The sun was hitting the pavement in Dallas just right on November 22, 1963. People were cheering. It felt like a party. Then, everything broke. Most of us think we know the story of the john f kennedy shooting because we've seen the grainy Zapruder film or heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald a thousand times. But when you actually sit down and look at the raw files, the official reports, and the messy, human mistakes made that day, the "clean" history we’re taught in school starts to look a lot more complicated. Honestly, it’s a miracle the country stayed together at all.
The 12:30 PM Chaos at Dealey Plaza
Dealey Plaza wasn't supposed to be a graveyard. It was just a right turn off Main Street. Kennedy was in a customized 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible. No bulletproof glass. No roof. Just the President, Jackie in her pink suit, Governor John Connally, and his wife Nellie.
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Nellie actually turned to JFK just seconds before the first shot and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." He agreed. Then the first crack rang out.
Most witnesses thought it was a motorcycle backfiring. It wasn't.
Lee Harvey Oswald was perched on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He had a 6.5mm Carcano Model 91/38 carbine. A cheap, Italian bolt-action rifle he'd bought through a mail-order ad in American Rifleman magazine for about $20.
The Warren Commission says he fired three shots.
The first one likely missed. The second hit Kennedy in the upper back, passed through his neck, and—according to the "Single Bullet Theory"—went on to hit Governor Connally in the back, chest, wrist, and thigh. This is the part that still makes people's heads spin. Skeptics call it the "Magic Bullet," but forensic experts like Luke and Michael Haag have used modern ballistics to show that because of the way the seats were aligned, the trajectory actually makes sense. It wasn't magic; it was just a weirdly straight line through two bodies.
Then came the third shot. The fatal one.
Why the Warren Commission Didn't End the Argument
President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission because the country was vibrating with panic. People thought the Soviets did it. Or Castro. Or the Mob.
Chief Justice Earl Warren led the group. They spent ten months looking at evidence. Their conclusion? Oswald acted alone. Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Oswald two days later in a police basement, also acted alone. Basically, they told America: "It’s over. There's no big monster under the bed. Just one lonely, angry guy with a rifle."
But they messed up.
They didn't look at the autopsy photos or X-rays because they wanted to respect the Kennedy family's privacy. Think about that for a second. The most important murder investigation in human history, and the lead investigators didn't even look at the primary medical evidence because it felt "intrusive."
That's why the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) came back in 1979 and said, "Wait a minute."
The HSCA agreed Oswald fired the shots that killed JFK. But they also dropped a bombshell: they concluded there was a "high probability" of a second gunman. They based this on acoustic evidence from a police motorcycle microphone that was supposedly stuck in the "on" position during the shooting. While later experts have debated that audio, the damage to the "lone wolf" narrative was permanent.
The Man in the Window: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?
Oswald wasn't some high-level James Bond villain. He was a 24-year-old high school dropout and former Marine. He had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman named Marina, and then got bored and came back to the U.S.
He was a Marxist who didn't really fit in anywhere.
A few months before the john f kennedy shooting, he actually tried to assassinate a retired Major General named Edwin Walker. He missed. He also took a bus to Mexico City in September 1963, trying to get a visa to go to Cuba or back to Russia. He was a man desperately looking for a cause to belong to.
He got a job at the Book Depository just weeks before the motorcade route was announced. Talk about a dark coincidence.
When the police finally caught him in the Texas Theatre—after he’d already shot and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit—he didn't confess. He shouted, "I’m just a patsy!"
We’ll never know what he meant by that. Jack Ruby made sure of it when he stepped out of a crowd of reporters and shoved a .38 revolver into Oswald’s stomach.
The Medical Mess at Parkland and Bethesda
The medical side of this is where things get truly gnarly. When the motorcade arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the doctors were in "save a life" mode, not "forensic investigation" mode. They performed a tracheotomy right through the bullet wound in Kennedy's neck.
Later, when the body was flown back to Washington D.C. for the official autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the doctors there were confused. They didn't know about the neck wound because the Parkland doctors had essentially cut it away to insert a breathing tube.
This gap in communication fueled decades of "two shooters" theories. If the doctors at Bethesda couldn't see the entry/exit points clearly, how could they be sure where the bullets came from? It was a comedy of errors at the highest possible stakes.
Why We Still Care About the John F Kennedy Shooting
It's about the loss of innocence. Before Dallas, most Americans trusted the government. After the shooting, and after the weirdness of the Warren Commission, that trust evaporated.
Polls consistently show that over 60% of Americans still don't believe the official story.
Whether it was the CIA, the Mafia, or just a guy named Lee who got lucky with a cheap rifle, the event changed the DNA of the United States. It gave birth to the modern conspiracy era. It’s the "Granddaddy of all Conspiracies."
If you want to understand why people today are so skeptical of "official" news, you have to look at Dealey Plaza.
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Practical Steps for History Buffs
If you're looking to dive deeper into the actual evidence rather than the TikTok theories, here’s how to do it properly.
- Read the JFK Act Records: The National Archives has released over 95% of the documents related to the case. You can browse them online. Look for the "ARRB" (Assassination Records Review Board) files.
- Visit the Sixth Floor Museum: If you’re ever in Dallas, go there. Stand in the spot. You’ll realize how small Dealey Plaza actually is. It makes the shots seem much more "doable" for a trained Marine marksman than they look on TV.
- Check the Ballistics: Look up the 1992 American Academy of Forensic Sciences report. They re-examined the "Single Bullet" using computer modeling and high-speed photography.
- Ignore the "Dying Witnesses" Lists: Many popular books list dozens of witnesses who died "mysterious" deaths. When you actually look at the actuarial tables for a group of that size over 50 years, the death rates are statistically normal. Focus on the hard forensics instead.
The reality of the john f kennedy shooting is that it was likely a combination of a broken man, a series of massive security failures by the Secret Service, and a whole lot of bad luck. Sometimes history isn't a grand design; sometimes it's just a mess that no one was ready to clean up.