On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated at the age of 46. The president had been in office for just three years and was extraordinarily popular both at home and abroad. The murder gripped the nation and marked what’s now seen as one of the more turbulent periods in modern U.S. history.
Kennedy was shot while riding in a motorcade going down the streets of Dallas, Texas. The drive was part of his presidential campaign (that he hadn’t yet officially announced). Texas was a key state for Kennedy, but Dallas was something of a hotbed of opposition to the administration. A month earlier Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson had been physically attacked there.
The president gave remarks on the morning of Nov. 22, speaking in part about the challenges he and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, had faced after the recent death of their baby. Jacqueline was with her husband then, in her first appearance in public since the death.
The Kennedys departed the event in an open convertible, and the car took a turn off the city’s main avenue to another street. It was there that the president was shot, as was the governor of Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was arrested around an hour after the shots were fired – and around half an hour after JFK was pronounced dead. Oswald was himself killed two days later while being transferred to a county jail.
You can read more at the websites of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the Library of Congress.
