assassination of John F. Kennedy: Facts & Related Content

Written and fact-checked by The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Date	November 22, 1963
Location	Dallas • Texas • United States

Kennedy's assassination was thought by many Americans to have been the result of a conspiracy rather than the act of an individual despite findings to the contrary by the Warren Commission.
Evidence for this theory was supposedly provided by a statement by convicted Watergate conspirator and former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, Jr., who claimed that Johnson had ordered CIA agents to kill Kennedy.
On the same day, Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One at 2:38 pm, before takeoff, with Kennedy's corpse aboard. Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing blood-spattered clothes, stood at his side.
Lee Harvey Oswald never stood trial for murder, because, while being taken into custody, he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a distraught Dallas nightclub owner.
Popular but generally disregarded conspiracy theories claim that LBJ, the U.S. military, or the mob engineered the assassination of JFK. Over time 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 individuals have been blamed.