This Day in History: US President Kennedy assassinated

On November 22, 1963, US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated during a visit to Dallas, Texas.
He was riding in an open car, when a gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at him from an upper-level window of a nearby building. He was pronounced dead upon arrival at a Dallas hospital.
JFK’s death caused intense mourning in the United States and brought Vice President Lyndon Johnson to the presidency. Kennedy’s untimely death also left future generations with a great many “what if” questions concerning the subsequent history of the Cold War. He was the fourth president to be assassinated in US history.
A bystander named Abraham Zapruder happened to capture Kennedy’s shooting on his 8mm home-movie camera. His film provided graphic visuals of JFK’s death and has since been analyzed extensively for evidence of a potential conspiracy. Even decades later, some scholars, investigators and amateur sleuths continue to insist that Kennedy’s death was a coup d’etat committed by hard-line US anti-communists who feared Kennedy would pull US advisors out of Vietnam and act “soft” on the communist threat from the USSR. 
Some have suggested that he would have sharply curtailed military spending and brought the arms race under control. The most persistent claim, which served as the centerpiece of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, is that Kennedy would have withdrawn US troops from Vietnam after being re-elected in 1964. Stone also went on to charge right-wing militants in the US government for the plot.
It is difficult to say what Kennedy would have done had he not been killed in November 1963, but the arguments raised by Stone and others do not seem supported by the available evidence.
During his brief presidency, Kennedy consistently requested higher military spending, asking for billions in increased funding. After the humiliating defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, his administration approved Operation Mongoose, a CIA program that involved plots to destabilize the communist government in Cuba. There was even discussion about assassinating Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
In Vietnam, Kennedy increased the number of US advisers from around 1,500 when he took office, to more than 16,000 by the time of his death.
His administration also participated in the planning of the coup that ultimately overthrew South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was murdered by his own military just three weeks prior to Kennedy’s assassination. If Kennedy was going to become less of a cold warrior after 1964, there was little to suggest this change prior to November 22, 1963.