62 years later: Why JFK’s assassination still fuels some of America’s biggest conspiracy theories
More than six decades after those fateful shots rang out in Dallas in 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains one of America’s most disputed and discussed crimes.
Kennedy’s murder, which took place in broad daylight before thousands of people, stunned the country and ignited decades of conspiracy and scrutiny. Investigators quickly arrested former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald as the suspected killer, but tangles of theories have kept the case alive in the public imagination ever since.
A new ABC News Studios special, “Truth and Lies: Who Killed JFK?” airing Monday, Nov. 24, at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu, examines the tragic assassination.
On Nov. 22, 1963 at 11:42 a.m., Kennedy arrived in Dallas when Air Force One touched down at Love Field, beginning a sequence of events that the U.S. would never forget.
“He brings along Jacqueline Kennedy,” CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali told ABC News Studios. “He wants her obviously sitting next to him in a motorcade. And he wants the top off, so that everybody can see her as well as him.”
Naftali recalled how Kennedy was riding through Dealey Plaza in Dallas in a presidential motorcade alongside Texas Gov. John Connally, his wife Nelly and the first lady.
Two shots then struck the president from above. One hit Kennedy in the back of his neck, and one hit him in the side of the head, according to the National Archives.
Kennedy was then rushed to Parkland Hospital in the motorcade, but by 1 p.m., he was declared dead.
Government releases thousands of declassified pages related to JFK assassination
Police soon arrested Oswald, 24, for the assassination, with authorities later learning that he spent time in the Soviet Union, and had previously applied for citizenship there.
Two days after the Kennedy assassination, on Nov. 24, 1963, Oswald was shot and killed as he was being moved from the Dallas Police Headquarters, according to the Library of Congress.
However, most of the evidence surrounding Kennedy’s assassination was not released until much later. Speaking with ABC News Studios, director Oliver Stone highlighted the problem created by this delay.
“People wanted to get to the truth — they were angry because they were given a bunch of lies and they knew it at the time,” he said.
Stone co-wrote and helmed the 1991 movie “JFK,” which was a fictional retelling of the assassination, focusing on the story of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation. The movie and the significant public interest that followed led, in part, to Congress passing the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
Oliver Stone calls on Congress to reopen JFK assassination investigation
Then, this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the release of all remaining records related to the assassination, saying it was in the “public interest” to do so. The National Archives in March released thousands of pages of declassified records related to the assassination.
Kennedy biographer Barbara Perry told ABC News Studios that she believes that the U.S. government withholding evidence led to widespread distrust of the federal government.
“The fact that the government didn’t release material until many years later regarding the Kennedy assassination only led to more conspiracy theories and the beginning of the people of the United States believing that the government was lying to it,” Perry said.
“And that then gets picked up in the very contemporary era of the concept of fake news and the deep state,” she added.
