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50 years ago on November 22, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. To this day, those gunshots resonate around the world. Chris Wright takes us through the fateful days in question, sets the context of a vibrant and unsettled 1963 – and explains the challenges to the official version of events.
January-October 1963
It is tempting to look back on 1963 as a halcyon time presided over by a much-loved President. In fact, the true picture was nothing like as clear.
Kennedy had been sworn in as the 35th President of the USA on January 20, 1961, and since then his Presidency had been dominated not by harmony but by confrontation, chiefly with the Soviet Union: these were the early salvos of what we would come to know as the Cold War. In particular, in April 1962 he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in an attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, because it was considered sympathetic to the Russians; the entire invading force was either killed or captured and it took Kennedy the best part of two years to negotiate the release of the 1,189 survivors in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine. Then, in October 1962, came the Cuban Missile Crisis, where tensions grew after it became clear the Soviets were building ballistic missile sites in Cuba; by most accounts, this is considered the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.
Entering 1963, tension with Premier Khrushchev’s Soviet Union had at least declined, but there were plenty of other problems at home and abroad.
Domestically, the year up until November would be dominated by Kennedy’s civil rights struggle. In February, he announced his plans for new legislation, ensuring that all black Americans would have the right to vote, discrimination would be outlawed, and segregation – the practice of keeping black and white people separate, from buses to schools, with black facilities always greatly inferior to the white – would be ended. “Legislation was necessary because without it, nothing had changed since emancipation 100 years before,” writes Andrew Cook in his book 1963. “Black children were growing up with the prospect of radically lower earnings, poorer health, inferior education and shorter lives than whites born at the same time.”
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