LIFE The Day Kennedy Died

Fifty years ago on November 22, 1963, in Dallas's Dealey Plaza, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline. LIFE magazine, the weekly pictorial chronicle of events in America and throughout the world, was quickly on the scene. The Kennedys had been our story: Jack and Jackie made the cover in his sailboat before they were married and he was a fresh-faced senator from Massachusetts, and the White House doors had remained open to LIFE throughout his presidency: Cecil Stoughton's photographs of Caroline and John-John in the Oval Office, Jackie's tour of the renovation, tense behind-the-scenes moments during 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis — all of this appeared in LIFE. We needed to be in Dallas.

The famous Zapruder film first appeared in LIFE, after being acquired by LIFE's Richard B. Stolley. Stolley also interviewed at the time Dallas police, Kennedy administration officials, members of the Oswald family, workers at Jack Ruby's bar. Jackie's first conversation after the murder was with Theodore H. White for LIFE, and in it she told the American people, for the first time, about the Camelot her late husband had imagined.

All of that is revisited in this commemorative book, including:All 486 frames of the Zapruder film in print for the first timeAn essay by Richard B. Stolley on how he exclusively obtained the iconic film for LIFEAn essay by Abraham Zapruder's granddaughter, Alexandra, who writes for the first time about how the film affected her family over the generationsPersonal stories about where they were when they heard the news from Barbra Streisand, Maya Angelou, Jimmy Carter, Tony Bennett, Willie Mays, Sergei Khrushchev, James Earl Jones, John Boehner, Tom Brokaw, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alec Baldwin, Bill O'Reilly, Dan Rather and many moreRarely seen photos from the TIME/LIFE archive of Allan Grant's photo essay of the Oswald family on the night of the assassinationA foreword featuring a conversation with historian David McCulloughA full reprint of LIFE's 1963 issue covering the tragic events in DallasLIFE's Theodore H. White's famous "Camelot" interview with Jackie (which she gave shortly after the assassination), as well as the story behind the interview and the words that never ranA new essay on 50 years of conspiracy theories by J.I. Baker, author of The Empty GlassThe Kennedys: A LIFE story for more than 50 years, and still today.