John F. Kennedy Assassination

Case background and investigation

President John F. Kennedy arrived at Love Field in Dallas at 11:40 a.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, on the second day of a Texas trip, according to the Warren Commission's report. A motorcade was to take him through downtown Dallas to a luncheon at the Trade Mart. At about 12:30 p.m., as the open presidential limousine passed through Dealey Plaza, rifle shots struck the president and seriously wounded Texas Governor John Connally, who was riding in the same car. Kennedy was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital and pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. He was 46.

Dallas police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the plaza, in a movie theater that afternoon. He was charged under Texas law with the murder of the president and of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, who was shot dead about 45 minutes after the assassination. Oswald denied the charges. On November 24, while being moved through the basement of Dallas police headquarters, he was shot by nightclub operator Jack Ruby and died at Parkland. Ruby was convicted of murdering Oswald; the conviction was overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.

Because Oswald was never tried, no court ruled on his guilt. President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren on November 29, 1963. Its report, delivered on September 24, 1964, concluded that Oswald fired the shots from the sixth floor of the depository and that there was no evidence that he or Ruby was part of a conspiracy.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations re-examined the case in the late 1970s. Its findings, published by the National Archives, state that Oswald fired three shots and that the third killed the president. Relying on acoustic evidence, the committee also concluded that there was a high probability that two gunmen fired and that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, though it could not identify another gunman. It found that the Soviet and Cuban governments, the Secret Service, the FBI and the CIA were not involved. A later National Academy of Sciences panel disputed the acoustic analysis, and the Justice Department concluded that no persuasive evidence supported a conspiracy.

Congress passed a records act in 1992 requiring release of assassination files. After staged releases, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 23, 2025, and on March 18, 2025, the National Archives released the records that had been withheld for classification. Historians told the BBC they did not expect the material to change the basic account.