# JFK Assassination **The assassination of John F. Kennedy** — the shooting of the 35th president from the Texas School Book Depository as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, Dallas, at about 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963 — is covered here as an event; the sixty-year argument over who did it lives at [[JFK Assassination Conspiracy]]. For the KB it matters as history (it made [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] president and cleared the path for the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]]), as the foundational case of mass distrust in official findings, and as the template for "release the files" politics, revived under [[Donald Trump]] in 2025. ## The event Texas Governor John Connally was wounded in the same car; Kennedy died at Parkland Hospital, and Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One that afternoon. Lee Harvey Oswald, a Depository employee and ex-Marine who had defected to the [[Soviet Union]] and returned, was arrested that day after killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. On November 24 nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the Dallas police headquarters basement on live television, foreclosing a trial. ## The official investigations | Body | Years | Finding | |---|---|---| | [[Warren Commission]] | 1963–1964 | Oswald "acted entirely alone"; so did Ruby. Report delivered September 24, 1964 | | [[Church Committee]] | 1975–1976 | Found the CIA and FBI had withheld relevant information, including the CIA–Mafia plots against [[Fidel Castro]], from the Warren Commission | | House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) | 1976–1979 | Oswald fired the fatal shot, but Kennedy "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" — a late reversal resting on an acoustic analysis of a Dallas police Dictabelt recording that seemed to show a fourth shot | | National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Ballistic Acoustics | 1982 | "Reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman" | | Justice Department | 1988 | "No persuasive evidence can be identified to support the theory of a conspiracy" | The HSCA finding is the only official endorsement of a conspiracy, and its sole physical basis collapsed within three years. Public memory kept the conclusion and dropped the debunking. ## Records-release politics The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, signed by George H. W. Bush on October 26, 1992 partly in response to Oliver Stone's film *JFK*, created the Assassination Records Review Board (1994–1998) and set an October 26, 2017 deadline for release of everything not certified for further withholding. Trump (2017) and Biden (2021–2023) both released large tranches while postponing others. On January 23, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14176, ordering declassification of the JFK, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassination records; in February the FBI said it had found about 2,400 uncatalogued JFK records. The [[National Archives]] began posting files on March 18, 2025. Page counts differ by source and cut-off date: about 63,000–64,000 pages in the first batches (ABC; Boston Globe), 77,100 pages by March 20, and about 100,000 pages in 2,709 documents across five batches through April 3 (Mary Ferrell Foundation). The release exposed the Social Security numbers of more than 200 people, mostly former congressional staffers. Historians found CIA agents, informants, covert actions and budget lines, but nothing that overturned the lone-gunman finding: the secrecy had protected the agency's operations, not evidence about the shooting. Further batches followed: a few hundred FBI documents on June 27, 2025 and another mainly FBI release on January 30, 2026 (one source each). The same order produced the RFK files (April 2025) and the MLK files (July 21, 2025; see [[Martin Luther King Jr.]]). ## Why it anchors the conspiracy pages The case has the structure [[Conspiracy Theory Logic]] describes elsewhere. Documented concealment, such as the CIA hiding the Castro plots and its own HSCA liaison's history (see [[The Assassination Archive]] and [[MK-Ultra]]), is real, and was read as concealment of the crime itself. Each investigation and release widened distrust instead of settling it, because the question of what is still missing never closes. Withheld records become proof; released ones are dismissed as curated. The same loop now runs through [[Jeffrey Epstein]], [[QAnon]] and the [[Deep State]]. ## See Also - [[JFK Assassination Conspiracy]] · [[John F. Kennedy]] · [[Warren Commission]] · [[Earl Warren]] - [[US Presidential Assassination Attempts Timeline]] · [[United States Secret Service]] · [[Conspiracy Theory]] · [[Jerome Corsi]]