Death of a president: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas 40 years ago this month. For many people, it marked the end of an era.

• Author: Price, Sean
• Position: Cover Story

On Nov. 22, 1963, crowds jammed the side walks of Dallas to cheer President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, as they smiled and waved, looking like matinee idols, from the back of an open limousine. The youngest man ever elected President (at 43), Kennedy had come to Texas, a key electoral state, in advance of the I964 presidential race. Texas Governor John Connolly and his wife, Nellie, sat in front of the Kennedys, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas was two cars back in the presidential motorcade.

Though Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, had critics in conservative Dallas, thousands turned out to see him. As the motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza, Nellie Connolly turned to Kennedy and said, "Mr. President, you can't say that Dallas doesn't love you." He replied, "No, you certainly can't."

They were his last words. Seconds later, at 12:30 p.m. gunshots rang out. The First missed, but the second and third hit Kennedy in the throat and head. His assassination, 40 years ago this month, stunned the nation and the world and is hotly debated to this day.

With his good looks, personal charm and dynamic speaking abilities, the former Senator took full advantage of the young medium of television to project an image of youth and vigor that contrasted with that of the prosperous but less exciting Eisenhower years of the 1950s. Kennedy's activism seemed to back up his image, as he stood up to the Soviets during the Berlin crisis in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and promised to send men to the moon by the end of the decade; at home, he pushed for civil rights and a tax cut to spur the economy.

Kennedy's death was announced at 1:36 p.m. CBS's famously composed anchorman, Walter Cronkite, wiped away tears after he read the bulletin on the air. As people heard the news, often from passersby, many were simply overcome. Frances Green, a Birmingham, Alabama, high school student, told The New York Times, "A girl came through the halls at school screaming about it when it happened. When my teacher found out about it, she laid her head down and cried."

Businesses, including the stock exchanges and Broadway theaters, shut down, and the entire nation seemed to go into mourning. The three major television networks preempted their programs for three days of nonstop coverage--a record that stood until Sept. II, 2001, according to Stuart Elliott, who covers media for The New York Times. "You can't exaggerate what a difference the coverage made to the country in turning to television as a source for news and information," Elliott said.

The man arrested for Kennedy's killing, 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, worked at the Texas School Book Depository, whose sixth floor window overlooking Dealey Plaza had been used by the sniper. Oswald, arrested in a Dallas movie theater within hours of Kennedy's killing, was a ninth-grade dropout from Louisiana who had been dishonorably discharged from the Marines. Interested in Marxism as a teenager, he briefly defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, only to leave there disillusioned.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON

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