By Kaleena Fraga
Tomorrow, November 22, 2017, is the 54th anniversary of the Jack Kennedy assassination. It’s a tragedy that grabbed the attention of the world and never let go. It’s only this year that hundreds of pages of government files concerning the assassination were released, and more were withheld for security reasons.
This photo was taken the day before, on November 21, 1963. Kennedy had had a foreboding feeling about the trip, telling a friend that he had, “a terrible feeling,” about visiting Dallas. Kennedy was no stranger to death–he’d lost his brother in WWII, had lost babies, had faced it himself during his bouts of illness. One of his favorite poems was Robert Seeger’s I Have a Rendezvous with Death.
In the years after his assassination, many people have cried conspiracy, because how could a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald murder the president? Yet, in all cases of presidential assassination, the assassin has always been a nobody. James Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were all killed by nobodies. Other presidents–Andrew Jackson, Gerald Ford, etc.–narrowly escaped the same fate.
Of course, some people thought that Zachary Taylor had been assassinated after he died unexpectedly, but this theory has been largely debunked.
With Oswald’s death, and Jack Ruby’s death, we may never have a definite answer for why JFK was killed on that sunny day in Dallas. He’ll remain a figure of fascination for many years to come. In the meantime the Warren Commission, the first official investigation of his death, makes for some good reading.
History First 