The Assassination of John F Kennedy
With election season fast approaching, on November 22nd, 1963, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy joined her husband on a ten-mile motorcade through Dallas Texas in a convertible Lincoln Continental limousine, waving to an enthusiastic crowd that lined the parade route. Along for the ride sat Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie, when at 12:30 in the afternoon, as their limo passed the Texas School Book Depository Building, three shots rang out from a sixth floor window, ending the life of the 35th president of the United States and seriously wounding Governor Connally.
Walter Cronkite’s Emotional Reporting
For those Americans alive at the time, the tragic murder of the commander-in-chief gutted a nation to its core. Passing away at Parkland Hospital at the still young age of 46, at 2:39 that same afternoon, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the presidential oath aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field, in front of 30 eyewitnesses including Jackie Kennedy, who still wore clothes stained with her dead husband’s blood.
Quick Departure From Dallas
Seven minutes later, Air Force One departed Dallas for its return trip to Washington. Less than an hour after JFK’s murder, 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald took the life of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit, who had stopped Oswald near the suspect’s Dallas rooming house. Two days later, while Oswald was being moved from Dallas police headquarters to a more secure location, the suspected assassin was himself slain by strip club owner Jack Ruby, which in turn laid the groundwork for years of speculation and conspiracy theories regarding who ordered the president’s assassination.
Mournful Day in American History
On November 25th, 1963, a nation came together to mourn the loss of a dynamic American icon, as Kennedy’s horse-drawn caisson traveled from the U.S. Capitol to a requiem mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, before leaders from 92 countries followed his caisson to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was buried with full military honors on a slope below Arlington House. At the request of his widow, Jacqueline lit an eternal flame, which still burns to this day in honor of the the fallen president, making the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a prescient foreshadowing of a nation’s violent years to come.