TODAY, exactly fifty years ago, an incident that was as sudden, and shockingly unexpected occurred in the United States that caused an unprecedented outpouring of national grief. It was approximately 12.30pm, Central Standard Time, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was felled by an assassin’s bullet. The 35th President of the United States was at the time travelling in a motorcade along with his wife, Jacqueline, and  accompanied by the first couple of Texas, Governor John Conolly and Mrs Conolly, through Dallas, Texas.

Kennedy had been elected to the white House in the 1960 November Presidential elections, after defeating the Republican Vice-President and Presidential nominee, Richard Milhous Nixon, in what has been the closest US presidential race. Kennedy polled 34,220,984 votes or 49.7%, while his challenger garnered 34,108,157 votes or 49.6%, thus he won by a very slim margin of 112, 827. He was also the first Roman Catholic to occupy the White House, as well as the youngest President to be elected, after Franklin Roosevelt.
He was also the Fourth American President to die by the gun, the others being Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley, the 16th, 20th, and 25th Presidents respectively. In fact, the latter Chief Executive died in 1901, thus making Kennedy and his death, the only two violent tragedies of twentieth century White House incumbents.
An observation made is that McKinley’s death, although similarly violent, and occurring fifty years earlier, was hardly ever recalled by Americans prior to Kennedy’s death, and even after.
The 35th President’s death is still the source of great controversy as it relates to the circumstances of his ending. There is no other political assassination more famous than this, that has spawned so many conspiratorial theories as to how this much–beloved American, political statesman met his death. The theories become even more complex when it is considered that the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot dead by Jack Ruby, a self-proclaimed sympathizer of the slain president’s widow.
Despite a ten-month investigation by the Earl Warren Commission that found there was a lone gunman, the strong belief upheld to this day is that there was a vast conspiracy inclusive of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) and some congressional personalities at the time and the Mafia, that had been responsible for Kennedy’s murder. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, although exempting those agencies stated, did not exclude the possibility that individuals from those institutions may have been involved, when in its investigative report it criticized flaws in the Warren Report, and investigations done by the FBI. But the polls conducted between 1966-2003, showed that 80% of those polled suspected a plot or cover-up. Even a recent 2013 AP exercise concludes the view that more than one person was a part of the crime. No doubt, the more than 1000 books, including in excess of 100 this year that continue to argue and debate as to the mosaic of conspiracy still surrounding his tragic ending.

But this enchantment with a dead president, seen at the time as holding great promise for leadership, but whose untimely death robbed the fulfillment of such, continues up to this day, despite later revelations of his personal indiscretions, that if known at that time, would have rendered him liable to impeachment proceedings.
Arriving at the Oval Office in the heat of the Cold War, Americans and the world over, will remember Kennedy as one of the two principal East-West figures in each of the following incidents: the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which he reportedly executed, although his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower had been its architect; the Berlin crisis in 1961 that culminated in the building of the Berlin Wall; and the Cuban Missile crisis, in which the world came closest to a nuclear war.
His stock as leader who had been able to defeat the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s(USSR) leader, Nikita Khruschev during this tense stand-off, rose after this particular high voltage Cold War incident. In fact, this incident was reported to be one of the reasons for Chairman Kkruschev’s removal from office in 1964.