When dressmaker Abraham Zapruder brought his camera to see President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade pass through Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963, he could never have suspected that he’d witness anassassination—or that his home movie would become one of the most watched ...read more
The public has waited nearly 26 years for the last classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to be released. But it looks like we’ll have to keep waiting, due to a decision by the Trump administration to withhold some material in the archive ...read more
On October 26, the National Archives made public more than 2,800 files relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, just hours before the deadline set for their final release by Congress in the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act. President Donald Trump announced ...read more
The National Archives just released more than 2,800 previously classified records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, sparking a feeding frenzy among historians and conspiracy theorists alike.Click HERE for our most recentstory on what the documents ...read more
Under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law back in 1992, the National Archives established a single collection of all records relating to Kennedy’s assassination. The law also set up a plan to declassify the records, ...read more
1. “Migrant Mother,” 1936, California In 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange shot this image of a destitute woman, 32-year-old Florence Owens, with an infant and two other of her seven children at a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo, California. Lange took the photo, which came to be ...read more
1. Clint Hill When the Secret Service agent assigned to Jackie Kennedy heard the shots ring out in Dealey Plaza, he rushed from the left running board of the trailing car and dove onto the trunk of the presidential limousine and shoved scrambling Jackie Kennedy back inside the ...read more
While the police converged on the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas and doctors at Parkland Hospital began working on the mortally wounded President in Emergency Room No. 1, Lee Harvey Oswald was briskly walking the seven blocks from the depository to the bus stop at Elm ...read more
Against the backdrop of fear and apprehension over the spread of communism, the Kennedy administration was constantly preoccupied with how to maintain U.S. power and avoid the catastrophic consequences that would follow from nuclear conflict. In the wake of the Cuban Missile ...read more
On November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder shot what has become the most famous home movie of all time: a chilling 26-second snippet of film depicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Russian-born Zapruder was a clothing manufacturer whose office sat across the ...read more
1. Some members of the Commission were reluctant to serve on it. Lyndon Johnson initially resisted the idea of forming a federal commission to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, preferring to allow the state of Texas to review what he called a “local killing.” But after ...read more
1. The Politician Born on a farm, John Connally earned both an undergraduate and law degree from the University of Texas prior to serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He got his political start as a legislative assistant to then-Representative Lyndon B. Johnson and later ...read more
In the spring of 1963, President John F. Kennedy paid a visit to Arlington House, an estate built by George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson of America’s first president, and later inhabited by Custis’ son-in-law, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The Greek Revival ...read more
On November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby (1911-1967), a 52-year-old Dallas nightclub operator, stunned America when he shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963), the accused assassin of President John Kennedy (1917-1963). Two days earlier, on November 22, Kennedy was fatally shot ...read more
One week after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes a special commission, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. After 10 months of gathering ...read more
Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald–the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy–is found guilty of the “murder with malice” of Oswald and sentenced to die in the electric chair. It was the first courtroom verdict to be televised in U.S. ...read more
At 12:20 p.m., in the basement of the Dallas police station, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. On November 22, President Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in an open-car motorcade ...read more
On January 3, 1967, Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, dies of cancer in a Dallas hospital. The Texas Court of Appeals had recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and was scheduled ...read more
Three days after his assassination in Dallas, Texas, John F. Kennedy is laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was shot to death while riding in an open-car motorcade with his wife and ...read more
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, is assassinated while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible. First lady Jacqueline Kennedy rarely accompanied her husband on political outings, but she was beside him, along with Texas ...read more
On this day, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. Kennedy took office on January 20, 1961. From the start of his term, he was faced with a deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia, in which both Laos and South Vietnam were threatened by communist insurgencies. ...read more
On this day in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson receives a special commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Since the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed by a man named Jack Ruby almost ...read more
On this day in 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints a special commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred a week earlier, on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. According to his memoirs and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, ...read more
On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated three days earlier, is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. It was his son’s third birthday. Kennedy’s coffin had lain in state in the rotunda of the Capitol building the previous day. Approximately 250,000 ...read more