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Sitting in a rocking chair helped relieve JFK's chronic back pain.
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It has been 60 years since Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald as he was riding in an open-topped car with the first lady at his side in Dallas.
Here are 60 facts you may not have known about that day, what preceded it and what came after.
1. On Nov. 11, 1963, President Kennedy laid a Veterans Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
2. He would be buried at the cemetery exactly two weeks later.
3. Jacqueline Kennedy rarely traveled with her husband on political trips but decided to fly with him to Texas on Nov. 21.
4. On Nov. 22, the couple attended a breakfast in Fort Worth.
5. The presidential open-top limousine had been flown in from D.C.
6. The morning of the assassination, the president’s mother, Rose Kennedy, played golf in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, alongside her neighbor, baseball player Jimmy Piersall.
7. The last time JFK saw his father was in October in Hyannis Port. After saying goodbye, JFK said to his friend Dave Powers about his dad, who was wheelchair-bound after a stroke, “He’s the one who made all this possible, and look at him now.”
8. A 14-year-old boy in Dallas reported watching JFK’s face go blank around 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22.
9. The boy also said he heard Jacqueline Kennedy shout, “God, oh God, no.”
10. Texas Governor John Connally Jr. received multiple gunshot wounds.
11. In 2023, Secret Service agent Paul Landis said in a memoir that he found a bullet in the limousine, lodged in the back of the seat where JFK sat. He said he then put the bullet on the stretcher.
12. JFK’s brother Bobby Kennedy called the family to tell them what happened to JFK. He told his mother, Rose, that JFK’s condition was serious and that he wasn’t expected to live.
13. Rose Kennedy wrote, “I had a mixture of reactions. Worry about Jack, of course, instinctively. But then a rejection of the idea that it could be something terribly serious because, after all, he had been through so much.”
Rose Kennedy sits with her son, John F. Kennedy, on the day he officially accepted the Democratic presidential nomination.
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14. Ted Kennedy was presiding over the Senate when JFK was shot. The senator tried to call his family after hearing the news but phone lines were jammed. He finally went to the White House to get a secure line.
15. A priest administered last rites to the first Roman Catholic U.S. president.
16. Ted and his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver flew to Hyannis Port after the shooting to tell their father JFK was dead.
17. Hyannis Port mourned JFK by flying flags at half-mast, hanging black crepe around the Barnstable Town Office Building and hanging portraits of JFK in windows on Main Street.
18. This was the fourth presidential assassination in a nation that was less than 200 years old.
19. It was the first since the Secret Service began protecting presidents.
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