When John F. Kennedy became the 4th sitting president of the United States to be assassinated at the hands of an armed man in Texas 60 years ago, the country was left completely stunned and heartbroken.
The handsome and charismatic Democrat from Massachusetts was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, joining a list that includes Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley.
Unlike the other three assassinations, the motive for JFK’s murder, which the FBI concluded was carried out by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, has always remained obscure, sparking a debate that has dragged on for decades.
Why was JFK in Texas?
President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy traveled to Texas as part of a campaign to unify the Democratic Party and kick off his re-election bid in 1964.
The couple spent November 21 in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth, flying into Dallas Love Field on Air Force One the next day.
The president and the first lady were greeted by a convertible Lincoln Continental that would take them, along with Texas Governor John Connally, through the streets of downtown Dallas to give a speech at the Trade Mart at 12:30 PM.
Shots rang out
As the car passed the Texas Book Depository, three shots were fired.
The official version of events is that Kennedy was hit by two bullets, one in the neck, exiting through the throat before hitting Governor Connally, who was seriously injured but survived the attack. The other bullet struck the president in the head.
Secret Service agent Clint Hill, now 91 years old, jumped onto the limousine and covered the first lady and the president. The motorcade then rushed to Parkland Hospital. Thirty minutes later, the president was pronounced dead.
After the assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, with Jackie Kennedy by his side.
The Arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald
Former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had spent time in the Soviet Union, was arrested for the president’s murder in a movie theater less than an hour after the shots were fired and after also killing Dallas police officer JD Tippit.
Two days later, while Oswald was being transported through the basement of the Dallas Police Department headquarters, live on television, he was shot and killed by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
Ruby was convicted of Oswald’s murder and sentenced to death, but he appealed and died of cancer in 1967 before a new trial could take place.
The Warren Commission and the FBI
After Kennedy’s assassination, the FBI conducted about 25,000 interviews and investigated thousands of leads before concluding that Oswald acted alone.
The Warren Commission, established by President Johnson to investigate the assassination, spent a year looking into the events and in its final 889-page report also concluded that Oswald acted alone.
The report confirmed that “there was no evidence” that Oswald or Ruby were part of a domestic conspiracy to kill Kennedy, or that a foreign government had planned and executed the attack.
Investigators noted that Oswald traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959, unsuccessfully sought Soviet citizenship, and lived there until 1962. The report also stated that Oswald, a Marxist, visited the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in September 1963, months before the shooting.
Conspiracy theorists have questioned the reason for Oswald’s visits to the embassies and whether he had any contact with local intelligence officials.
However, the report ultimately did not provide a conclusive motive for the assassination.
“The explanation for why Oswald killed President Kennedy was buried with him,” TIME wrote in 1964.
Conspiracies
Conspiracy theories have emerged about the president’s assassination over the last six decades, with thousands of books, films, TV shows, and podcasts dedicated to what happened and the mysteries that remain.
According to a Gallup poll earlier this month, the majority of Americans believe that Oswald did not act alone on November 22, 2023, and that others were involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
Meanwhile, 2024 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. – JFK’s nephew and son of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968 while running for president – supports a conspiracy theory that the CIA was responsible for his uncle’s assassination, calling the evidence “overwhelming.”
“There is compelling evidence that the CIA was involved in his assassination,” Kennedy said in a May interview with John Catsimatidis on New York’s WABC 770 radio station.
Kennedy went on to suggest that the assassination was carried out because the president refused to send American troops to Vietnam.
Source: Independent