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 LIFE's 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.
The famous Zapruder film, included here, 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 LIFE The Day Kennedy Died, including:
• An official release of the unedited Zapruder film
• An essay by Richard B. Stolley on how he exclusively obtained the iconic film for LIFE
• An essay by Abraham Zapruder's granddaughter, Alexandra, who writes for the first time about how the film affected her family over the generations
• Personal 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 more
• Rarely seen photos from the TIME/LIFE archive of Allan Grant's photo essay of the Oswald family on the night of the assassination
• A foreword featuring a conversation with historian David McCullough
• LIFE'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 ran
• A detailed look at 50 years of conspiracy theories, written by J.I. Baker, author of The Empty Glass
The Kennedys: A LIFE story for more than 50 years, and still today.
