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1963 murder of the U.S. President / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was in the vehicle with his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, Nellie, when he was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally was also wounded in the attack but recovered. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's death.
Assassination of John F. Kennedy | |
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Location | Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas U.S. |
Date | November 22, 1963; 60 years ago (1963-11-22) 12:30 p.m. (CST) |
Target | John F. Kennedy |
Weapons | 6.5×52mm Italian Carcano M91/38 |
Deaths | John F. Kennedy J. D. Tippit[note 1] |
Injured | John Connally James Tague[note 2] |
Perpetrator | Lee Harvey Oswald |
Charges | Murder with malice (2 counts, murdered before trial) |
Around 70 minutes after Kennedy and Connally were shot, Oswald was arrested by the Dallas Police Department and charged under Texas state law with the murders of Kennedy and J. D. Tippit: a Dallas policeman shot in a nearby neighborhood shortly after the assassination. On the morning of November 24, 1963, as Oswald was 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, although the verdict was later overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.
After a 10-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had assassinated Kennedy, that Oswald had acted entirely alone, and that Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald. Five years later, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison tried Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill Kennedy; Shaw was found innocent. Subsequent federal investigations like the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee agreed with the Warren Commission's general findings. In its 1979 report, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was likely "assassinated as a result of a conspiracy", largely based on now discredited acoustic evidence. The HSCA did not identify a second gunman or group involved in the possible conspiracy, but concluded that there was "a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President". A separate U.S. Justice Department investigation concluded that there was no "persuasive evidence" of a conspiracy. Nevertheless, Kennedy's assassination is the subject of widespread debate and has spawned numerous conspiracy theories and alternative scenarios. Polls have found that a majority of Americans believe that there was a conspiracy.
Kennedy's assassination was the first of four major assassinations during the 1960s in the United States, coming two years before the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and five years before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and his brother Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Kennedy was the fourth U.S. president to die in office, and the last to date.