LIFE The Day Kennedy Died

By The Editors of LIFE

Fifty years ago on November 22, 1963, in Dallas's Dealey Plaza, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline. LIFE magazine, the weekly pictorial chronicle of events in America and throughout the world, was quickly on the scene. The Kennedys had been our story: Jack and Jackie made the cover in his sailboat before they were married and he was a fresh-faced senator from Massachusetts, and the White House doors had remained open to LIFE throughout his presidency: Cecil Stoughton's photographs of Caroline and John-John in the Oval Office, Jackie's tour of the renovation, tense behind-the-scenes moments during 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis — all of this appeared in LIFE. We needed to be in Dallas.

The famous Zapruder film first appeared in LIFE, after being acquired by LIFE's Richard B. Stolley. Stolley also interviewed at the time Dallas police, Kennedy administration officials, members of the Oswald family, workers at Jack Ruby's bar. Jackie's first conversation after the murder was with Theodore H. White for LIFE, and in it she told the American people, for the first time, about the Camelot her late husband had imagined.

All of that is revisited in this commemorative book, including:

• All 486 frames of the Zapruder film in print for the first time
• An essay by Richard B. Stolley on how he exclusively obtained the iconic film for LIFE
• An essay by Abraham Zapruder's granddaughter, Alexandra, who writes for the first time about how the film affected her family over the generations
• Personal stories about where they were when they heard the news from Barbra Streisand, Maya Angelou, Jimmy Carter, Tony Bennett, Willie Mays, Sergei Khrushchev, James Earl Jones, John Boehner, Tom Brokaw, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alec Baldwin, Bill O'Reilly, Dan Rather and many more
• Rarely seen photos from the TIME/LIFE archive of Allan Grant's photo essay of the Oswald family on the night of the assassination
• A foreword featuring a conversation with historian David McCullough
• A full reprint of LIFE's 1963 issue covering the tragic events in Dallas
• LIFE's Theodore H. White's famous "Camelot" interview with Jackie (which she gave shortly after the assassination), as well as the story behind the interview and the words that never ran
• A new essay on 50 years of conspiracy theories by J.I. Baker, author of The Empty Glass

The Kennedys: A LIFE story for more than 50 years, and still today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Nov 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547846283

Book preview

Farewell

Introduction

The Moment That Lives On

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was one of the most traumatic events in our country’s history. How did it define us as Americans?

By Lily Rothman

BETTMANN/GETTY

At the funeral, on November 25, 1963, from left: Caroline Kennedy (obscured by the sailor and holding her mother’s hand), Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, Peter Lawford (behind Rose), John F. Kennedy Jr., Robert Kennedy, Stephen E. Smith and Patricia Kennedy Lawford.

Just as trauma leaves its mark on the mind of an individual, so too can moments scar a society. A sudden, brutal blow carves a deep sadness into a country and is followed in later days and years by an inevitable question: Where were you when . . .

Those are the days we, collectively, remember most keenly. There’s 1941’s date which will live in infamy, when the United States was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. There are the terrorist attacks of September 11, forever known by their place on the calendar. And there’s November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy died. Those Americans old enough to have been aware of the events in Dallas will remember, even now, how it was when they learned that the young President had been shot. And for the many of us who were not yet alive or aware, the day nevertheless endures, in the photos we’ve seen, the stories we have heard.

That thunderbolt of news engendered a collective awareness. Americans—and others around the world—subconsciously sorted out the moments that would come to stand for the whole awful episode. These were the moments that would live on.

When Kennedy was assassinated, no American cultural institution was better positioned than LIFE to present those memories. The magazine was, and had been for decades, a central source of American iconography. In the years leading up to 1963, LIFE’s editors had taken special interest in the Kennedy family. The Massachusetts clan was everything the editors could have hoped for, from the rags-to-riches American Dream narrative in the family’s past to the photogenic young children romping around the White House in its present. Readers agreed, eager for photos of and stories about the handsome young President and stylish First Lady Jackie. And when the enchanting story turned tragic, LIFE was still there.

The weekly had the means and experience to cover the Kennedy assassination like no other outlet. Plus, as Richard Stolley, who was then the magazine’s Los Angeles bureau chief, recounts in this book, saying that you were from LIFE functioned as the magic words when it came to access. LIFE thus secured its own place in Kennedy history with its role in publishing frames from the Zapruder film and locating assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s family. The staff rushed to get the news into that week’s edition, and to come up with some way to honor the President with whom the publication had had such a deep relationship.

The issue covering the events of November 22 is the only time LIFE’s iconic logo has been printed in black.

The assassination shook the United States to its soul, and the disturbance ran even deeper than the surprise of death in the streets, the gore of Frame 313, the blood on Jackie’s pink suit, the slow gait of the riderless horse, the poignant power of little John-John’s salute. That time in 1963 would, in ways that would not become fully clear until much later, also mark the end of an era of American innocence.

The smooth transfer of power to the new President, Lyndon Johnson, who was sworn in almost immediately, assuaged concerns that the murder might rupture America’s relatively young democracy. But, even if the government continued to tick along without a hitch, society did not. Feelings and priorities within the two major political parties shifted, with Kennedy’s cold warrior stance giving way to a more liberal Democratic Party as the Republicans moved farther to the right. And for many both inside and outside Washington, disenchantment replaced trust. The dark events in Dallas also stirred a part of the American psyche that tends to look for secrets and lies, giving rise to conspiracy theories that still grab attention today.

The Kennedy myth was just that: The happiness and good health the family exuded did not always correspond with truth, and they were experts at using the media to manipulate their images. A lot of what the nation admired so much was manufactured for the cameras that loved the family so. And yet, in terms of its impact on the American mind, the myth was real as real can be. The optimism encapsulated by Kennedy’s New Frontier politics mattered. When Kennedy told Americans they could go to the moon and would, that mattered. When he implored Americans to ask what they could do for their country, it mattered. No dramatist could have manufactured a metaphor as piercing as reality when that optimism was gunned down. Just days after the assassination, Jackie spoke, in LIFE, with journalist Theodore H. White. When she told him that Jack had liked to listen to the record of the musical Camelot and that he loved its line about one brief shining moment, that phrase was seen to capture their time in the White House. The brevity was as significant as the shine.

All these years later, perhaps because of the trauma and tragedy, the myth still holds. We tend to look back to that era, when all was not actually well but it was easier to pretend, with a wistful fondness.

And what we see when we look back is John F. Kennedy. So, to the many Americans who remember, we still ask the question: Where were you when?

MARK SHAW/MPTVIMAGES

On the beach in Hyannis Port, Senator John F. Kennedy relaxes with his wife, Jackie, and their daughter, Caroline, in 1959.

ROBERT KNUDSEN. WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPHS. JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON

President Kennedy speaks in 1962 to a crowd at Rice University in Houston about the space program.

CARL MYDANS/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION

Commuters in New York City read about the President’s assassination.

The Kennedys

The United States doesn’t support royalty, but if it did, the Kennedys would be royals. They have experienced the outsize triumphs, awful travails and abject tragedies of such exalted families. One of them, so obviously a prince, was elected President—our democratic version of a king—and then he was killed. The term Shakespearean is overused, but it certainly applies to the tale of the Kennedys.

DICK HANLEY/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX

By any historical measure, it all happened pretty fast, the it being a climb from the gutter to the Oval Office. Patrick Kennedy, an immigrant to the United States who fled Ireland during the Great Famine of the mid–19th century, was the patriarch of what grew to be certainly the most remarkable (adherents would argue, greatest) of all Irish American families. Bridget Murphy, too, was a famine refugee—from the same county, Wexford, as Kennedy. She traveled to America aboard the same ship in 1849. She would become Patrick’s wife and thus the matriarch of that family. Family legend holds that aboard that boat, Patrick met Bridget, and they found they had a month to kill and much in common to discuss. By the time the boat reached Boston, they were in love.

Patrick and Bridget married, but love is spiritual currency only, and their early residence was in the slum of East Boston—they probably couldn’t afford the two-penny ferry to cross the harbor into downtown. The conditions in Paddytown were beyond deplorable—60 percent of those born in Boston at that time didn’t live to see their sixth birthday—but Patrick was fiercely determined (a great trait in the family) and became a cooper. Bridget bore three daughters and two sons in eight years (a Kennedy pace).

We need to scoot ahead: Cholera hit the Irish slums hard, killing hundreds, including Patrick. He left behind one son to carry his name, his last-born child, Patrick Joseph Kennedy. The boy, P.J., went to school under the Sisters of Notre Dame, worked in Boston Harbor, saved some money, borrowed some from his mother and took possession of a saloon in a dilapidated part of town. He worked hard, his bar prospered, he bought more properties. He married up in class in 1887 to Mary Augusta Hickey. They had four children, the first of whom was Joseph Patrick Kennedy—the Joe Kennedy you know.

Joe married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of the legendary Boston politician John Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, and they had loads of children, all of whom you will see in the pages immediately following. Joe Jr. came first and was primed for greatness, John was born next in 1917, then Rosemary, then Kathleen (Kick), then Eunice (perhaps the smartest of them all), then Patricia, then Bobby, then Jean and then Teddy.

Joe Jr. was killed in the war, and John, known as Jack, was