Assassination

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963, while on a political trip through Texas, he was pronounced dead at 1:00pm. Kennedy was struck by two bullets, according to the single bullet theory developed by Arlen Specter. Texas Governor John Connally, seated ahead of Kennedy, was also struck by a single bullet, but survived. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in a theatre about 80 minutes after the assassination and was then charged at 7:00 p.m. for killing a Dallas policeman, J.D Tippit, under "murder with malice". Oswald was then charged at 11:30 p.m. for the murder of Kennedy (there being no charge for "assassination" of a president at that time). Oswald denied shooting anyone; he claimed that he was being set up as a "patsy", and that photographs of him holding the alleged murder weapon were fabrications. Oswald was fatally shot less than two days later on Sunday, November 24 in a Dallas police station by Jack Ruby, in front of TV cameras in the first live murder ever seen by U.S. audiences. Consequently, Oswald's guilt or innocence was never determined in a court of law, and some critics (such as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and conspiracy researchers Mark Lane and David S. Lifton) contend that Oswald was either part of a conspiracy, or framed, or that he was not involved at all. On November 29, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission—chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren—to investigate the assassination. It concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin. Conspiracy theories that dispute the official version of US President John F. Kennedy's assassination have been given a major boost by tests in Italy. Army-supervised tests on a rifle identical to the Italian-made weapon Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used to murder the president suggest he could not have been working alone. According to the official Warren Commission report on the assassination, Oswald loaded and fired three shots at Kennedy in seven seconds in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He used a Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle. The first shot missed the president, the second went through his back and neck and the third hit Kennedy in the head, killing him. But the Italian tests showed that it would take a minimum of 19 seconds to load and fire three shots using a Carcano M91/38. So there must have been at least one more sniper for so many shots to have been fired in such a short space of time, the experts believe. The tests were carried out at the former Carcano factory in the town of Terni, around 100km north of Rome, where the alleged murder weapon was produced in 1940. The research also raised questions about whether the Commission's conclusion that the third bullet disintegrated when it hit Kennedy's head is compatible with the supposition that Oswald was about 80 meters away in a book depository when he fired the shot. Tests on the Carcano M91/38 suggested the bullet would have remained intact and come out of Kennedy's forehead, if fired from that distance. The tests also focused on the so-called 'magic bullet' of the second shot. The Warren Report concluded the bullet passed through Kennedy's body and hit then-Texas Governor John Connally in the back, chest and wrist, remaining almost perfectly intact at the end. Bullets fired through two blocks of meat in the Italian tests were so deformed that experts concluded it would have been impossible for the bullet to remain intact. Over the years sceptics have picked at suspected inconsistencies in the official version of the Warren Commission - named after Chief Justice Earl Warren - to support a wide range of conspiracy theories. The CIA, the Mafia, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Cuban leader Fidel Castro have all been variously blamed for the assassination by conspiracy theorists. A later investigation in 1976 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) also concluded that Oswald was the assassin, but that there was a "probable conspiracy" as well. The assassination was captured on film, most famously by Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, directly to the north of the limousine and east of the grassy knoll, as well as by Orville Nix to the south of the motorcade route. Several other films were taken in Dealey Plaza, including that of Marianne "Maria" Muchmore, which shows the limousine slowing at the grassy knoll and agent Clint Hill climbing atop the vehicle. On February 19, Presidents Day, 2007 new film footage relating to the JFK assassination was donated to the Sixth Floor Museum by George Jefferies, an amateur photographer. The film does not show the assassination, having been taken roughly 90 seconds beforehand and a couple of blocks away. One detail relevant to the investigation of the assassination is a clear view of Kennedy's bunched collar — which has led to different calculations about how low in the back Kennedy was first shot.

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