Nov. 22, 1963, was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history, when a young president who had captured the imagination of the world was gunned down sitting with his wife in a motorcade driving through the heart of Dallas, Texas.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy shook the confidence of a country that had emerged less than a generation earlier, triumphant from World War II, and set the stage for the social upheavals of the rest of the decade. The official explanation for the assassination was that a nonentity named Lee Harvey Oswald had carried off the murder entirely on his own — for reasons that have never been fully explained.
This left many Americans unsatisfied and gave rise to the modern industry of conspiracy-mongering that still defines much of American political discourse. (AP/Yahoo News)