What happened on 24 November 1963
Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead on Sunday 24 November 1963, two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. He was being moved from the Dallas police headquarters to the county jail when Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, stepped out of a crowd of reporters in the basement and fired a single shot into his abdomen at close range. Television cameras were broadcasting the transfer live, so millions of Americans saw the shooting as it happened or in immediate replays. Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy had been pronounced dead, and he died there shortly afterwards.
The killing took place in 1963, not 1967. Its importance in 1967 is that it left the central suspect dead before any trial, which made the official account of the Kennedy assassination harder to test in court and helped sustain public doubts for years afterwards.
Oswald and Ruby
Oswald, 24, had been arrested on 22 November in a Dallas cinema, after the killing of a police officer, J. D. Tippit, and was then charged in connection with the president’s death. A former Marine, he had lived for a time in the Soviet Union and had handed out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans in 1963 before returning to Texas. He denied killing the president and reportedly said he was a “patsy”. Little was ever heard from him in a courtroom, because he was killed before any hearing on the evidence.
Ruby, who ran strip clubs in Dallas, was known to local police officers and was in the area of the police building that morning. He was arrested immediately. At his trial in early 1964 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His lawyers argued that he had been overcome by grief and emotion. In 1966 an appeals court overturned the conviction, in part because of problems over where the trial had been held, and ordered a new trial. Ruby died of cancer in January 1967, before the new trial could take place. His death at a Dallas hospital added another chapter to the story that year, and it left questions about his motives permanently open.
The Warren Commission
President Lyndon Johnson set up a commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren a few days after the shootings. Its report, published in September 1964, concluded that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy and that Ruby had also acted alone in killing Oswald. It found no evidence of a conspiracy involving foreign governments, domestic groups or the Dallas police, but it also criticised the way the Secret Service and other agencies had handled security and information.
The report was supported by many officials and newspapers when it appeared, but it was criticised almost at once. Critics questioned the analysis of the shots, the handling of physical evidence and what they saw as gaps in the investigation. Books in the following years, including Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment in 1966, brought those objections to a mass readership. Some critics were careful researchers; others offered claims with little supporting evidence. Distinguishing between the two was, and still is, a major challenge for readers.
The mood in 1967
By 1967 a sizeable part of the public was uncertain about the official explanation. The country was already sceptical of official statements because of the Vietnam War, and the killing of a suspect on live television made many people suspicious of the authorities, even though no evidence proved that Ruby had been working with anyone. Public opinion surveys over the years have often shown that many Americans do not accept the single-gunman account, although it is important not to give a precise figure for a particular year without a source.
Television shaped the memory of the event in a particular way. The live broadcast of the shooting was an early example of the power of mass media coverage, and it affected later decisions about how to handle suspects in custody. Also in 1967, the 25th Amendment was ratified, which clarified presidential succession and disability, a change prompted in part by the problems the assassination had exposed.
Jim Garrison’s investigation
The most publicised challenge in 1967 came from Jim Garrison, the district attorney of Orleans Parish in New Orleans. In February 1967 news of his inquiry became public. He argued that a group in New Orleans had been involved in a plot connected with the killing, and he named a local businessman, Clay Shaw, as a participant. Shaw was arrested on 1 March 1967. David Ferrie, a former pilot whom Garrison had also been investigating, was found dead in his apartment later in February; the coroner’s finding was natural causes.
Garrison’s case drew enormous attention and was criticised by many journalists and legal observers, who said that his evidence was weak and that his methods, including how he treated witnesses, were questionable. The trial of Clay Shaw took place in early 1969, and the jury acquitted him after a short deliberation. Garrison’s claims of an elaborate conspiracy involving intelligence agencies have never been supported by evidence accepted by mainstream historians, though his investigation became a source for later books and a well-known film.
Later reviews
Official reviews did not end the debate. A House committee in the late 1970s concluded that Kennedy was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy, relying largely on an acoustic analysis of a police recording; that analysis was later questioned by a National Academy of Sciences panel and by other experts. The committee did not identify a conspiracy’s participants. Many historians continue to hold that Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy, while public doubt remains widespread.
For a reader trying to weigh the evidence, the key point is that Oswald’s death meant that his account was never tested in court. That absence, together with the speed of the events and the lack of public trust in government at the time, explains much of why the assassination remained one of the most contested episodes of the 1960s. The King assassination and the Robert Kennedy shooting in 1968 then deepened the sense that the decade’s political violence had never been fully explained.