Cold Open

This pulled from retirement episode of History Daily originally aired on November 22nd, 2021.

It’s November 22nd, 1963

It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Dallas, Texas. Over 50,000 people have swarmed the sidewalks to welcome a special visitor to the city: the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

All around Dealey Plaza, in downtown Dallas, spectators jostle and crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the presidential motorcade. The atmosphere is one of feverish excitement – the kind of reception you’d expect for a famous rock star, not a politician.

At the back of the crowd, a father hoists his daughter up onto his shoulders so she can see President Kennedy and the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, smiling and waving from the backseat of an open-top limousine. Delighted, the little girl beams and waves back.

Kennedy is up for re-election next year and that’s why he’s here in Dallas, drumming up support among Texans – and even this traditionally conservative city seems swept up in the belief that the handsome young Democrat represents the future of the country.

But then, suddenly, something sharp and menacing pierces the celebratory noise. 

Confused faces turn toward the direction of the sound – the sixth floor window of a building at the corner of the Plaza. Some notice the muzzle of a rifle aimed directly at the President’s car.

Two more shots ring out.

From her dad’s shoulders, the little girl sees President Kennedy slump forward; and Jacqueline Kennedy – splattered with blood – clutching her husband’s limp body in her arms. The President has been shot twice – once through the neck, and again in the back of the head.The assassination of President John F. Kennedy will play out on live television in front of a shocked nation. And within forty-eight hours, the assassin himself, Lee Harvey Oswald, will also be dead – murdered while in police custody. With the sole culprit dead, conspiracy theories will begin to fester, speculation around the true motives behind the assassination will grow, and a mourning nation will attempt to make sense of this inconceivable and unforgettable tragedy.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast – every day – we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is November 22nd: The Asssassination of JFK.

Act One: The President is Dead

It’s November 22nd, 1963.

In Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, an unidentified gunman has just fired three shots at President Kennedy’s motorcade.

Panic and confusion break out across the Plaza. Some spectators flee. Others duck for cover. Parents form protective shields around their children.

Inside the White House press pool car, a group of frantic reporters try to make sense of what’s going on. They are several cars behind the motorcade. And while they heard the shots, they all assumed it was just kids with firecrackers. Now Merriman Smith, a veteran reporter for United Press International, spots the President’s limousine speeding off. Smith urges the driver of the press car to follow.

The driver gives chase, slamming his foot on the gas as the car tears through the streets of Dallas. Inside, Merriman Smith crouches over the portable radio-telephone and reports back to his news desk. But he strains to be heard over the noise and chaos. Other reporters attempt to wrestle the phone off him. But Smith, a hard-bitten newshound, is determined not to miss a single detail. He fends off the other journalists while reporting this bulletin: THREE SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.

As this distressing news makes its way into the homes and businesses of millions of Americans, President Kennedy’s limousine screeches up to the emergency entrance of Parkland Hospital – just six minutes after the shooting.

Moments later, the press pool car arrives as well.

Merriman Smith leaps from the vehicle and watches as paramedics rush the President into the hospital, with Jacqueline Kennedy following close behind. In her hands, she is holding fragments of her husband’s skull and brain matter. Another passenger from the presidential limousine, Texas governor John Connolly, who was also badly injured in the shooting, is rushed to a different ward. Smith approaches the First Lady’s bodyguard, Clint Hill. Smith asks him “How badly was Kennedy hit?”. Hill replies curtly “He’s dead”.

But it’s not quite true. The President is still alive – barely. And over the course of the next thirty minutes, doctors will try everything in their power to save his life. In the meantime, news of the shooting will spread around the country, bringing the nation to a standstill, as its citizens stare at their television screens in mounting horror.

***

In downtown Fort Worth, just over thirty miles from Dallas, three women sit in a hair salon, idly flipping through magazines. Their gum-chewing hair stylist has one eye on a television set in the corner of the salon. A lifestyle program called The Julie Bennell Show is playing on WFAA, a local television station.

But at exactly 12:45, the program is interrupted by a breathless news anchor who delivers the news of Kennedy’s assassination. The women gasp in shock. “Those poor children,” one of them sobs. She is speaking of the Kennedys’ two infants. But she might have been referring to an entire generation of young people, whose optimism and reforming energy was reflected back at them by a president who seemed poised to change America.

In the minds of many, the idealistic Kennedy had given the country a much needed sense of purpose. But now all that’s in peril. The women in the salon pray for his survival.

***

Meanwhile, at a lunch counter a thousand miles away in Chicago, customers stop eating as a CBS News Bulletin flashes on a small television screen. Anchor Walter Cronkite delivers the breaking story: 

"CRONKITE: In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in Downtown, Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting."

A salesman on his lunch break turns to his colleague. “Kennedy’s a hero and a patriot. The way he handled that missile crisis in Cuba was exemplary. I hope to God he makes it.”

Further along the counter, an older man returns to his lunch and grumbles, “serves him right, that Irishman was in over his head.”

The two men glare at each other withe the younger telling the older man to shut his mouth, it's the president he is talking about. But the old man just snarls: “Don’t you remember that Bay of Pigs?”

The Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis are, perhaps, the two defining pieces of foreign policy from Kennedy’s three years in office. The first was a failed invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1961 – a humiliation for Kennedy’s administration. But in 1962, after discovering nuclear missile silos being constructed in Cuba, Kennedy’s peace-making negotiations with the Soviets pulled the world back from the brink of war. His handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis restored Kennedy’s reputation as a brilliant political tactician. But even as he lays dying at Parkland, no one can agree on what his legacy will be.

***

Later that afternoon, in Manhattan, a group of students from Hunter College gather in a midtown bar to watch the CBS coverage. They hold onto each other in tearful solace as the tragedy unfolds. These students have been actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement. They saw President Kennedy as a force for change. He was the first president to refer to Civil Rights as a “moral issue”. He proposed the bill in 1963 that would become the instrumental Civil Rights Act of 1964. His death could set the Movement back decades.

But at this point, nothing official has been confirmed. The student activists still have hope that Kennedy will survive. But then, at 2:38 PM in New York, the CBS anchor, Walter Cronkite, broadcasts a now famous bulletin:

"CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time. 2 o’clock Eastern Standard Time. Some 38 minutes ago."

By the time a Catholic priest administers President Kennedy’s last rites, federal officers are already hot on the tail of the man responsible for his violent death. And before the day is out, they will capture the assassin, and bring him to justice.

Act Two: Lee Harvey Oswald

It’s 6:30 AM on November 22nd, 1963. A man gets out of bed after a restless night. Before leaving for work, he removes his wedding ring and leaves it on his wife’s dresser in their bedroom, along with $170. This man, Lee Harvey Oswald, lives in a boarding-house in Dallas, but he sometimes stays with his wife, Marina, in the suburbs, where she lives with a friend.

Oswald met Marina while living in Moscow – having defected to the Soviet Union after being dishonourably discharged from the US Marine Corps in 1959. The two returned to the States together in 1962.

But Oswald came back a changed man; a sworn enemy of the United States; determined to see the downfall of capitalism. As a result of his time in the Soviet Union and his vocal support for Castro’s Cuba, Oswald caught the attention of the CIA, who placed him on a “watch list” of security threats. 

When Oswald and Marina first returned to the US from Moscow, times were tough. With another baby on the way and his last unemployment check cashed, Oswald needed work. That was when a neighbour told him about an opening at a schoolbook warehouse in Dallas. Oswald interviewed and got the job.

But Oswald wasn’t happy in the United States. He was desperately seeking a VISA to relocate to Cuba. But this proved difficult. After several unfruitful visits to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, Oswald grew frustrated. Like a caged animal, this frustration boiled over into anger. And with it, a desire for vengeance against the country he had grown to hate.

***

After leaving his ring and the money on his dresser, Oswald catches a ride to work with a colleague. The colleague asks about the long object he’s carrying in a paper bag – Oswald tells him they’re curtain rods for his boarding-house.

Then after arriving at the Schoolbook Depository, Oswald makes his way up to the sixth floor. From the paper bag, he removes not curtain rods but a sniper rifle and gets into position. He’s studied Kennedy’s route and knows when the President is due to cross Dealey Plaza. What he doesn’t know is how many people are going to be standing in the way or whether he’ll have a clean shot.

It's left up to chance like so much of the assasination. It was chance that led Oswald to find a job at the Schoolbook Depository; chance that led him to Dallas in the first place; and chance that now allows him, at 12:30 PM, to take three unobstructed shots at President John F. Kennedy.

Two of them hit their target.

With ringing in his ears and gunsmoke in the air, Oswald has to act fast. He stashes the rifle behind some boxes and heads for the exit, briefly pausing to buy a Coca Cola from the soda machine. Witnesses see him leaving the Depository, but he looks so calm and ordinary, they suspect nothing.

***

It’s 1:15 PM, forty-five minutes after the fatal shooting of JFK.

Officer J.D. Tippit drives his police cruiser down East 10th Street in Dallas. He’s just received a radio order to patrol the area and to be on the look-out for a slender white male, early thirties, about 5’10’’. In his eleven years in the Dallas Police Department, Tippit has never been given such an important assignment:

Find the man who killed the President. 

It’s good he has experience. Tippit has seen plenty of rookie cops get carried away and act rashly. He knows that the key to good policing is to keep a cool head. But even he feels his heart begin to pound when he spots a man fitting the assassin’s description walking down East 10th street.

Tippit pulls over, rolls down his window and calls over to the suspect. Up close, Tippit can see he’s younger than the description suggests, despite a receding hairline. He has a long neck and a pointed, rat-like face. He seems a little jumpy. So Tippit gets out of the car to question him.

As the officer walks around to the front of the vehicle, the man – Lee Harvey Oswald – pulls a pistol from his waistband and shoots Tippit in the head. The police officer will be pronounced dead ten minutes later.

After shooting Tippit, Oswald runs into a nearby movie theatre. He slinks into a darkened auditorium and settles into a back-row seat. But a store clerk saw him entering the theatre. He alerted the authorities, and now, after just a few minutes, the house lights go up. Police swarm the auditorium. An officer spots Oswald and, after a brief tussle, he’s placed under arrest.

Oswald will be taken into police custody and, after a long interrogation, charged with Kennedy’s murder. He will be held at Dallas Police Headquarters until the morning of Sunday November 24th. It's then while Oswald is being escorted from the building on his way to prison, a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby will fire a single bullet into Oswald’s belly. When spectators on the street hear that Oswald’s been shot, they will clap and cheer. And within two hours, Oswald will die from his gunshot wound in the same hospital where, just two days before, President Kennedy himself drew his final breath.   

Act Three: The Warren Report

It’s September 24th, 1964, almost a year after the assassination of JFK. 

But the nation is still reeling from the tragedy; and many people are desperate for answers. So, Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, established the Warren Commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the crime.

In early September of 1964, the Commission presents its findings to the President. The report concludes that the initial police assessments were correct: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But the publication of the report sparks a backlash. People simply cannot believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, by no means an expert sharpshooter, could have successfully hit a moving target from that distance.

Conspiracy theories begin to circulate. These theories latch onto contradictions in the investigation and in the subsequent Warren Report: discrepancies in the doctors descriptions of Kennedy’s injuries, or the strangely low angle of the bullet entry wound given the height of the window. Many believe Oswald did not act alone. Some believe he was a hired assassin sent by the Soviets. Others believe the assassination was an inside job orchestrated by the CIA. Still others have suggested that it was a mafia hit.

The truth of the tragedy is far more banal: a sad, lonely fanatic believed he was writing himself into the history books by murdering a beloved president. The hard truth to swallow, is the fact that he succeeded.

But Oswald did not succeed in eradicating Kennedy’s legacy. Nor could he silence the message that Kennedy proclaimed throughout his presidency; a message that still inspires today – a vision of progress, of peace, and of hope. 

Outro

Next on History Daily. November 23rd, 1936. Life Magazine publishes its first issue and quickly becomes America’s primary visual source for current events.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Mollie Baack.

Sound design by Derek Behrens.

Music by Lindsay Graham.

This episode is written and researched by Joe Viner.

Executive Producers are Steven Walters for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.