Dallas

22 Nov 1963

22 November 1963

The President’s car turned onto Elm Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, past the Texas School Book Depository. Seconds later shots were fired and the car raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where at 1 p.m. President Kennedy was pronounced dead. At 2:38 p.m. Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as President on the plane at Love Field.

12:30 p.m.The clock on the Texas School Book Depository as the motorcade turned onto Elm Street, in the Warren Commission’s account

24 Nov 1963

Two days later

Police arrested Oswald in a Dallas movie theater that afternoon. On Sunday 24 November, as he was moved from the city jail, Jack Ruby shot him while, in the Commission’s words, “millions watched on television.” Ruby said it was “a temporary fit of depression and rage over the President’s death”; he was found guilty of murder on 14 March 1964, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction on 5 October 1966 and ordered a retrial outside Dallas. The House committee later believed the shooting “was not a spontaneous act,” and found Ruby was not a member of organized crime but had many contacts with underworld figures.

26 Sep 1963

Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and came back in June 1962; the FBI had opened a security file on him and interviewed him after his return. In May 1963 he moved to New Orleans, where in August he clashed with a delegate of an anti-Castro student group. In Mexico City he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies and contacted a Soviet vice consul whom the Church Committee calls “in fact a KGB agent.” The FBI, it found, did not step up its inquiries.

29 Nov 1963

The Commission

On 29 November 1963 President Johnson created a commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren and selected its seven members, among them Representative Gerald Ford, later President, and Allen Dulles, who had directed the CIA until November 1961. What Dulles’s seat meant is told by a CIA historian, David Robarge: Dulles advised CIA officers on what the other commissioners would ask, and McCone could count on him to “keep a dutiful watch over Agency equities” and steer clear of “lethal anti-Castro covert actions.” Robarge adds that it is not known whether Dulles told other commissioners of those plots. The conflict he describes is over Cuba operations; none of these sources ties it to the shooting itself.

Sep 1964

What it found

In September 1964 the Commission concluded that Oswald fired the shots that killed the President, that he “acted alone,” and that nothing supported the speculation that he was an agent of the FBI or the CIA; it also held that he killed Patrolman J. D. Tippit 45 minutes after the shooting. The House committee later agreed that he owned the rifle and was on the sixth floor. The Commission called the evidence that one bullet struck both the President and Governor Connally “very persuasive,” while noting “some difference of opinion” on it. It added that, because of “the difficulty of proving negatives to a certainty,” the possibility of others being involved “cannot be established categorically.”

17 Apr 1961

Bay of Pigs

Back to the spring of 1961. On 17 April a force of Cuban exiles, backed by the CIA, landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast, and Cuban troops thwarted it. The Church Committee later put it, with Operation MONGOOSE, among the “fully authorized” assaults on Castro’s government. Two and a half years separate it from Dallas.

28 Nov 1961

A medal for the director

Days after the invasion was thwarted, Kennedy told a news conference he was “the responsible officer of the government.” On 28 November 1961 he went to CIA headquarters at Langley and gave its director, Allen Dulles, the National Security Medal. John McCone succeeded him the next day. The CIA’s own history says Dulles “lost his job after” the Bay of Pigs, which gives the order of events, not a reason.

25 Apr 1966

The remark

Kennedy is said to have wanted “to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” The earliest printing anyone has traced is The New York Times of 25 April 1966, in the first of five articles on the CIA by a team that included Tom Wicker. The Times says only that Kennedy said it “to one of the highest officials of his Administration,” as the Bay of Pigs disaster “came home to him.” It names no one, and does not say who told the Times.

25 Apr 1966

How firm is it?

The Times does not say who told it; even if the official did, it is a recollection printed more than two years after Kennedy died. Gizmodo, checking in 2017, found no earlier record, and noted that the wording echoes much older sermons and fiction. The same article adds that Kennedy “did not ‘splinter’ it after all,” and in public, on 28 November 1961, he told CIA staff how “essential” their work was. Whether he said the words in private is not settled by any source we found.

Nov 1961

Plots against Castro

A Senate committee found in 1975 that the CIA plotted to kill Castro at least eight times between 1960 and 1965; one plot, with underworld figures, reportedly twice got as far as sending poison pills to Cuba. Operation MONGOOSE, a program to overthrow him, ended, the committee says, when the Cuban Missile Crisis came. On Kennedy, witnesses told it he raised assassination and opposed it: Senator Smathers recalled a conversation, and the reporter Tad Szulc’s notes of 9 November 1961 say Kennedy was “resisting pressures” to “okay a Castro murder.” Whether any President knew of the plots the committee could not find; it called the chain of command “so ambiguous.”

1964

What it was not told

The Church Committee found that neither the CIA nor the FBI told the Commission about the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro; Dulles “presumably knew” of the earlier plots but probably not of the 1963 AM/LASH operation, and the FBI never told the Commission or the public it had disciplined seventeen staff over its Oswald file. The committee said senior officials may have “made conscious decisions not to disclose potentially important information,” but could not settle it. CIA historian David Robarge wrote that the agency’s help was “passive, reactive, and selective,” and that McCone “did have a place in a ‘benign cover-up.’” He limited that to the Castro plots, quoting the scholar Max Holland that the only conspiracy was “to kill Castro and then keep that effort secret after November 22nd.”

22 Nov 1963

The same day

In 1963 the CIA renewed contact with a high-level Cuban official code-named AM/LASH, who proposed an “inside job” against Castro. In September Castro publicly warned that Cuba would “answer in kind” against such plotting; on 22 November a CIA case officer told AM/LASH he would be given rifles with telescopic sights. No one directing either agency’s investigation was told, and they said they would have found it relevant. Yet the committee “has not uncovered any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy,” saw no evidence that Castro plotted the killing, and said its report “does not reach any final conclusions.”

29 Mar 1979

What the House said about the agencies

The House committee found the CIA “deficient in its collection and sharing of information,” and the FBI deficient in sharing too, but concluded that the Secret Service, FBI and CIA “were not involved in the assassination.” The 1975 Rockefeller Commission had also found the CIA not involved. The committee added a warning: a finding that Oswald was never in contact with the CIA “should explicitly acknowledge the possibility of oversight,” because it could not always verify that the CIA had given it everything. It found that once McCone and Helms assured the Warren Commission that Oswald had no tie to the CIA, “no further efforts were made” to pursue the matter.

29 Mar 1979

1979: “probably a conspiracy.”

The House reopened the inquiry in 1976. Its committee agreed Oswald fired three shots, two of which struck the President, but concluded Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” and could not identify the other gunman or the extent of it. It rested that on four points: the Warren and FBI conspiracy inquiries were seriously flawed; the Commission was wrong about Oswald’s and Ruby’s associations; “a more limited conspiracy could not be ruled out”; and a high probability of a second gunman, which, it said, “did not, by itself, establish” a conspiracy. On the evidence it had, it believed the Soviet and Cuban governments were not involved, and that anti-Castro groups as groups and organized crime as a group were not, though it could not rule out individual members.

1978

The tape

Dallas police radio traffic was recorded that day on a Dictabelt; the committee said one channel was picking up a vehicle whose transmit switch was stuck on. The firm Bolt Beranek and Newman put the chance of a knoll shot at first at “only 50 percent”; Prof. Mark Weiss of Queens College and a colleague then extended that work and computed “a certainty factor of 95 percent or better,” which, with the chance the sound was a supersonic bullet, gave 76 percent for the whole sequence. The committee read it, with the shots known to come from the Depository, as “a high probability that two gunmen fired.” But it concluded the knoll shot missed the President, and that the second gunman was established only by the acoustic study.

95 percentThe certainty the House committee’s analysts computed for a shot from the grassy knoll; the whole sequence they put at 76 percent

1982

1982 and after

At the Justice Department’s arrangement, a National Research Council committee reviewed the recording in 1982 and said the acoustic analyses “do not demonstrate that there was a grassy knoll shot”; the sounds were recorded “about one minute after the President had been shot.” That answered one of the four grounds of the House finding. In 2001 D. B. Thomas argued in Science & Justice that the chance the knoll sound was random noise was “no greater than 0.037” and that the sounds fall at the time of the shooting; in 2005 Linsker, Garwin and others, among them N. F. Ramsey, first author of the 1982 report, answered that Thomas made “serious errors,” corrected errors in the 1982 report, and reaffirmed the one-minute timing. Each side is given in its own words; this page does not decide between them.

about one minuteHow long after the shooting a National Research Council committee placed the sounds the House committee read as gunshots

1979

A name from another story

E. Howard Hunt, an intelligence officer later in the White House Plumbers, was named in 1978 by the Spotlight newspaper, in an article he sued over, as one of three men arrested near Dealey Plaza (a claim it credited to the authors Weberman and Canfield) and as the subject of a CIA memo placing him in Dallas. The House committee compared photographs of the three men with Hunt and others critics had named and matched only Fred Lee Chrisman, whom it found was not in Dealey Plaza; the memo rumor, it said, “was not founded on fact.” Hunt denied it in a sworn deposition and the committee “found no evidence that contradicted” him. His libel suit decides nothing about it: an appeals court in 1983 sent the verdict back for a new trial.

26 Oct 1992

1992: open the files

Almost thirty years after Dallas, Congress, “hoping to allay lingering doubts” and, the Review Board’s report says, disturbed by the conclusions of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, passed a law gathering the records in one National Archives collection. It created a five-member Review Board, sworn in on 11 April 1994, to judge each agency’s request to keep records closed. The Board reviewed and voted on more than 27,000 redacted records and won agreement to release 33,000 more; it also learned that in January 1995 the Secret Service destroyed some presidential protection survey reports for Kennedy’s fall 1963 trips. Every record had to open by 2017 unless the President certified a specific harm.

more than four million pagesWhat the Review Board’s work left in the National Archives, in its own 1998 words

Jul 2025

The case officer

The CIA told a court that George Joannides took part in two covert projects, one named JMWAVE and the other his service as its representative to the House committee in 1978 and 1979. In 2003 the committee’s former counsel G. Robert Blakey and the journalist Jefferson Morley, with writers of opposed views among the co-signers, wrote that in 1963 he guided a CIA-funded Cuban student group whose New Orleans delegates denounced Oswald, and that the CIA never told the committee; Blakey later swore the CIA “knowingly and corruptly obstructed” the inquiry, and CIA counsel answered in court that “undercover” showed only that his affiliation was not publicly acknowledged.

Jul 2025

The 2025 files

In July 2025 the CIA posted about 40 documents on him, among them a 17 January 1963 memo directing an alias, “Howard Gebler”; Axios reported the agency had denied he was known as “Howard,” and Representative Anna Paulina Luna said the CIA had been “lying for 62 years.” Others differ: Michael Isikoff and Gus Russo wrote there is “no evidence of an actual CIA ‘connection’ to Oswald,” Axios said the documents do not settle whether Oswald acted alone, none of these accounts says Joannides met Oswald, and the CIA said it has fully complied with the law.

26 Oct 2017

2017 to 2026

The 1992 law set 26 October 2017 for opening what remained. That day President Trump held some records back after CIA and FBI requests and about 2,800 came out; the Archives posted batches through April 2018, more under presidential memos in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and on 18 March 2025 all records previously withheld for classification, with later batches to 30 January 2026. FBI records found after a 2020 inventory came out with grand jury redactions, and records under court seal or tax secrecy are handled separately.