Chapter One

Before

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Before we start

I have stood in this plaza more times than I can count. Work trips. Visiting friends. Every time I ended up on Elm Street, looking up at that window. It is smaller than you think. You can walk the whole place in two minutes. Something happened here that changed the world, and I never got past how ordinary it looks. So I rebuilt it. This one is mine.1

I want to say at the front what the standard is, so you can hold me to it. Every factual claim in this book has a source, and where a government document exists I have its record number, so you can pull the page yourself and read past me. The full source list runs to many pages and is not reprinted here, because I would rather spend the paper on the book. Ask me for it at @keithadler on X and I will send it.2

Every claim in here is one of three things, and I will tell you which. Established, meaning the record supports it and serious people on all sides accept it. Disputed, meaning good people read the same evidence and disagree. Theory, meaning somebody has proposed it and the evidence does not carry it. Almost every bad book about this works by letting one of those sound like another. That is the trick, and I am not going to use it.2

Some of what is in this book will not survive the next release of files, and I would rather say that at the front than have it discovered at the back. This case has been revised continuously for sixty years and there is no reason that stops now. So where a claim is contested I have marked it, and where I could be shown wrong I have said what would do it. That is the offer. Nothing here is defended past the point where the evidence goes.2

One more rule, and it cuts against completeness. The released files carry private citizens’ identity numbers, home addresses and dates of birth, and the names of people who informed on states that still exist. Where a page carries any of that, I will tell you what the document is, give you its record number, and not reproduce what is on it. Released is not the same as fair game. That distinction comes up more often in here than you would expect.2

The first piece of this I ever held

When I was a child my mother showed me a card. It was an acknowledgement from Mrs Kennedy, sent out to people who had written to her after Dallas, and my mother had kept hers. Hundreds of thousands of Americans wrote to that widow. She answered with a printed card, and families put them in drawers and left them there for fifty years. Mine did. That card is the first piece of this I ever held.3, 4

The scale of it is the thing I have never been able to explain to anyone born after. Everyone in my mother’s generation could tell you exactly where they were standing. In my own life nothing came close until the morning of September the eleventh, and what I recognized that day was the shape of it. A date that cuts everything into before, and after. There are only a few of those, and this was one.3

What the world was, if you were not there

If you are under fifty this needs saying plainly, because the book assumes it and half its stakes are invisible without it. The Soviet Union was a country that no longer exists. Fifteen republics, of which Russia was the largest, run from Moscow by a single party that permitted no other. It came out of the revolution of 1917, it broke up at the end of 1991, and for the whole of the story in this book it was the second most powerful thing on earth.5

The Cold War is the name for the forty years those two countries spent trying to defeat each other without ever meeting on a battlefield. They fought through other people’s wars, through money, through spies, through who could put what in orbit. And underneath it, both held enough nuclear weapons to end the other inside an afternoon. That is the ceiling over every single page of this book. Not a mood. A standing arrangement about the end of the world.5

Now you can see what he actually did. In 1959 the border between those two worlds was closed in a way nothing today resembles. Ordinary people did not move between them. You could not fly to Moscow for a vacation. And a serving United States Marine, trained on radar, walking into the American Embassy in Moscow and announcing he was staying, was not a curiosity. It was front page news, and it was a security problem, and the file it opened never closed.6

Cuba is an island ninety miles off Florida. In 1959 a guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro overthrew the government there, and within two years the new one had aligned itself with Moscow. So the United States now had a Soviet ally close enough to see from a beach. In 1961 an American backed invasion by Cuban exiles failed badly at the Bay of Pigs. Everything you will read about exiles, training camps and assassination plots comes out of that failure.5

In October 1962 the Soviets put nuclear missiles on that island and the United States found them. For thirteen days the two countries stood at the edge of a war that would have killed tens of millions of people in an afternoon. It ended in a bargain: the missiles came out, and the Americans quietly undertook not to invade Cuba. That was thirteen months before Dallas. The men in this story had all just lived through it, and none of them had recovered.5

Put those pieces together and the summer of 1963 reads differently. A young American who had lived in the Soviet Union, come back, and now stood on a street corner handing out leaflets supporting Castro was not being eccentric. In that year, in that country, he was standing on the most dangerous fault line on earth and waving. Whatever else he was, he had made himself extremely interesting to several governments, and that is true whether or not anybody sent him.7

One more thing before we go on, because it explains behavior you will otherwise find sinister. On the afternoon of the shooting nobody in Washington knew whether this was one man or the opening move of a war. The accused had lived in the Soviet Union and campaigned for Cuba. If that connected upward, the United States might have had to respond, and responding meant missiles. A great deal of what looks like a cover-up begins as men trying very hard not to start the end of the world by teatime.7, 8

The gray market

One more thing about that island before we leave it, because it explains a whole cast of people you are about to meet. A long low-grade war fought at ninety miles produces an economy, and that economy does not sit inside any country’s law. Boats. Weapons. Explosives. Radios. Forged papers. Money moving between people who do not ask questions. And men who will get into a boat at night for a fee. All of that grew, and it grew fast.7

I did not have to reason my way to that. Search the released files for it and it is everywhere. Explosives, in eight separate documents. Arms smuggling. Gun running. Dynamite. The financing of raids on Cuba. Infiltration. Vessels and crews. Bank accounts. A soldier of fortune with a file of his own. These are not the exciting documents anybody quotes. They are the ledger of a war being run by private people out of a warm coastline.9

And here is the correction I have to make to my own instinct, because I had this the wrong way round for a long time. Cuba was not the marketplace. Cuba in 1963 was a closed, rationed, heavily policed state with a security service reading its own mail, which is the opposite of a bazaar. The marketplace was on this side of the water. Miami, the Keys, the Bahamas, New Orleans, and camps in Guatemala. Havana was the target. Florida was the shop.7

Now the part that is not speculation at all. The largest single buyer in that market was the American government. The Agency ran a station in Miami that was among the biggest it had anywhere, inside its own country, where it was not supposed to operate. It armed exiles, trained them, paid them, and handed them what one of its own officers called an assassination package. And it went to organized crime and hired men to kill a head of state.10, 11

Look at what that actually is. A zone exists where the rules do not reach. It exists not because the state failed to close it but because the state needed somewhere its own rules did not apply, and then shopped there. That is the same structure as everything I showed you about how paper moves. A gray space is not a hole in power. It is a thing power builds on purpose, uses, and then does not write down.7

And now the refusals, because this is exactly the ground where a book like mine goes wrong. There is a temptation to make that coastline into a drugs pipeline and a trafficking route, and the record I have does not carry it. Narcotics appear in these files thirteen times and every one of them is an American organized crime case, not a Cuban one. That is a different market in a different city. On trafficking in people there is essentially nothing. I could write those paragraphs. They would be false.12, 7

What he actually flew into

Everyone remembers a beloved president. In February 1963 Gallup had him at seventy per cent. By October it was fifty-nine, and the last poll of his life put him at fifty-eight. Still a number most presidents would take, but the direction was down, and almost all of the fall came from one region. He was not going to Texas because he was safe there. He was going because he was not.13, 14

On the eleventh of June he went on television and called civil rights a moral issue, as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution. It was the right speech. It was also the most expensive one he ever gave. Most of his decline through 1963 came after that night, and most of it came in the South. He knew the bill would cost him the South. He sent it to Congress eight days later anyway.15, 16

In 1960 he won Texas by about two points, and only because the man on the ticket beneath him was from Texas. Twenty-four electoral votes, taken by an eyelash, with a native son doing the asking. In 1964 the arithmetic looked worse and the state party was at war with itself. That is the whole reason for the trip. Not a victory lap. A rescue.17, 18

The war had two names. Ralph Yarborough, the liberal senator. John Connally, the conservative governor, riding in the President’s own car. Lady Bird Johnson put it plainly. John was a good deal more conservative, Yarborough a good deal more liberal, and their chemistries just did not mix. Kennedy had flown 1,500 miles to get two men photographed smiling at each other.19, 20

It sounds petty. It was not. Yarborough was supposed to ride with Vice President Johnson, and he kept refusing. Getting into other cars, walking away, anything. It became such a problem that the President personally ordered his staff to make it happen. The seating chart of that motorcade is a peace treaty. That is what the cars behind him were for.21

Lyndon Johnson was not having a good fall. His former Senate aide, Bobby Baker, had resigned in October under an influence-peddling investigation, and the Senate was pulling at threads that led back toward Johnson’s own finances. He was a vice president with a scandal attached. Three days later he was President, and the investigation quietly went away.22, 23

†You will read that Kennedy had decided to drop Johnson from the 1964 ticket, and said so three days before Dallas. That comes from one source. His secretary, writing years afterwards, and historians have argued about it ever since. Nobody else in that White House recorded hearing it. It has never been established, and it is worth an enormous amount to anyone who needs a motive.24, 25

Four weeks before, Adlai Stevenson. The American ambassador to the United Nations. Spoke in Dallas and was jeered, jostled and spat on as he left. A woman hit him over the head with her placard. He telephoned Washington afterwards and wondered aloud whether the President should go to Dallas at all. He was told the trip was on.26

Handbills went round Dallas with the President’s face on them, front and profile, like a mugshot, under the words: wanted for treason. And on the morning he landed, the Dallas Morning News carried a full-page advertisement edged in black, the way a death notice is edged in black, accusing him of being soft on communism. He saw it at the hotel. He showed it to his wife.27, 28

Twenty days before Dallas, the president of South Vietnam was overthrown and killed. Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were taken from a church and shot in the back of an armored car. The coup happened with American knowledge. Washington decided not to stop it. There were around sixteen thousand American advisers in Vietnam that month. Nobody called it a war yet.29, 30

It had been thirteen months since the missiles in Cuba. In August they signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. No more testing in the atmosphere, in space or under water. A hotline had been strung between Washington and Moscow that summer so the two of them could speak before anybody launched anything. This was the year the temperature dropped. It is easy to forget he died during a thaw.31, 32

A president losing the South over a bill he refused to drop. A state he barely won, run by two Democrats who hated each other. A vice president under investigation. A city that had spat on his UN ambassador and printed his face on a wanted poster. And a world that had just watched America help remove another president. He landed at Love Field into all of that, and the crowds were enormous, and friendly.33

Nut country

He read that advertisement in a hotel room in Fort Worth and handed it to his wife, and what he said was: we are heading into nut country today. Then he said the rest of it. That if somebody wanted to shoot a president from a window with a rifle, nobody could stop it. He said that out loud, to her, over breakfast, about four hours before it happened.34, 35

The wanted poster did not come from nowhere. It was printed by an associate of Edwin Walker, a former general who had been removed from his command for handing out John Birch Society material to his own troops, who had run for governor of Texas and lost, and who lived in a house in Dallas. That is the temperature of the city. A cashiered general with a printing operation was a local political figure.36, 37

Seven months before the motorcade, somebody fired a rifle through the window of that general’s house and missed him by inches. It was unsolved at the time. The man later arrested for the President was named for it afterwards by his own wife, and the attribution rests largely on her. If she was right, the same man tried this twice in one city inside a year, and the first time nobody knew who to look for.38, 39

He was the first Catholic ever elected, and it had been used against him hard. In 1960 the pastor of the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world preached against putting a Catholic in the White House. That church was in Dallas. Three years later that had not gone anywhere. It is one more layer of a city where a substantial number of respectable people considered him not merely wrong but illegitimate.40, 41

Ask people now and he rates around eighty-five per cent, consistently near the top of every list of presidents. The last poll taken while he was alive said fifty-eight. That gap of nearly thirty points is not a change in the evidence. It is what happens when a man stops being a politician people argue with and becomes a thing that was taken. We are not remembering him. We are remembering the loss of him.42, 43

It is worth being fair to him about the number. Fifty-eight per cent, in the third year of a presidency, would be a remarkable figure in almost any decade since. He was not a failing president and he was not a hated one. He was a narrowly elected president losing one region over one bill, in a country that mostly liked him, visiting the part of it that did not. All of those are true at once, and only the last one usually gets told.42, 44

Who he was in the way of

He was President for a thousand and thirty-six days. Every president makes enemies and it is not interesting that he had some. What is worth setting out is how many separate and powerful interests he had actively disturbed in under three years, in how many directions at once, and how senior the people were who ended up on the wrong side of him. Here is the list. Then I am going to tell you why it proves nothing.7

After the Bay of Pigs failed he removed the Director of Central Intelligence, the deputy director for plans, and the deputy director. Three of the most senior intelligence officers in the United States, gone inside a year. And it was not only people. He signed national security directives shifting responsibility for large paramilitary operations away from the Agency and toward the Joint Chiefs. He did not just fire men. He moved a mission out of a building.45, 46

With the military it was a pattern rather than an incident. He refused the air strikes at the Bay of Pigs. In 1962 the Joint Chiefs put forward a plan to manufacture pretexts for a war with Cuba, including staged attacks on Americans, and he threw it out. During the missile crisis he refused to invade, and the Air Force chief told him to his face that the outcome was the greatest defeat in American history. Then he signed a test ban treaty they opposed.47, 48

In April 1962 the steel companies raised prices after he had leaned on the unions to hold wages down. He treated it as a betrayal and went at them with everything the federal government had. Antitrust threats, defense contracts moved, and F.B.I. agents telephoning reporters before dawn. The companies backed down in three days. American business did not forgive it, and from that spring a great deal of corporate money regarded him as an enemy rather than an opponent.49

And the Attorney General was his brother, running the first serious federal campaign against organized crime the country had seen. Convictions multiplied. The Teamsters president was pursued by a squad set up for the purpose. And in 1961 the most powerful man in the New Orleans underworld was put on a plane without notice and dumped in Guatemala. Not investigated. Removed. For men who believed they had helped put that family in office, it was worse than prosecution. It was contempt.50, 51

In his 1963 tax proposals he moved to cut the oil depletion allowance, which was the single largest tax advantage in American industry and the foundation of a great many Texas fortunes. Every independent oil man in that state understood exactly what it would cost him. That is worth holding in mind, because the man was killed in Texas, and among the loudest private voices against him were people whose money came out of the ground there.52

The Cuban exiles felt it twice. First on the beach in 1961, when the air cover did not come and men were left to be captured. Then after the missile crisis, when the price of ending it was an American undertaking not to invade, which to them meant the door had been closed permanently. Through 1963 his own government was seizing their boats and restricting their movements. The men he had armed were now being policed by him.53, 54

Here is one that rarely appears on anybody’s list. Through 1962 and 1963 he pressed the government of Israel, in a series of increasingly firm private letters, to allow American inspection of the reactor at Dimona, because he did not want another nuclear power in that region. The correspondence exists. It is some of the hardest language an American president has ever put in writing to that government, and the Israeli prime minister resigned in the middle of it.55

Then the biggest one, which is not a group of people but a condition. A test ban treaty. A telephone line to Moscow. A speech in June asking Americans to re-examine their attitude to the Soviet Union. A private channel opened to Havana. Careers, budgets, whole institutions had been built on that confrontation continuing, and in his last summer he was visibly trying to lower it. Nobody had to hate him personally to find that intolerable.56, 57

And now I take it all back, or rather I put it in its place. That is a list of motives, and motive is the cheapest thing in any murder case. Prosecutors do not win on motive, they win on means and opportunity and physical evidence, because in a large enough country somebody always wanted the victim dead. Every president in that century had a list like this. Long lists of enemies are the fuel of every theory in this subject precisely because they are always available.7

‡So I will keep only one thing from all of that, and it is not that people wanted him gone. It is the simultaneity. Intelligence, the general staff, heavy industry, organized crime, Texas money, the exiles and the whole architecture of the Cold War, all disturbed by the same man inside thirty-four months. That does not tell you anybody acted. It tells you that if somebody did, the field of people who would not have grieved was extraordinarily wide, and a wide field is very hard to investigate.7

The man the public did not know

The man in the photographs is tanned, forty-six and built like an advertisement. The man inside those photographs was seriously ill and had been most of his life. He had Addison’s disease, which is a failure of the adrenal glands and was potentially fatal before steroids. He had a back that had been operated on repeatedly and had nearly killed him twice. He was in pain most days. Almost none of this was public, and some of it was flatly denied.58

The medical records, opened decades later, describe a regime. Corticosteroids daily to keep him alive. Painkillers and injections of local anesthetic into his back. Drugs for his stomach, drugs to help him sleep, drugs to counter the drugs. And for a period, injections from a New York doctor who was giving him amphetamines and who was later stripped of his license. Some of the doctors treating him did not know what the others were prescribing.59, 60

Here is why I am telling you any of this. That day he was wearing a stiff back brace, laced tight, and over it a wide elastic bandage wound around his hips and thighs in a figure of eight. He was, in effect, strapped upright. Everything you are about to watch in that film happens to a man who physically could not slump, could not bend forward, and could not fall sideways out of the line of fire. That is not a detail about his health. It is a fact about the geometry.61, 62

And the reporters knew. Not all of it, but a great deal of it, and they did not write it. That was the working arrangement of the time: a president’s health and a president’s private life were considered outside the story unless they broke into public. It is very hard to explain to anybody under forty. Every scandal in the next few minutes was known, in some form, to people who typed for a living and chose not to.63

Most of the private life is nobody’s business and I am not going to inventory it. One relationship is different, because of who else was in it. Judith Campbell Exner was involved with the President and, in the same period, knew Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. Those are the two organized crime figures the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited to try to kill Fidel Castro. White House telephone logs record the calls. She testified to the Senate about it in 1975.64, 65

In March 1962 the Director of the F.B.I. had lunch with the President. What he brought was what his Bureau had learned about that relationship and about who else was in it. The logs show the calls to her stopped that day. You do not need a theory about what was said. You need only the sequence. A man with a file, a lunch, and a pattern of telephone calls that ends the same afternoon.66, 67

That summer a British government was falling apart over a minister, a young woman and a Soviet naval attache. Washington was watching it with real fear, because there was an East German born woman moving through the same social circles in Washington, and questions were being asked. She was quietly removed from the country in August 1963. Senate leaders were briefed by the Bureau. Three months before Dallas the administration had just survived something that could have ended it.68, 69

†Mary Pinchot Meyer, a Washington artist who had been close to the President, was shot dead on a towpath by the Potomac in October 1964. A man was tried and acquitted and nobody was ever convicted. What makes it belong in this book is what happened to her diary. By the account of her brother-in-law, who was a senior editor at Newsweek, it was retrieved and taken by James Angleton of the C.I.A. The same man the Bureau had filed as a confidential informant.70, 71

The rest arrived in pieces across half a century. Senate hearings in the seventies. Memoirs. Medical records opened in 2002. In 2011 a woman in her late sixties published an account of having been a nineteen year old intern in that White House. Some of what is alleged, including about the most famous actress of the age, has never been established and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the shape of it is no longer in question.72, 73, 74

I have not put this here for appetite. It earns its place four ways. The brace changes what his body could do in that car. The medicine bears on what the doctors in Bethesda were and were not told. One relationship connects the President directly to the two criminals his own government had hired to kill a foreign leader. And every piece of it was in a filing cabinet belonging to a man who could not be removed. None of that says who shot him. All of it says who had leverage.7

What was on his mind that morning

Fifteen weeks before Dallas they buried a baby. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born five and a half weeks early on the ninth of August 1963 and lived thirty-nine hours. His father was with him at the end and by every account did not take it well and did not talk about it. Whatever you have read about that marriage, the people around them said the same thing afterwards: they were closer after August than they had ever been.75, 76

It is also the reason she was there. She did not do political travel. She had not been on a domestic campaign trip since he was elected, and she had spent the fall recovering. Texas was the first one she agreed to, and she agreed to it partly because he wanted her there and partly because she was coming back to the world. She had told him she would campaign with him through 1964. Dallas was the beginning of that.77

At home there were two children. Caroline, nearly six, and John, who would be three on the twenty-fifth of November. That is the Monday. Which means the small boy standing on the steps of that cathedral in a coat, doing the thing everybody has seen a photograph of, was doing it on his third birthday. Nobody planned that. It is simply where the calendar fell.78

On the work in front of him, start with what had gone right. That fall the Senate had ratified a treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, negotiated with the Soviets, the first arms agreement of the nuclear age. He considered it the best thing he had done. It had also confirmed to a section of his own country that he was soft, and the men who thought so were loud, organized and increasingly concentrated in the state he was flying into.79

The largest thing on his desk was a civil rights bill he had sent to Congress in June and could not move. It was stalled, and it was doing exactly what everybody had warned him it would do, which was to take the southern states apart under him. That is not incidental to this trip. He was in Texas because Texas was slipping, and Texas was slipping in part because of that bill, and the bill would pass the following summer under the man riding two cars behind him.80

†Then Vietnam, which is argued about more than anything else he left behind. In October he had approved a plan to bring a thousand advisers home by the end of the year. Three weeks before Dallas the government in Saigon was overthrown and its president murdered, in a coup his administration had encouraged and which visibly shook him. Whether he was leaving or digging in is the great unanswerable question of his presidency, and honest people read the same papers and come out opposite.81, 82

One more thing was running, quietly, and almost nobody in his own government knew. Through a diplomat at the United Nations and through a French journalist he had opened a private line to Fidel Castro to explore whether the two countries could talk. It was live that week. That is why, when the news reached Havana, the man carrying the message was actually in the room. He was trying to end that quarrel while his own agencies were still trying to end Castro.83, 84

And underneath all of it, the ordinary reason he was in an open car on a Friday lunchtime. He was running. The election was a year away, he had won by a hair in 1960, Texas had twenty-five electoral votes and two Democrats in it who would not sit in the same room. He had come to be seen, in the sun, with his wife beside him, waving at a city that was thought to be against him. The whole trip was about being visible.85

Put him together. Forty-six years old. In pain and strapped upright. Fifteen weeks past burying a son, with a wife beside him who had come back into public life for it. A treaty he was proud of, a bill he could not move, a war he had half decided about, a secret line to an enemy, and a re-election to win in a state that did not want him. That is who was sitting in the back of that car at twelve thirty. Not a photograph. A man in the middle of things.7

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

85 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

  1. personal, the narrator's own visits to Dealey Plaza
  2. personal, the author's statement of method
  3. personal, the narrator's own account
  4. the White House acknowledgement cards sent in response to condolence mail, 1963-64
  5. general historical record
  6. contemporary press coverage of the Oswald defection, November 1959
  7. the author's assessment
  8. contemporaneous accounts of the response in Washington, 22 November 1963
  9. FBI records in the 2025 release, including RIF 124-10223-10008, 124-10204-10278, 124-10204-10495
  10. Church Committee interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 1975
  11. RIF material on the assassination package discussed earlier in this book
  12. the author's search of the 2025 FBI release
  13. Gallup approval series 1961–63
  14. Gallup: final approval 58%
  15. JFK Civil Rights Address, 11 June 1963
  16. Gallup: decline concentrated in the South after June
  17. 1960 presidential election, Texas result
  18. WR ch.2 (purpose of the Texas trip)
  19. Lady Bird Johnson oral history
  20. contemporary reporting on the Connally–Yarborough feud
  21. contemporary reporting on the motorcade seating dispute
  22. Senate Rules Committee inquiry into Bobby Baker, Oct 1963
  23. the inquiry into Johnson's finances lapsed after 22 Nov
  24. Evelyn Lincoln's later account
  25. historians' criticism of the Lincoln claim
  26. reporting of the Stevenson incident, Dallas, 24 Oct 1963
  27. "Wanted for Treason" handbill, Dallas, Oct–Nov 1963
  28. Dallas Morning News advertisement, 22 Nov 1963
  29. 1963 South Vietnamese coup, 1–2 Nov 1963
  30. US foreknowledge documented in the Pentagon Papers and NSA files
  31. Limited Test Ban Treaty, signed 5 Aug 1963
  32. Washington–Moscow hotline, established Jun 1963
  33. synthesis of the above; Love Field arrival, 22 Nov 1963
  34. Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers, Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
  35. William Manchester, The Death of a President, 1967
  36. Warren Report, chapter VII
  37. Warren Commission testimony of Robert Surrey
  38. Warren Report, chapter IV
  39. Warren Commission testimony of Marina Oswald, volume I
  40. Houston Ministerial Association address, 12 September 1960
  41. contemporary Dallas press coverage, 1960
  42. Gallup approval series 1961 to 1963
  43. Gallup retrospective presidential ratings
  44. 1960 presidential election returns
  45. National Security Action Memoranda 55, 56 and 57, June 1961
  46. contemporaneous record of the 1961 CIA leadership changes
  47. Operation Northwoods proposal, Joint Chiefs of Staff, March 1962, declassified 1997
  48. Executive Committee recordings, October 1962
  49. contemporaneous reporting of the April 1962 steel crisis
  50. Department of Justice organized crime prosecution records, 1961 to 1963
  51. contemporaneous reporting of the deportation of Carlos Marcello, April 1961
  52. Kennedy administration tax proposals, 1963
  53. records of United States restrictions on exile raids, 1963
  54. Church Committee interim report, 1975
  55. Kennedy correspondence with the government of Israel regarding the Dimona reactor, 1962 to 1963, declassified
  56. Limited Test Ban Treaty, 1963
  57. American University address, June 1963
  58. Kennedy medical records released to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, 2002
  59. Kennedy medical records, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
  60. New York State medical board proceedings against Max Jacobson, 1975
  61. Warren Commission testimony and exhibits regarding the back brace
  62. Kennedy medical records
  63. contemporaneous journalistic practice, widely documented in later memoirs
  64. Church Committee testimony of Judith Campbell Exner, 1975
  65. White House telephone logs, Warren Commission and Church Committee records
  66. White House appointment and telephone records, 22 March 1962
  67. Church Committee, Book V
  68. Senate and FBI records concerning the Rometsch matter, 1963
  69. contemporaneous reporting on the Profumo affair
  70. Benjamin C. Bradlee, published account of the recovery of the diary
  71. contemporaneous reporting of the 1965 trial
  72. Church Committee hearings, 1975
  73. Kennedy medical records released 2002
  74. published memoirs, 2011
  75. contemporaneous reporting, August 1963
  76. published accounts by Kennedy family associates
  77. published accounts of the planning of the Texas trip
  78. contemporaneous reporting of the state funeral, 25 November 1963
  79. Limited Test Ban Treaty, ratified by the Senate September 1963
  80. legislative record of the Civil Rights Act, 1963 to 1964
  81. National Security Action Memorandum 263, October 1963
  82. contemporaneous record of the November 1963 coup in South Vietnam
  83. records of the William Attwood initiative, 1963
  84. Jean Daniel, The New Republic, December 1963
  85. contemporaneous reporting on the purpose of the Texas trip