JFK assassination: fact and conspiracy

By Mark Oliver, Jack Kempster, Joel Gunter, Radhika Sanghani

At 11.40am on 22 November 1963, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie touched down at Love Field Airport Dallas aboard Air Force One. Three hours later, Jackie was back on the aircraft, standing next to Lyndon B. Johnson as he was sworn in as the next president of the United States of America. Her husband lay dead at Parkland Hospital. 

The actions of those few short hours changed the American psyche forever. Here, fifty years on, we chart them minute-by-minute, from the route of the motorcade to the trajectory of the bullets that killed the president. 

But there are few such things as facts in the shooting of JFK, conspiracy theories spin off from nearly every event on our timeline. The KGB, the Cubans, the far-right, the military, even JFK's successor, few escaped finger-pointing in the aftermath. We have digested some of the most common conspiracy theories. 

Elsewhere we have spoken to six people who witnessed the assassination, from the man who passed Oswald at the book depository, to the bystander struck by a deflected bullet, to the nurse who tried to save the president as he lay dying.