HT This Day: Nov 23, 1963 – President Kennedy is assassinated
Police were reported to have taken possession of a rifle of a non-American make. A youth was reported to have been picked up.
Dallas, Texas – President Kennedy died here today from an assassin’s bullet.
The 46-year-old President was riding in a motorcade with his wife Jackie, when three shots were fired and he was hit in the head.
He was rushed to hospital and given a blood transfusion but died shortly afterwards, at 1 p.m. local time (0030 IST Saturday).
Mr Kennedy lived for 25 minutes after an unknown assassin had cut him down with rifle fire.
A late NBC report said the President was shot once in the head.
Police were reported to have taken possession of a rifle of a non-American make. A youth was reported to have been picked up.
Vice-President Lyndon Johnson assumed the full constitutional responsibilities of the presidency immediately on the death of Mr Kennedy and before taking an oath of office.
Hunt for assassin
FBI Chief Edgar Hoover ordered an all-out manhunt for the assassin or assassins A youth was later reported to have been picked up. Police believed the fatal shots were fired by a white man.
The murder weapon was believed to be a 30-30 high calibre rifle. The President was shot as his open car passed near an intersection in the main business area of the city.
As the shots rang out, Mr Kennedy fell face down in the back of the car.
Mrs Kennedy cried “Oh, No” and tried to hold his head.
Governor Connally, who was also hit by bullets, slumped on the seat.
Police rushed the car to a nearby hospital.
Pandemonium broke out but secret service agents waved the motorcade onto a road which led to the Parkland Hospital where he was earlier scheduled to deliver a speech. Within five minutes the President's car pulled up at the hospital entrance.
Hospital officials in the emergency ward gave the President a transfusion of B positive blood from the bank.
Mr Kennedy was then given last sacraments.
The announcement of Mr Kennedy’s death brought cries and moans from the crowd gathered outside the hospital.
Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas collapsed as he described the shooting to newsmen.
Governor Connally underwent an operation for a bullet wound in the chest half an hour after President Kennedy's death.
Mrs Lyndon Johnson denied a report that the Vice-President had been hurt. "He is fine." she told newsmen.
Three shots
A woman who said she was a spectator of the shooting, said in a radio interview that the President and Mrs Kennedy were looking at a dog in the middle of the street when the shots rang out.
"There were three shots. He grabbed his chest and fell over his seat and Jackie fell over him," Mrs Jean Hill said.
"The shots came from a hill just east of the underpass." An eye-witness said he saw a gun emerge from an upper storey of a warehouse commanding an unobstructed view of the Presidential car.
Mr Kennedy was the first President to be assassinated since William McKinley was shot in 1901.
It was the first death of a President in office since Franklin D. Roosevelt succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgie, in April 1945.
A radio report from the scene said a white man and a Negro boy had reported seeing a man in a window with what appeared to be a gun.
Some residents of Dallas expressed surprise that the triple overpass was not guarded by police.
The President, concerned about his unpopularity in the south over his Civil Rights Bill, arrived in Texas yesterday with Mrs Kennedy to win support and close the divided ranks of the Texas Democrats.
The New York Stock Exchange remained closed.
A secret serviceman and a DalIas policeman were shot dead some distance from where Mr Kennedy was assassinated.
Early life
John Fitzgerald ci Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. America had just entered the war. For several years the family lived in a large frame house set back from the sidewalk on a small plot. It was a quiet, lower-middle-class area.
But the pleasant Boston days were soon over. Joseph Kennedy had outgrown his native city, and he settled his family near the centre of New York, in Bronxville. It was an affluent place surrounded by broad lawns. Young John went to nearby Riverdale School; the teachers remembered him as a slight boy, polite, industrious, and likable, with a special interest in English history.
Even as a boy, Kennedy showed some of the skill at persuasion that would mark his political career later.
At thirteen Kennedy left his Bronxville home for boarding school. For a year he went to Canterbury School in Connecticut, the only Catholic school he ever attended. He showed early a trait that baffles his staff today-an almost photographic memory for correspondence, conversations, and historical fact, but an almost total absent-mindedness about where he has mislaid speeches, books, and clothing. Always a ready competitor he tried out for football, baseball, and other sports with fair success. He could swim fifty yards in thirty seconds; this swimming skill would save his life years later.
The next fall he shifted to Choate, a select private school, where Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles had been students. Joe Jr. was there making out well. The boys' father chose Choate because he wanted them to mix and compete with a greater variety of boys.
In his senior year at Choate, he wrote his father that he had "definitely decided to stop fooling around. I really do realize how important it is that I get a good job done this year, if I want to go to England, I really feel that I have been bluffing myself about how much real work I have been doing."
"Now Jack, I don't want to give the impression that I am a nagger," the father wrote. "After long experience in sizing up people I definitely know you have the goods and you can go a long way ...After all, I would be lacking even as a friend if I did not urge you to take advantage of the qualities you have.
I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don't turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and good understanding. . …
Graduate at 18
The father encouraged political argument at the dinner table. He asserted his views strongly, but did not force his views.
Kennedy became an omnivorous reader during these school years, but history and stories of famous men, rather than current affairs, were his favourites.
At eighteen he graduated from Choate. At the end of 1937, when Jack was still in his sophomore year, President Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy ambassador to Britain.
Jack Kennedy's last two years at Harvard fell in the shadow of tumultuous world affairs. About the time he began his junior year, in September 1938, Neveille Chamberlain yielded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler at Munich. Thousands of young men of his age were leaving school and work; millions more would soon follow.
Young Kennedy watched restlessly while Europe girded for war. Eager to see the tension points at first hand, he won permission from Harvard to spend the second semester in Europe. After spring in Paris, he went to Poland, then to Riga, Russia, Turkey, Palestine and back to the Balkan, Berlin, and Paris.
The long-gathering storm burst over Europe soon after Kennedy concluded his tour.
Kennedy was still a college student and classes were beginning at Harvard. Later in the month he sailed for home.
To gain such honours he needed to submit an undergraduate thesis, and this was Kennedy's main intellectual effort during his senior year. His subject was "Appeasement at Munich."
The thesis had two arresting qualities. One was Kennedy's emotional detachment from the crisis he described.
As Kennedy handed his dissertation in to Professor Hopper in the spring of 1940, events in Europe dramatized his thesis of democracy's weakness. Germany smashed through Dutch and Belgian defences, cut to pieces French infantry corps, and pinned British troops against the sea at Dunkirk. France was gone; Britain was in grave danger. Churchill was now leading the British. But would America wake in time?
In June Kennedy was graduated from Harvard amid the traditional pomp and pageantry. But all the bands and songs could not drown out the roar from abroad.
Kennedy moved near to direct involvement in the war. He tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of his old back condition. He went through five months of strengthening exercises, and managed to pass a Navy fitness test in September. When Pearl Harbour came he applied for sea duty.
Early in 1943, he shipped out from San Francisco for the South Pacific, where Allied forces were beginning to turn back the Japanese advance.
Shortly after midnight on August 2, 1943, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri cut through the dark waters of Blackett Strait west of New Georgia. The commander of the destroyer peered through the waves. A wave tore Kennedy from the canoe and spun him around and down, but miraculously he landed not on coral but in an eddy.
His ordeal was almost over. In the morning island natives awakened them. One said in English, "I have a letter for you, sir." It was from the commander of a New Zealand infantry patrol on New Geogria urging them to follow the islanders back to his camp.
The Navy bestowed official recognition when it awarded to him, in addition to the Purple Heart, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. The citation in part read: "His courage, endurance and excellent leadership contributed to the saying of several lives and was (in) keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service."
The rest of the war for Kennedy was anticlimatic and studded with frustration and tragedy. He contracted malaria. His flip-flop on his back after the PT boat explosion had aggravated his old back injury, and this caused him a good deal of pain. In December 1943, he was sent back to the States.
As reporter
He tried his hand at journalism once again by reporting the British election from London in the summer. After that he had had enough of reporting. The war was coming to an end in the Pacific. Thousands of demobilized soldiers were streaming back home. Most of them had formed plans for civilian life. But not Jack Kennedy. By the age of twenty-eight he had earned a B.A. degree, learned how to swim and to sail; had written a successful book, travelled extensively and learned courage and endurance in the war. But the man and the political leader was unformed; his political views and his personality were still is the making.
On the PT boat, Lt. John F. Kennedy, skipper, and his twelve officers and men, watched helplessly as the destroyer bore down on them. Two men were killed outright; others struggled to keep afloat and away from the gasoline fire burning on the water. Kennedy was thrown hard in the cockpit and fell on his back.
Kennedy decided to strike out on his own to a further island and try to intercept a PT boat along the regular route through Ferguson Passage. He swam to the reef, hugging the ship's lantern.
During the summer of 1941 as the war drew to an end in Japan, Kennedy restlessly pondered his prospects. He was undecided. He still toyed with the notion of making a career of journalism; and was also attracted to academic life. On the other hand, newspaper work was an undependable trade, and he had no graduate degree for teaching. Business lured him not at all.
He had mixed feelings about a political career. He liked the idea of being part of the top circles of government-making decisions, working on legislation, handling affairs of state, But he was not sure that he would like politics at the level where he would have to start. He disliked the blarney, the exuberant backslapping and handshaking, the exaggerated claims and denunciations that went with politics.
Some of his friends, knowing he was looking around urged him to run for statewide office--Kennedy was cool to the idea; he far preferred office in Washington to Boston. Kennedy decided to make the run for the Democratic nomination for Congress. In this district the Democratic nomination was equivalent to election.
Kennedy was only twenty-eight. Reserved, gaunt, almost emaciated-looking, he was a polar opposite to the familiar image of the derby-hatted, loud-talking, paunchy Boston politician. Many of the latter did not take the young candidate very seriously.
Kennedy got into the race early. He campaigned for several months before the other candidates jumped off from the starting line. And in the process he began to build a big personal organization. It was this group that was responsible for Kennedy's victory.
During his first two years in Congress. Kennedy seldom spoke upon foreign policy. He strongly backed the Truman Doctrine for aid to Greece and Turkey, and also supported the Marshall Plan bill authorizing aid to Western Europe.
During his first term of office, violent shifts took place in the world situation. America began large-scale foreign aid and the airlift saved Berlin. By the end of 1948, the situation in Europe seemed stabilized. In China, by late 1948, the Communist armies of former library assistant at Peking University, Mao Tse-tung, were overwhelming Nationalist forces. Chiang Kai-shek's divisions were melting away. Affairs came to a climax in January 1949, when Chiang gave up the fight and prepared his retreat to Formosa.
In 1952 he ran for the Senate and defeated the incumbent Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the present U.S. Representative to the United Nations.
In 1958 he was re-elected to the Senate with a resounding lead of 874,000 votes, the greatest majority known in the political history of Massachusetts.
President
By 1958 Kennedy has become a National celebrity. But in the critical Presidential election year 1960 he did not still come up to the accepted tests of Presidential timber.
He was a protestant; he was not a governor of a large estate or cabinet. He was not a long time party leader. He did not personify any national issue.
But his election machinery tried in earlier years stood him in good stead and he won.
As was to be expected President Kennedy because of his youth came like a fresh breeze on the world scene.
The administration of "new frontiers men" tried hard not to think in terms of the cold war. It immediately came upon a huge crop of problems in Laos, Congo, Latin America, Africa and China.
The crucial test, however, came with the Cuban crisis last year which coincided with the Chinese invasion of India.