Sixty Years On

There is a joke that goes like this:

Kevin Costner dies and meets God. He asks Him, “Who killed Kennedy?”

“Oswald, acting alone.”

Sixty years ago, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, was to give a speech at the Trade-Mart in Dallas, Texas. He was then to go to Austin to speak to there, overnight at Vice-President Johnson’s ranch and then fly back to Washington the next morning.

He had given a speech in nearby Fort Worth that morning, where he quipped, “Two years ago, in France, I remarked that I was the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris and I’m beginning to feel the same way here in Texas.”

It was a political trip, designed to shore up his 1964 prospects in Texas, where just weeks earlier, United Nations Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson had been attacked. Kennedy cancelled a scheduled trip to Chicago to watch Notre Dame play Navy shortly after that.

He never made it to the luncheon at the Trade-Mart. At 12:30 CST as the president, his wife and Governor John Connelly and his wife turned the corner, past the Texas School Book Depository Building to hit the freeway, shots were fired at the motorcade.

The number of shots are still debated today. Three, four, five? Six? We know of at least three, fired from the sixth floor of the Book…