November 22, 1963

The motorcade came down Elm Street into Dealey Plaza a little after half past twelve, Central time. The car was open. His wife was beside him and the governor of Texas and his wife were in front of them.

He was hit twice, in the back and in the head. The car ran for Parkland Hospital four miles away and he was pronounced dead there at one o'clock. He was forty-six years old, and he had been president for two years and ten months.

Forty-five minutes after the shots in the plaza, a Dallas police officer named J. D. Tippit stopped a man walking in Oak Cliff and was shot four times beside his patrol car. He was thirty-nine, and he left a wife and three children. The man was arrested in a cinema half an hour later and was himself shot dead two days after that, in the basement of the city jail, in front of the cameras.

What the killing meant, and who else may have been behind it, has been argued over ever since and is argued over still. That argument is not what this page is for. This page is for a Tuesday in Boston in 1917 and a Friday in Dallas in 1963, and the man between them, and the officer who stopped a stranger in the street because it was his job.

The country stopped. It went on afterwards, as countries do. But for four days in November the television carried nothing else, and a quarter of a million people filed past a coffin in the Capitol rotunda through the night, and a great many people who had never met him found they were grieving.