Dealey Plaza, Twelve-Thirty in the Afternoon

The motorcade turned from Houston Street onto Elm Street at approximately twelve twenty-nine in the afternoon on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. The crowds along the route were deep and enthusiastic. Dallas had worried, in the weeks before, about the president's reception. The city's political culture ran rightward and hot that year; there had been incidents, pamphlets, a wanted poster circulated with Kennedy's photograph. The Secret Service had assessed the route; the Texas School Book Depository on the northwest corner of Houston and Elm had not been considered a particular concern.

What happened in the next twenty-six seconds was captured on an eight-millimeter home movie by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dress manufacturer who had positioned himself on a concrete pedestal on the south side of Elm Street with a clear line of sight down the motorcade route. He had almost stayed home that morning because of rain. He started filming as the limousine turned the corner.

Lee Harvey Oswald was on the sixth floor of the Book Depository. He had been hired there about six weeks earlier. He fired three shots. The first missed or grazed. The second passed through Kennedy's neck and into Governor Connally. The third struck the president in the head at twelve-thirty in the afternoon.

The limousine accelerated. The Secret Service agent on the running board reached the car too late. Jacqueline Kennedy climbed onto the trunk of the car; accounts differ on whether she was reaching for a fragment or trying to pull an agent aboard. The motorcade raced four miles to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Physicians worked for twenty-two minutes. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was pronounced dead at one in the afternoon.

Oswald was arrested about eighty minutes after the shooting, at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, after a police officer was killed in a separate incident nearby. Two days later, on November twenty-fourth at eleven twenty-one in the morning, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department headquarters, live on national television. Oswald died without being tried.

The Warren Commission, convened by President Johnson and reporting in September nineteen sixty-four, concluded that Oswald acted alone. Sixty years and several subsequent investigations have not definitively closed the question of whether he did. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza holds more than ninety thousand items documenting this event and its aftermath, and engages the competing narratives with measured scholarly discipline.

The Zapruder film runs twenty-six seconds. It remains the most analyzed home movie in history.