JFK Parade Through Dallas: Motorcade, Dealey Plaza, Zapruder Film

The JFK parade through Dallas on November 22, 1963, was a ten-mile motorcade carrying President John F. Kennedy in an open Lincoln Continental from Love Field toward a luncheon at the Trade Mart. It ended at 12:30 p.m. in Dealey Plaza, where three shots fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository killed the president and seriously wounded Texas Governor John Connally. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00 p.m.¹

Why Kennedy Was in Dallas

The Dallas stop was the fourth city on a two-day Texas trip. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Governor Connally had agreed to the visit on June 5, 1963, at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso. Kennedy wanted to repair factional splits inside the Texas Democratic Party ahead of his 1964 reelection campaign, raise money at a planned Austin dinner, and see voters in one of the country’s largest states.²

The Kennedys arrived in San Antonio on the afternoon of November 21, then went on to Houston and spent the night at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth. On the morning of November 22, Kennedy spoke at an outdoor rally and a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth before flying the short leg to Dallas Love Field, where Air Force One landed at 11:40 a.m.³

A Hostile City That Morning

Dallas had voted for Richard Nixon over Kennedy in 1960 by the widest margin of any major American city, and conservative groups had a visible presence there. A month earlier, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been spat on and struck with a placard by protesters during a Dallas appearance.⁴

The morning Kennedy arrived, the Dallas Morning News ran a full-page, black-bordered advertisement accusing him of being soft on communism. Anonymous handbills circulated around the city carrying Kennedy’s photograph under the words “Wanted for Treason.” Kennedy saw the newspaper ad and reportedly told his wife, “We’re headed into nut country.”⁴

The crowds along the route did not reflect that tone. Roughly 200,000 people turned out. As the motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, Nellie Connally turned to the president and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

The Route and the Cars

The motorcade left Love Field shortly before noon. The route covered approximately ten miles through suburban streets and into downtown along Main Street, designed to bring the president past the largest possible crowds inside a 45-minute window before the Trade Mart luncheon.⁵

The presidential car was a 1961 Lincoln Continental. President Kennedy sat in the right rear seat, Jacqueline Kennedy to his left, Governor Connally in the right jump seat directly in front of the president, and Nellie Connally in the left jump seat. Secret Service Agent William Greer drove. Agent Roy Kellerman rode beside him.

Behind the presidential car came a follow-up vehicle carrying eight Secret Service agents and two presidential aides, David Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell. The vice-presidential car followed with Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, and Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas.⁵

The limousine’s clear plastic bubbletop had been removed because the weather was clear. The bubbletop was not bulletproof or bullet-resistant, but with it off, the occupants were fully exposed. The decision followed instructions relayed by Kenneth O’Donnell: if it wasn’t raining, take the top off. Kennedy also preferred that Secret Service agents not ride on the rear running boards of his car except when crowds pressed close.⁵

Security on the Ground

Only 28 Secret Service agents were on the ground in Dallas, supplemented by 173 local law enforcement officers along the route or within the motorcade.⁶⁷ Agents and Dallas police had jointly selected the route, but no one inspected the buildings along it. The Secret Service later acknowledged that searching buildings was not standard motorcade practice at the time. The Warren Commission would identify this as a significant failure, concluding the agency’s procedures contained “certain shortcomings and lapses from the high standards” expected in presidential protection.⁸

Kennedy himself seemed alive to the risk. On the morning of the assassination, he remarked to staff that if anyone really wanted to shoot the president, it would not be difficult; all someone had to do was get into a high building with a telescopic rifle.⁵

The Shots in Dealey Plaza

At approximately 12:30 p.m., as the motorcade moved through Dealey Plaza and turned from Houston Street onto Elm Street, shots rang out. According to the Warren Commission, three shots were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, a seven-story brick warehouse at the northwest corner of Houston and Elm Streets.⁹

One shot missed. A second entered the base of Kennedy’s neck, exited through his throat, and then struck Governor Connally, passing through his shoulder, wrist, and thigh. A third shot hit the president in the back of the head, inflicting a massive and fatal wound. Connally was gravely injured but survived.¹⁰

Parkland Memorial Hospital

The motorcade raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital, less than four miles away. In the emergency room, a team led by Dr. M. T. Jenkins attempted resuscitation. Drs. Charles Baxter, Malcolm Perry, and Robert McClelland performed a tracheotomy while Dr. Kemp Clark administered closed-chest cardiac massage. No heart activity was detectable by 12:45 p.m. Kennedy was officially pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m.¹

The Zapruder Film

The assassination was captured on an 8mm home movie camera operated by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker who had positioned himself on a concrete parapet overlooking Elm Street. His 26-second, 486-frame film is the only known footage showing the entire sequence of shots and remains the single most important visual record of the event.¹¹

Zapruder sold the film to Life magazine the day after the assassination for a reported $150,000, with the stipulation that the magazine not exploit its most graphic content. Frame 313, which shows the fatal head wound, was withheld from public view for twelve years. The full, uncut film was not broadcast on television until March 6, 1975, when Geraldo Rivera aired it on the ABC program Good Night America.¹² In 1999, the federal government purchased the original film from the Zapruder estate for $16 million. The estate later donated the copyright to the Sixth Floor Museum. The film was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1994.¹³

The Suspect: Arrest and Death

Within minutes of the assassination, police identified Lee Harvey Oswald as a missing employee of the Book Depository. Oswald had obtained a job there on October 15, 1963.¹⁴

Roughly 45 minutes after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Oswald shot and killed Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. He was apprehended shortly afterward at the Texas Theatre, a nearby movie house, where officers recovered a .38-caliber revolver later linked by ballistics to the Tippit killing.¹⁵

At the Depository, investigators found a makeshift sniper’s nest in the southeast corner of the sixth floor, along with a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and three spent cartridge cases near an open window overlooking Elm Street.⁹ Oswald was charged with the murder of Officer Tippit at approximately 7:00 p.m. on November 22 and with the murder of President Kennedy at 11:26 p.m. that same night.¹⁶ He denied both killings. During a brief press conference at police headquarters, he told reporters, “I really don’t know what this situation is about.”

Oswald was never tried. On the morning of November 24, as police transferred him from headquarters to the county jail, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped out of a crowd of reporters in the basement and shot him with a small-caliber pistol. Oswald died at Parkland Hospital at 1:07 p.m., in the same hospital where Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier.¹⁷

Ruby’s killing of Oswald was the first homicide broadcast live on American television. He said he acted on impulse out of grief and to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of testifying at a trial. His attorney, Melvin Belli, mounted an insanity defense based on what he called “psychomotor epilepsy.” A jury rejected it and convicted Ruby of murder with malice on March 14, 1964, sentencing him to death. In October 1966, a Texas appeals court overturned the conviction, ruling that inadmissible testimony had been improperly admitted at trial. Ruby was awaiting retrial when he died on January 3, 1967, of a pulmonary embolism complicated by cancer.¹⁸¹⁹

What the Warren Commission Concluded

One week after the assassination, on November 29, 1963, President Johnson established the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The commission conducted a ten-month investigation and released an 888-page report on September 24, 1964.²⁰

The report’s central conclusions were unequivocal. Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, killing President Kennedy and wounding Governor Connally. The commission found no evidence that Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign.²⁰

The Single-Bullet Finding

The commission’s most contested finding was what critics came to call the “magic bullet theory.” The commission posited that a single bullet entered the president’s upper right back, exited through his throat, and then caused all of Governor Connally’s wounds, passing through his shoulder, shattering his right wrist, and lodging superficially in his left thigh. A nearly intact bullet, designated Commission Exhibit 399, was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital that the commission concluded had been Connally’s.²¹

Later neutron activation analysis confirmed it was highly likely that the stretcher bullet caused the governor’s wrist injuries, and trajectory analysis based on the Zapruder film supported the timing. Critics pointed to the bullet’s relatively pristine condition and to the backward motion of Kennedy’s head visible in the film as evidence that the official account was wrong.²¹

The Autopsy

The president’s autopsy was performed at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, rather than in Dallas, a decision that generated lasting controversy. The Warren Commission itself never examined the autopsy X-rays and photographs, citing privacy concerns for the Kennedy family. The Navy doctor who led the autopsy destroyed his original notes.²¹

The House Select Committee’s Different Conclusion

By the mid-1970s, public confidence in the Warren Commission’s conclusions had eroded. In 1976, Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations to reinvestigate. After a two-year inquiry, the committee issued its final report in January 1979 with a conclusion that directly contradicted the Warren Commission: President Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

The committee’s key evidence was a Dictabelt audio recording from a Dallas motorcycle officer’s open microphone, which acoustics experts interpreted as capturing four shots rather than three, with the fourth fired from the so-called “grassy knoll” in front of the motorcade, not from the Book Depository behind it.²²

The committee agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald’s shots killed the president and that one bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally. Its finding of a probable second gunman was the departure. The committee concluded that neither the Soviet government, the Cuban government, the CIA, the FBI, nor the Secret Service was involved. It could not rule out that individual members of organized crime or anti-Castro Cuban groups may have played a role, though it lacked sufficient evidence to make that finding.²³

The acoustic evidence came under broad scientific criticism almost immediately. The National Academy of Sciences later reviewed the Dictabelt recording and deemed it uncorroborated, significantly undermining the committee’s conspiracy conclusion. The question of a second shooter remains unresolved, and polling has consistently shown that most Americans reject the lone-gunman finding. As of a 2023 Gallup survey, 65 percent of U.S. adults believed the assassination involved a conspiracy, while 29 percent accepted that Oswald acted alone.²⁴

Johnson Sworn In Aboard Air Force One

At 2:38 p.m. on November 22, roughly ninety minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead, Lyndon B. Johnson took the presidential oath of office aboard Air Force One at Love Field. The oath was administered by U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes of the Northern District of Texas, making it the first time a woman had administered the presidential oath and the only time a president has been sworn in on an airplane.²⁵ Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing the suit stained with her husband’s blood, stood beside Johnson in the crowded conference compartment for the photograph that became one of the most recognizable images of the American presidency.

Dealey Plaza Today

Dealey Plaza, the three-acre triangular park where Commerce, Main, and Elm Streets converge at a triple underpass, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993 on the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination.²⁶ The former Texas School Book Depository still stands at the northwest corner of Houston and Elm Streets. Its sixth and seventh floors house the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which opened on Presidents’ Day 1989. The sniper’s nest has been restored to its 1963 appearance.

The museum’s core exhibition, John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation, draws over 260,000 visitors annually. Its collections include approximately 95,000 objects and more than 2,500 oral histories from eyewitnesses, community leaders, and former White House officials. The archives are accessible to scholars and the public both on-site and through digital platforms.²⁶

1
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Appendix 8 – Parkland Medical Reports
2
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Chapter 2
3
San Antonio Express-News. JFK San Antonio Visit
4
The Guardian. JFK Assassination Dallas Legacy
5
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Chapter 2
6
Texas State Library and Archives Commission. JFK Itineraries
7
NPR. How Kennedy’s Assassination Changed the Secret Service
8
National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Secret Service and the Warren Commission
9
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Chapter 3
10
Britannica. Assassination of John F. Kennedy
11
The Sixth Floor Museum. Zapruder Film FAQ
12
Smithsonian Magazine. What Does the Zapruder Film Really Tell Us
13
Library of Congress. Zapruder Film of the Kennedy Assassination
14
NBC DFW. Texas School Book Depository
15
CBS News. JFK Assassination Suspect Lee Harvey Oswald Is Arrested, Then Gunned Down
16
National Archives. Warren Commission Report, Chapter 5
17
JFK Presidential Library. November 22, 1963 – Death of the President
18
Britannica. Jack Ruby
19
Texas State Historical Association. Jack Ruby Entry
20
Britannica. Assassination of John F. Kennedy – Conspiracy Theories
21
National Archives. HSCA Report, Part 1A
22
National Archives. HSCA Report Summary
23
National Archives. HSCA Report, Part 1C
24
Gallup. Decades Later, Americans Doubt Lone Gunman Killed JFK
25
U.S. Senate Inaugural Committee. Swearing-In of Lyndon Baines Johnson
26
The Sixth Floor Museum. About the Museum Press Kit