John F. Kennedy Assassinated 44 Years Ago Today

Kennedy's Inaugural Address offered the memorable injunction: "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

Photo courtesy: wikipedia.org

(SALEM, Ore. ) - John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated 44-years ago today.

Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, at 12:30 PM CST, at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in a theatre about 80 minutes after the assassination, and was charged with the crime, but was murdered two days later by Jack Ruby before he could be put on trial. Oswald denied shooting anyone, claiming he was a patsy.

On November 29, 1963, President Johnson created the Warren Commission — chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren — to investigate the assassination.

It concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin, but this remains widely disputed by some scholars and eye witnesses of the assassination.

Approximately 80% of the American people have consistently not believed the Commission's findings since the mid-1960s in many Gallup Polls taken on the issue of Oswald's guilt or innocence, partly due to the findings in the Zapruder film that many believe shows the fatal shot being fired from the front, allege many witnesses who ran towards the infamous Grassy Knoll area.

After Kennedy's leadership as commander of the USS PT-109 during World War II in the South Pacific, his aspirations turned political.

Kennedy represented the state of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat, and in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1961.

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Kennedy defeated former Vice President and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election, one of the closest in American history. To date, he is the only practicing Roman Catholic to be elected President and the only President to have won a Pulitzer Prize.

His administration witnessed the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the American Civil Rights Movement and early events of the Vietnam War.

Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with his wife Jacqueline and their deceased minor children, and his brother, the late Senator Robert Kennedy is also buried nearby.

Information from White House Biography and Wikipedia