Air Force One touched down at Dallas’s Love Field at about 11:30 on the morning of November 22, 1963. On board was President John F. Kennedy who was beginning the first day of a planned two-day trip to Texas. Within minutes, the president and his wife Jackie took their places in the rear seat of the presidential limousine and joined a motorcade that would escort America’s leader to his death.
The young president had been in office less than three years. The highlight of his tenure had occurred in October a year earlier when nuclear war had been averted by the diffusion of a confrontation with the Soviet Union over their deployment of missiles in Cuba.
President Kennedy and Jackie arrive
in Dallas, 11:25 AM 11/22/63
Click picture to see
the assassination site His trip to Texas was a political one – an attempt to mollify a factious division within the Texas Democratic Party that might threaten his run for re-election the following year. Accompanying the president in his open limousine was the Democratic Governor of Texas, John Connally, and his wife Nellie. Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird rode in a following limousine accompanied by Texas Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough.
The motorcade (led by Dallas police, interspersed with Secret Service cars and followed by press cars) slowly made its way through the streets of Dallas to the accompaniment of cheering crowds that filled the sidewalks. By 12:30 it was approaching its end as it slowed to make a sharp left-hand turn in front of the Texas School Book Depository Building. Suddenly the festive atmosphere was shattered by the sound of three shots and immediately replaced with horror and chaos.
As spectators ran or fell to the ground in self-protection, the motorcade accelerated to top speed and raced to near-by Parkland Hospital. The president was dead, Governor Connally wounded.
The president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, fled the scene. About forty-five minutes later, Oswald was confronted by a police officer on a Dallas street. Oswald shot and killed the officer and then ran into a near-by movie theater where he was captured. Two days later, Oswald himself became the victim of an assassin’s bullet as he was being escorted from police headquarters to the Dallas County Jail.