed onto the trunk of the moving limousine in a moment captured on film that remains one of the most haunting images in American history. Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the United States, was arrested that afternoon after also killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Oswald fired from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository using an Italian-made Carcano rifle he had purchased by mail order for $19.95. He denied involvement, declaring to reporters: "I'm just a patsy." Within two hours, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in her bloodstained pink suit. The assassination traumatized a generation and spawned decades of conspiracy theories that polls consistently show a majority of Americans believe. Kennedy's murder remains the single most investigated crime in American history, and the questions it raised about power, violence, and truth have never fully been answered.