kennedy

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy arrived at Dallas' Love Field from Fort Worth at 11:37 in the morning. He was with Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Texas governor John Connally, and Connally’s wife. They were in Dallas as part of a tour for the 1964 Presidential campaign. The motorcade left Love Field drove through downtown Dallas on Main Street. Next, they turned north onto Houston Street, moving against the normal direction of traffic, (the street had been blocked off) for one block. From Houston Street, the motorcade turned left onto Elm Street and moved towards the triple underpass.The entourage was on its way to the Trade Mart north of the central business district for a sold-out luncheon. At 12:30, the open limousine moved west on Elm past Dealey Plaza when shots were fired at the motorcade. They started just past the oak tree on the north side of Elm and stopping before the limousine reached the second lamppost on the north side of the street. Both the President and the Governor were wounded. The limousine picked up speed and raced to the Parkland Hospital Emergency Room where Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:00.

Police at Dealey questioned eye witnesses and immediately began searching the Texas School Book Depository, a textbook distribution facility facing Dealey Plaza at 411 Elm and the rail yard in back of the pergola on Dealey Plaza. They also searched a fenced area north of Elm and west of the Depository, later known as the grassy knoll (on the north side of Elm Street between the parking lots for the School Book Depository and triple underpass). No evidence was found. At 1:12, after a search of the School Book Depository, police discovered a barricade of boxes, three spent bullet cartridges, and a paper bag in the southeast corner window area on the sixth floor. Ten minutes later, they found a rifle between boxes near the six-floor staircase. This evidence, along with finger and palm prints on some of the boxes, was later linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, an order clerk who had begun work at the depository October 15, 1963.
Oswald had been seen on the sixth floor about 35 minutes before the motorcade passed the building, and in the second-floor lunchroom about two minutes after the shooting. Police investigators said that Oswald left the building through the front door.

At 1:18, a call came in on the police radio that Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit had been shot at Tenth and Patton in the Oak Cliff section of town. Oswald was seen a few minutes later at the Hardy Shoe Store a few blocks away from the Tippit shooting. The witness, Johnny Brewer, led police to the Texas Theater where Oswald was arrested at 1:50. He was linked to both the Kennedy assassination and to the Tippit murder.

On November 24, as Oswald was being transferred from the City Jail to the County Jail, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a local night club owner, on public television. Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death in March 1964, but the verdict was overturned in the fall of 1966. While awaiting a second trial, Ruby died of cancer at Parkland Hospital in January 1967.

On November 29, 1963, President Johnson established a commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. Their findings were made public on September 24, 1964. They stated that Oswald acted alone when he killed the President. Discrepancies in the Warren Report led to numerous investigations in the years that followed.
On January 2, 1979, the House of Representative's Select Committee on Assassinations supported the Warren panel's conclusion that Oswald fired the fatal shots, however, the committee also found that, based on audio recordings of the shooting taken from police radios at the time of the assassination, that a second gunman had fired at the motorcade from the grassy knoll. The House Select Committee concluded that President Kennedy "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."
The FBI later rejected these findings. In 1988, the Justice Department formally closed the investigation into the assassination, concluding that there was no "persuasive evidence" of conspiracy.