1963 - JFK
JFK - DALLAS
In November 1963, President Kennedy journeyed to Texas for a speechmaking tour. In Dallas on November 22, he and his wife were cheered enthusiastically as their open car passed through the streets. Suddenly, at 12:30 in the afternoon, an assassin fired several shots, striking the president twice, in the base of the neck and the head, and seriously wounding John Connally, the governor of Texas, who was riding with the Kennedys. The president was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about a half hour later. Within two hours, Vice President Johnson took the oath as president. On November 24, amid national and worldwide mourning, the president's body lay in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. The next day, leaders of 92 nations attended the state funeral, and a million persons lined the route as a horse-drawn caisson bore the body to St. Matthew's Cathedral for a requiem Mass. While millions of Americans watched the ceremonies on television, the president was buried on a slope in ArlingtonNationalCemetery. There an eternal flame, lighted by his widow, marks the grave. On the day of the assassination, the police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, for the president's murder. Oswald, who had lived for a time in the Soviet Union, killed Dallas Policeman J. D. Tippit while resisting arrest. Two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police station, Oswald himself was fatally shot by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner. On November 29, President Johnson appointed a seven-member commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to conduct a thorough investigation of the assassination and report to the nation. The commission's report, made public on Sept. 27, 1964, held that Oswald fired the shots that killed the president. Further, to allay suspicions that the murder was a conspiratorial plot, it stated that the committee "found no evidence" that either Oswald or Ruby "was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy." In 1979, however, the House assassinations committee, after approximately two years of investigation, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald probably was part of a conspiracy that also may have included members of organized crime.
