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A U.S. battleship exploded and sank in Havana Harbor; 260 Americans died. Although later found to be an accident, the incident pushed the U.S. toward war with Spain

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Launched centuries of European exploration and colonization of the American continent.

1492

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Destroyed the Aztec empire, and the Spanish began to consolidate control over what became the colony of New Spain.

Time: 1519-1521 (The Spanish conquest, led by Hernán Cortés, culminated in the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521.)

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The first English attempt at a permanent and stable English settlement in North America. It failed.

1585-1590 (The Roanoke Colony, "Lost Colony," was established in 1585, and by 1590, it had mysteriously disappeared.)

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War that pitted Native Americans against English settlers and their Indian allies. Paved the way for additional English settlements.

1675-1678 (The war was fought between the Wampanoag tribe, led by King Philip (Metacomet), and English settlers.)

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The first popular uprising in the American colonies. It was long viewed as an early revolt against English tyranny.

1676 (Led by Nathaniel Bacon, the rebellion took place in the Virginia Colony against Governor William Berkeley’s administration.)

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Part of the Seven Years' War in Europe. Britain and France fought for control of the Ohio Valley and Canada. The colonies fought under British commanders. Britain eventually won, and gained control of all of the remaining French possessions in Canada.

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A group of colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor in protest of the British Parliament's Tea Act of 1773

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A Philadelphia meeting that brought together representatives from each of the colonies, except Georgia, to discuss their response to the British "Intolerable Acts."

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A resolution created by the Continental Congress, which broke all ties between colonists and the British, creating the idea in America that the colonies were now "states."

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An uprising of rural, indebted farmers in western Massachusetts, against Boston creditors. It began in 1786 and lasted half a year, threatening the economic interests of the business elite and contributing to the demise of the Articles of Confederation.

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A Philadelphia meeting that brought together representatives from each of the colonies, except Georgia, to discuss the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.

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Printed in newspapers, this was largely a warning against political parties and permanent foreign alliances.

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A land deal between the United States and France, in which the U.S. acquired approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million dollars.

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A war between the U.S. and Great Britain caused by American outrage over the impressment of American sailors by the British, the British seizure of American ships, and British aid to the Indians attacking the Americans on the western frontier.

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General Robert Ross, a British force occupied Washington, D.C. and set fire to many public buildings following the American defeat at the Battle of Bladensburg.

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Americans moving away from self-sufficient agriculture to the production of goods for sale.

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Congress admitted Maine as a free state in 1820 so that Missouri would become a slave state and prohibited slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30', the southern boundary of Missouri.

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Women of all ages and even some men went to discuss the rights and conditions of women. There, they wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which, among other things, tried to get women the right to vote.

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Description: Sparked by a dispute over the annexation of Texas by the United States and a long-standing dispute over the southern border.

Translation: 由于美国对德克萨斯州并入的争议以及长期存在的南部边界争议而引发。

Time: 1846–1848

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Description: Since slaves are property of their masters, a slave is not automatically granted his freedom when his master moves him to a free state or territory.

Translation: 由于奴隶是主人的财产，当奴隶的主人将其带到自由州或地区时，奴隶不会自动获得自由。

Time: 1857

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Description: Issued by Lincoln to free all of the slaves in the Confederate states. The slaves in border states loyal to the Union, however, remained enslaved, it only applied to Confederate states in rebellion.

Translation: 由林肯发布，解放所有在南方联盟州的奴隶。然而，忠于联邦的边疆州的奴隶依然保持奴役状态，解放宣言仅适用于处于叛乱状态的南方联盟州。

Time: 1863

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Lincoln Signs the Emancipation Proclamation | Abraham Lincoln

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Description: Where the surrender of the Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant took place on April 9, 1865.

Translation: 1865年4月9日，罗伯特·E·李领导的南方联盟军队在尤利西斯·S·格兰特面前投降的地方。

Time: April 9, 1865

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Description: John Wilkes Booth shot this leader in the head at Ford's Theater, just days after the Civil War ended.

Translation: 约翰·威尔克斯·布斯在内战结束后不久，在福特剧院用枪击中了林肯总统的头部。

Time: April 14, 1865

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Description: Period after the Civil War during which Northern political leaders created plans for the governance of the South and a procedure for former Southern states to rejoin the Union.

Translation: 内战后，北方政治领导人制定了南方治理计划以及前南方州重返联邦的程序的时期。

Time: 1865–1877

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A labor protest rally in Chicago turned into a riot after someone threw a bomb at police. At least eight people died as a result of the violence that day. Despite a lack of evidence against them, eight radical labor activists were convicted in connection with the bombing

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A violent strike in Pittsburgh over a decision to cut wages by nearly 20%. This strike ended with the destruction of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel workers, one of the largest unions at the time

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A nonviolent strike that brought down the railway system in most of the West over wages. President Cleveland shut it down because it was interfering with mail delivery

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U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting the legality of Jim Crow laws that permitted or required separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites

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Spanish-American War War over the European control of Cuba, America won and gained: Guam, Puerto Rico, Philippines, and an alliance with Cuba

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An uprising in China directed against foreign influence. Suppressed by an international force including Americans, it paved the way for the 1911 revolution in China

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The first modern global war, started by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Known for trench warfare, mass destruction, and over 20 million deaths

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World War I: Summary, Causes & Facts | HISTORY

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World War I began in 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and lasted until 1918. During the conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction due to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare.

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A British passenger ship that was sunk by a German U-Boat during WWI. 128 Americans died. The sinking greatly turned American opinion against the Germans, helping the move towards entering the war.

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A decade of major cultural, social, and economic change in the U.S., marked by consumerism, jazz music, flappers, prohibition, and advances in technology and mass media

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The economic crisis and period of low business activity in the U.S. and other countries, beginning with the stock-market crash in 1929 and ending around the start of WWII

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The second, modern global war, starting less than 2 decades after the last. A significant portion of the world was involved, divided into Axis and Allied powers

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President FDR's response to the Great Depression, introducing programs for relief, recovery, and reform, creating the foundation of the modern welfare state

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A 14-year-old African American was brutally murdered in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman, an event that played a significant role in the civil rights movement in the United States.

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The Murder of Emmett Till | Articles and Essays | Civil Rights History Project | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 brought nationwide attention to the racial violence and injustice prevalent in Mississippi. While visiting his relatives in Mississippi, Till went to the Bryant store with his cousins, and may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and…

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A series of nonviolent protests initiated by African American college students in 1960 at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, challenging racial segregation and inspiring similar actions across the Southern United States during the civil rights movement.
格林斯伯勒静坐抗议 – 1960年，非裔美国大学生在北卡罗来纳州格林斯伯勒的伍尔沃斯餐馆发起了一系列非暴力抗议，挑战种族隔离，并激励了美国南部其他地区的类似行动。

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Greensboro Sit-In - Facts, Date & Definition | HISTORY

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The Greensboro Sit-in was a major civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young Black students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service.

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March on Washington – Over 200,000 participants, including Martin Luther King Jr., gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., advocating for equal rights and economic opportunities for African Americans.
华盛顿游行 – 超过200,000名参与者，包括马丁·路德·金，齐聚在华盛顿特区的林肯纪念堂，倡导非裔美国人的平等权利和经济机会。

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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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Assassination of JFK – Assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, when he was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade, sparking a wave of investigations and conspiracy theories.

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On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was in the vehicle with his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, Nellie, when he was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally was also wounded in the attack but recovered. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was hastily sworn in as president two hours and eight minutes later aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field.

After the assassination, Oswald returned home to retrieve a pistol; he shot and killed lone Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit shortly afterwards. Around 70 minutes after Kennedy and Connally were shot, Oswald was apprehended by the Dallas Police Department and charged under Texas state law with the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. Two days later, at 11:21 a.m. on November 24, 1963, as live television cameras covered Oswald's being moved through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, he was fatally shot by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Like Kennedy, Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he soon died. Ruby was convicted of Oswald's murder, though the decision was overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.

After a 10-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, and that there was no evidence that either Oswald or Ruby was part of a conspiracy. In 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison brought the only trial for Kennedy's murder, against businessman Clay Shaw; Shaw was acquitted. Subsequent federal investigations-such as the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee-agreed with the Warren Commission's general findings. In its 1979 report, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was likely " assassinated as a result of a conspiracy". The HSCA did not identify possible conspirators, but concluded that there was "a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President". The HSCA's conclusions were largely based on a police Dictabelt recording later debunked by the U.S. Justice Department.

Kennedy's assassination is still the subject of widespread debate and has spawned many conspiracy theories and alternative scenarios; polls found that a majority of Americans believed there was a conspiracy. The assassination left a profound impact and was the first of four major assassinations during the 1960s in the United States, coming two years before the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and five years before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy's brother Robert in 1968. Kennedy was the fourth U.S. president to be assassinated and is the most recent to have died in office.

Background

Kennedy delivering his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech at Rice University, 1962

In 1960, John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, was elected the 35th president of the United States with Lyndon B. Johnson as his vice presidential running mate. Kennedy's tenure saw the height of the Cold War, and much of his foreign policy was dedicated to countering the Soviet Union and communism. As president, he authorized operations to overthrow Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba, which culminated in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, during which he declined to directly involve American troops. The following year, Kennedy deescalated the Cuban Missile Crisis, an incident widely regarded as the closest that humanity has come to nuclear holocaust.

In 1963, Kennedy decided to travel to Texas to smooth over frictions in the state's Democratic Party between liberal U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough and conservative Governor John Connally. The visit was first agreed upon by Kennedy, Johnson, and Connally during a meeting in El Paso in June. The motorcade route was finalized on November 18 and announced soon thereafter. Kennedy also viewed the Texas trip as an informal launch of his 1964 reelection campaign.

Lee Harvey Oswald (born 1939) was a former U.S. Marine who had served in Japan and the Philippines and had espoused communism since reading Karl Marx at the age of 14. After accidentally shooting his elbow with an unauthorized handgun and fighting an officer, Oswald was court-martialed twice and demoted. In September 1959, he received a dependency discharge after claiming his mother was disabled. A 19-year-old Oswald sailed on a freighter from New Orleans to France and then traveled to Finland, where he was issued a Soviet visa.

Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, and in January 1960 he was sent to work at a factory in Minsk, Belarus. In 1961, he met and married Marina Prusakova, with whom he had a child. In 1962, he returned to the United States with a repatriation loan from the U.S. Embassy. He settled in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, where he socialized with Russian émigrés-notably George de Mohrenschildt. In March 1963, a bullet narrowly missed General Edwin Walker at his Dallas residence; a witness observed two conspicuous men. Relying on Marina's testimony, a note left by Oswald, and ballistic evidence, the Warren Commission attributed this assassination attempt to Oswald.

In April 1963, Oswald returned to his birthplace, New Orleans, and established an independent chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which he was the sole member. While passing out pro-Castro literature alongside unknown compatriots, Oswald was arrested after scuffling with anti-Castro Cuban exiles. In late September 1963, Oswald traveled to Mexico City, where, according to the Warren Commission, he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies. On October 3, Oswald returned to Dallas and found work at the Texas School Book Depository on Dealey Plaza. During the workweek he lived separately from Marina at a Dallas rooming house. On the morning of the assassination, he carried a long package (which he told coworkers contained curtain rods) into the Depository; the Warren Commission concluded that this package contained Oswald's disassembled rifle.

November 22

Kennedy's arrival in Dallas and route to Dealey Plaza

On November 22, Air Force One arrived at Dallas Love Field at 11:40 a.m. President Kennedy and the First Lady boarded a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible limousine to travel to a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart. Other occupants of this vehicle-the second in the motorcade-were Secret Service Agent Bill Greer, who drove; Special Agent Roy Kellerman in the front passenger seat; and Governor Connally and his wife Nellie, who sat just forward of the Kennedys. Four Dallas police motorcycle officers accompanied the Kennedy limousine. Vice President Johnson, his wife Lady Bird, and Senator Yarborough rode in another convertible.

The motorcade's meandering 10-mile (16 km) route through Dallas was designed to give Kennedy maximum exposure to crowds by passing through a suburban section of Dallas, and Main Street in Downtown Dallas, before turning right on Houston Street. After another block, the motorcade was to turn left onto Elm Street, pass through Dealey Plaza, and travel a short segment of the Stemmons Freeway to the Trade Mart. The planned route had been reported in newspapers several days in advance. Despite concerns about hostile protestors-Kennedy's UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been spat on in Dallas a month earlier-Kennedy was greeted warmly by enthusiastic crowds.

Kennedy's limousine entered Dealey Plaza at 12:30 p.m. CST. Nellie Connally turned and commented to Kennedy, who was sitting behind her, "Mr. President, they can't make you believe now that there are not some in Dallas who love and appreciate you, can they?" Kennedy's reply - "No, they sure can't" - were his last words.

From Houston Street, the limousine made the planned left turn onto Elm, passing the Texas School Book Depository. As it continued down Elm Street, multiple shots were fired: about 80% of the witnesses recalled hearing three shots. The Warren Commission concluded that three shots were fired and noted that most witnesses recalled that the second and third shots were bunched together. Shortly after Kennedy began waving, some witnesses heard the first gunshot, but few in the crowd or motorcade reacted, many interpreting the sound as a firecracker or backfire.

Within one second of each other, Governor Connally and Mrs. Kennedy turned abruptly from their left to their right. Connally-an experienced hunter-immediately recognized the sound as that of a rifle and turned his head and torso rightward, noting nothing unusual behind him. He testified that he could not see Kennedy, so he started to turn forward again (turning from his right to his left), and that when his head was facing about 20 degrees left of center, he was struck in his upper right back by a shot he did not hear, then shouted, "My God. They're going to kill us all!"

According to the Warren Commission and the HSCA, Kennedy was waving to the crowds on his right when a shot entered his upper back and exited his throat just beneath his larynx. He raised his elbows and clenched his fists in front of his face and neck, then leaned forward and leftward. Mrs. Kennedy, facing him, put her arms around him. Although a serious wound, it likely would have been survivable.

According to the Warren Commission's single-bullet theory-derided as the "magic bullet theory" by conspiracy theorists-Governor Connally was injured by the same bullet that exited Kennedy's neck. The bullet created an oval-shaped entry wound near his right shoulder, struck and destroyed several inches of Connally's right fifth rib, and exited his chest just below his right nipple, puncturing and collapsing his lung. That same bullet then entered his arm just above his right wrist and shattered his right radius bone. The bullet exited just below the wrist at the inner side of his right palm and finally lodged in his left thigh.

As the limousine passed the grassy knoll, Kennedy was struck a second time, by a fatal shot to the head. The Warren Commission made no finding as to whether this was the second or third bullet fired, and concluded-as did the HSCA-that the second shot to strike Kennedy entered the rear of his head. It then passed in fragments through his skull, creating a large, "roughly ovular" [] hole on the rear, right side of the head, and spraying blood and fragments. His brain and blood spatter landed as far as the following Secret Service car and the motorcycle officers.

Secret Service Agent Clint Hill was riding on the running board of the car immediately behind Kennedy's limousine. Hill testified to the Warren Commission that he heard one shot, jumped onto the street, and ran forward to board the limousine and protect Kennedy. Hill stated that he heard the fatal headshot as he reached the Lincoln, "approximately five seconds" after the first shot that he heard. After the headshot, Mrs. Kennedy began climbing onto the limousine's trunk, but she later had no recollection of doing so. Hill believed she may have been reaching for a piece of Kennedy's skull. He jumped onto the limousine's bumper, and he clung to the car as it exited Dealey Plaza and sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. After Mrs. Kennedy crawled back into her seat, both Governor and Mrs. Connally heard her repeatedly saying: "They have killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand."

Bystander James Tague received a minor wound to the cheek-either from bullet or concrete curb fragments-while standing by the triple underpass. Nine months later, the FBI removed the curb, and spectrographic analysis revealed metallic residue consistent with the lead core in Oswald's ammunition. Tague testified before the Warren Commission and initially stated that he was wounded by either the second or third shot of the three shots that he remembered hearing. When the commission counsel pressed him to be more specific, Tague testified that he was wounded by the second shot.

Aftermath in Dealey Plaza

Civilians shielding their children after hearing shots and dropping to the grass. The grassy knoll and its picket fence are visible in the background.[note 7]

As the motorcade left Dealey Plaza, some witnesses sought cover, and others joined police officers to run up the grassy knoll in search of a shooter. No shooter was found behind the knoll's picket fence. Among the 178 witnesses who testified to the Warren Commission, 78 were unsure of the shots' origin, 49 believed they came from the Depository, and 21 thought they came from the grassy knoll. No witness ever reported seeing anyone - with or without a gun (except policemen) - immediately behind the knoll's picket fence at the time of the shooting.

Lee Bowers was in a two-story railroad switch tower 120 yards (110 m) behind the grassy knoll's picket fence; he was watching the motorcade and had an unobstructed view of the only route by which any shooter could flee the grassy knoll; he saw no one leaving the scene. Bowers testified to the Warren Commission that "one or two" men were between him and the fence during the assassination: one was a familiar parking lot attendant and the other wore a uniform like a county courthouse custodian. He testified seeing "some commotion" on the grassy knoll at the time of the assassination: "something out of the ordinary, a sort of milling around, but something occurred in this particular spot which was out of the ordinary, which attracted my eye for some reason which I could not identify".

At 12:36 p.m., Black teenager Amos Euins approached Dallas police Sergeant D.V. Harkness to report having seen a " colored man ... leaning out of the window [with] a rifle" on the sixth floor of the Depository during the assassination; in response, Harkness radioed that he was sealing off the Depository. Witness Howard Brennan then approached a police inspector to report seeing a shooter-a white man in khaki clothing-in the same window. Police broadcast Brennan's description of the man at 12:45 p.m. Brennan testified that, after the second shot, "This man... was aiming for his last shot ... and maybe paused for another second as though to assure himself that he had hit his mark." Witness James R. Worrell Jr. also reported seeing a gun barrel emerge from a sixth floor Depository window. Bonnie Ray Williams, who was on the fifth floor of the Depository, stated that the rifle's report was so loud and near that ceiling plaster fell onto his head.

Oswald's flight, killing of J. D. Tippit, and arrest

When searching the sixth floor of the Depository, two deputies found an Italian Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle. Oswald had purchased the used rifle the previous March under the alias "A. Hidell" and had it delivered to his Dallas P.O. box. The FBI found Oswald's partial palm print on the barrel, and fibers on the rifle were consistent with those of Oswald's shirt. A bullet found on Governor Connally's hospital gurney and two fragments found in the limousine were ballistically matched to the Carcano.

Oswald left the Depository and traveled by bus to his boarding house, where he retrieved a jacket and revolver. At 1:12 p.m., police officer J. D. Tippit spotted Oswald walking in the residential neighborhood of Oak Cliff and called him to his patrol car. After an exchange of words, Tippit exited his vehicle; Oswald then shot Tippit three times in the chest. As Tippit lay on the ground, Oswald fired a final shot into Tippit's right temple. Oswald then calmly walked away before running as witnesses emerged.

As Dallas police officers conducted a roll call of Depository employees, Oswald's supervisor Roy Truly realized that Oswald was absent and notified the police. Based on a false identification of Oswald, Dallas police raided a library in Oak Cliff before realizing their mistake. At 1:36 p.m., the police were called after a conspicuous Oswald, tired from running, was seen sneaking into the Texas Theatre without paying. With the film still playing, Dallas policemen arrested Oswald after a brief struggle in which Oswald drew his fully loaded gun. He denied shooting anyone and claimed he was being made a " patsy" because he had lived in the Soviet Union.

Kennedy declared dead; Johnson sworn in

Cecil Stoughton's photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as President as Air Force One prepares to depart Love Field in Dallas. Jacqueline Kennedy, still in her Chanel suit (the blood spatters not visible here), looks on.

At 12:38 p.m., Kennedy arrived in the emergency room of Parkland Memorial Hospital. Although Kennedy was still breathing after the shooting, his personal physician, George Burkley, immediately saw that survival was impossible. After Parkland surgeons performed futile cardiac massage, Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m., 30 minutes after the shooting. CBS host Walter Cronkite broke the news on live television.

The Secret Service was concerned about the possibility of a larger plot and urged Johnson to leave Dallas and return to the White House, but Johnson refused to do so without any proof of Kennedy's death. Johnson returned to Air Force One around 1:30p.m., and shortly thereafter, he received telephone calls from advisors McGeorge Bundy and Walter Jenkins advising him to depart for Washington, D.C., immediately. He replied that he would not leave Dallas without Jacqueline Kennedy and that she would not leave without Kennedy's body. According to , Johnson did "not want to be remembered as an abandoner of beautiful widows".

At the time of Kennedy's assassination, the murder of a president was not under federal jurisdiction. Accordingly, Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose insisted that Texas law required him to perform an autopsy. A heated exchange between Kennedy's aides and Dallas officials nearly erupted into a fistfight before the Texans yielded and allowed Kennedy's body to be transported to Air Force One. At 2:38 p.m., with Jacqueline Kennedy at his side, Johnson was administered the oath of office by federal judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes aboard Air Force One shortly before departing for Washington with Kennedy's coffin.

Immediate aftermath

President Kennedy's autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland on the night of November 22. Jacqueline Kennedy had selected a naval hospital as the postmortem site as President Kennedy had been a naval officer during World War II. The autopsy was conducted by three physicians: naval commanders James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, with assistance from ballistics wound expert Pierre A. Finck; Humes led the procedure. Under pressure from the Kennedy family and White House staffers to expedite the procedure, the physicians conducted a "rushed" and incomplete autopsy. Kennedy's personal physician, Rear Admiral George Burkley, signed a death certificate on November 23 and recorded that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the skull.

Three years after the autopsy, Kennedy's brain-which had been removed and preserved for later analysis-was found to be missing when the Kennedy family transferred material to the National Archives. Conspiracy theorists often claim that the brain may have shown that the headshot entered from the front. Alternatively, the HSCA concluded that an assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother, likely removed the footlocker holding the brain and other materials at his direction, and he "either destroyed these materials or otherwise rendered them inaccessible" to prevent "misuse" of said material or to hide the extent of the president's chronic illnesses and consequent medication. Some autopsy X-rays and photographs have also been lost.

Most historians regard the autopsy as the "most botched" segment of the government's investigation. The HSCA forensic pathology panel concluded that the autopsy had "extensive failings", including failure to take sufficient photographs, failure to determine the exact exit or entry point of the head bullet, not dissecting the back and neck, and neglecting to determine the angles of gunshot injuries relative to body axis. The panel further concluded that the two doctors were not qualified to have conducted a forensic autopsy. Panel member Milton Helpern- Chief Medical Examiner for New York City-said that selecting Humes (who had only taken a single course on forensic pathology) to lead the autopsy was "like sending a seven-year-old boy who has taken three lessons on the violin over to the New York Philharmonic and expecting him to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony".

Kennedy's coffin is carried from the Capitol, November 25.

Following the autopsy, Kennedy lay in repose in the East Room of the White House for 24 hours. President Johnson issued Presidential Proclamation 3561, declaring November 25 to be a national day of mourning, and that only essential emergency workers be at their posts. The coffin was then carried on a horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol to lie in state. Hundreds of thousands of mourners lined up to view the guarded casket, with a quarter million passing through the rotunda during the 18 hours of lying in state. Even in the Soviet Union-according to a memo by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover -news of the assassination "was greeted by great shock and consternation and church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy".

Kennedy's funeral service was held on November 25, at St. Matthew's Cathedral, with the Requiem Mass led by Cardinal Richard Cushing. About 1,200 guests, including representatives from over 90 countries, attended. Although there was no formal eulogy, Auxiliary Bishop Philip M. Hannan read excerpts from Kennedy's speeches and writings. After the service, Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. An eternal flame was lit at his burial site in 1967.

Killing of Oswald

Robert H. Jackson's photograph Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was being escorted by police detective Jim Leavelle (tan suit) for the transfer from the city jail to the county jail. Ruby died in prison in 1967.

On Sunday, November 24, at 11:21 a.m., as Oswald was being escorted to a car in the basement of Dallas Police headquarters for the transfer from the city jail to the county jail, he was shot by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The shooting was broadcast live on television. Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald photographed the shooting which was titled, Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald for which he was awarded the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, Oswald was taken by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital; he was treated by the same surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy. The bullet had entered his lower left chest but had not exited; major heart blood vessels such as the aorta and inferior vena cava were severed, and the spleen, kidney, and liver were hit. Despite surgical intervention and defibrillation, Oswald died at 1:07 p.m.

Arrested immediately after the shooting, Ruby testified to the Warren Commission that he had been distraught by Kennedy's death and that killing Oswald would spare "Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial". He also stated he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment when the opportunity presented itself, without considering any reason for doing so. Initially, Ruby wished to represent himself in his trial until his lawyer Melvin Belli dissuaded him: Belli argued that Ruby had an episode of psychomotor epilepsy and was thus not responsible. Ruby was convicted, but the decision was overturned on appeal. While awaiting retrial in 1967, Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism, secondary to cancer. Like Oswald and Kennedy, Ruby was declared dead at Parkland Hospital.

Films and photographs of the assassination

The Bell & Howell Zoomatic movie camera used by Abraham Zapruder to capture footage of the motorcade and Kennedy's killing, which later came to be known as the Zapruder film. The camera is preserved within the collection of the National Archives.

Standing on the pergola wall some 65 feet (20 m) from the road, tailor Abraham Zapruder recorded Kennedy's killing on 26 seconds of silent 8 mm film - known as the Zapruder film. Frame 313 captures the exact moment at which Kennedy's head explodes. magazine published frame enlargements from the Zapruder film shortly after the assassination. The footage itself was first publicly shown at the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, and on television in 1975 by Geraldo Rivera. In 1999, an arbitration panel ordered the federal government to pay $615,384 per second of film to Zapruder's heirs, valuing the complete film at $16 million (equivalent to $27.5 million in 2022).

Zapruder was one of at least 32 people in Dealey Plaza known to have made film or still photographs at or around the time of the shooting. Most notably among the photographers, Mary Moorman took several photos of Kennedy with her Polaroid, including one of Kennedy less than one-sixth of a second after the headshot.

As well as Zapruder, Charles Bronson, Marie Muchmore, and Orville Nix filmed the assassination, but at farther distances than Zapruder. Of the three, only Nix - who filmed the assassination from the opposite side of Elm Street from Zapruder, capturing the grassy knoll - actually recorded the fatal shot. In 1966, Nix claimed that, after he gave the film to the FBI, the duplicate that they returned had frames "missing" or "ruined". Although lower-quality duplicates exist, the original film has been missing since 1978. Previously unknown footage filmed by George Jefferies was released in 2007. Recorded a few blocks before the shooting, the film captures Kennedy's bunched suit jacket, explaining the discrepancies between the location of the bullet hole in Kennedy's back and his jacket.

Some films and photographs captured an unidentified woman apparently filming the assassination; researchers have nicknamed her the Babushka Lady due to the shawl around her head. In 1978, Gordon Arnold came forward and claimed that he had filmed the assassination from the grassy knoll and that a police officer had confiscated his film. Arnold is not visible in any photographs taken of the area, which Vincent Bugliosi-author of Reclaiming History-called "conclusive photographic proof that Arnold's story was fabricated".

Official investigations

Dallas Police

Lee Harvey Oswald in police custody.

At the Dallas Police headquarters, officers interrogated Oswald about the shootings of Kennedy and Tippit; these intermittent interviews lasted for approximately 12 hours between 2:30 p.m. on November 22 and 11 a.m. on November 24. Throughout, Oswald denied any involvement and resorted to statements that were found to be false.

Captain J. W. Fritz of the Homicide and Robbery Bureau did most of the questioning and kept only rudimentary notes. Days later, Fritz wrote a report of the interrogation from notes he made afterwards. There were no stenographic or tape recordings. Representatives of other law enforcement agencies were also present, including the FBI and the Secret Service, and occasionally participated in the questioning. Several of the FBI agents who were present wrote contemporaneous reports of the interrogation.

On the evening of November 22, Dallas Police performed paraffin tests on Oswald's hands and right cheek in an effort to establish whether or not he had recently fired a weapon. The results were positive for the hands and negative for the right cheek. Such tests were unreliable, and the Warren Commission did not rely on these results.

The Dallas police forced Oswald to host a press conference after midnight on November 23, and, early in the investigation, made many leaks to the media. Their conduct angered Johnson, who instructed the FBI to tell them to "stop talking about the assassination". Dallas Police, after the FBI expressed concerns that someone might try to kill Oswald, assured federal authorities that they would provide him adequate protection.

FBI investigation

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (pictured between Robert and John F. Kennedy in May 1963) wrote in a 1964 memo that "we left no stone unturned".[196]

The FBI immediately launched an investigation into the assassination, relying on a federal statute that forbade assaulting a federal officer. Within 24 hours of the killing, FBI Director Hoover sent President Johnson a preliminary report finding that Oswald was the sole culprit. After Ruby killed Oswald, Johnson decided that the Texan authorities were incompetent and instructed the FBI to conduct a complete investigation.

On December 9, 1963, the Warren Commission received the FBI's report of its investigation which concluded that three bullets had been fired‍-‌the first striking Kennedy in the upper back; the second striking Connally; and the third striking Kennedy in the head, killing him. The FBI continued to serve as the main investigative arm of the Warren Commission in the field. A total of 169 FBI agents worked on the case, conducting over 25,000 interviews and writing over 2,300 reports.

The thoroughness of the FBI's investigation is contested. Bugliosi applauded its quality and cites conspiracy theorist Harrison Edward Livingstone's praise of the FBI's commitment to following all leads. In its 1979 report, the HSCA found that the FBI's investigation of pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, and any connections to Oswald or Ruby, was insufficient. The HSCA also noted that Hoover "seemed determined [to make the case that Oswald was the lone assassin] within 24 hours of the assassination".

Warren Commission

The Warren Commission presents its report to President Johnson. From left to right: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator Richard Russell, Congressman Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Allen Dulles, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Congressman Hale Boggs.

On November 29, President Johnson established by executive order " The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" and selected Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court to chair the investigation, commonly known as the Warren Commission. Its 888-page final report was presented to Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public three days later. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy and wounding Connally, and that Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. It made no conclusions as to Oswald's motive, but noted his Marxism, anti-authoritarianism, violent tendencies, failure to form personal relationships, and his desire to be significant in history.

Upon examining the Zapruder film, commission staffers realized that the FBI's gunshot theory was impossible. The reaction times of Kennedy and Connally were too close to have been caused by two bullets from Oswald: the reaction interval was less than the 2.3 seconds that it took to reload. This was one of the commission's most crucial findings: that a single shot caused the non-fatal wounds of Kennedy and Connally, known as the "single-bullet theory". In May 1964, staffer Arlen Specter replicated the single bullet's trajectory via a reenactment in Dealey Plaza: the bullet's path was exactly consistent with Kennedy's and Connally's wounds.

Out of the eight commission members, three-Representative Hale Boggs and Senators John Cooper and Richard Russell-found the theory "improbable"; their qualms were not mentioned in the final report. Conspiracy theorists labelled this theory the "magic bullet theory", partly due to the bullet's intact and purportedly pristine state. However, the HSCA's Michael Baden noted that the bullet, despite its lack of fragmentation, was fundamentally deformed. In 2023, Secret Service Agent Paul Landis-who had stood on the running board of Kennedy's car-told The New York Times that he retrieved the "magic bullet" from immediately behind Kennedy's seat upon arrival at Parkland, and that he placed it on Kennedy's stretcher. Landis believes that the bullet dislodged from a shallow wound in Kennedy's back.

As well as the Warren Report's 27 published volumes, the commission created hundreds of thousands of pages of investigative reports and documents. Relman Morin stated that "Never in history was a crime probed as intensely"; Bugliosi concluded that the commission's basic findings have "held up remarkably well". According to Gerald Posner, the Warren report is "universally derided" by the American public. Walter Cronkite noted that, "Although the Warren Commission had full power to conduct its own independent investigation, it permitted the FBI and the CIA to investigate themselves - and so cast a permanent shadow on the answers." According to a 2014 report by CIA Chief Historian David Robarge, then-CIA director John A. McCone was involved in a "benign cover-up" by withholding information from the commission.

Trial of Clay Shaw

Clay Shaw (pictured in 1951) was acquitted by the New Orleans jury after less than an hour of deliberation.

On March 22, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of Oswald, David Ferrie, and others. A respected businessman who had helped renovate and preserve the French Quarter, Shaw was described as "the unlikeliest villain since Oscar Wilde". Both Shaw and the neurotic, avidly anti-Castro Ferrie were members of New Orleans' gay community. Ferrie died, possibly by suicide, four days after news of the investigation broke. On The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1968, Garrison first publicly alleged that Shaw and Ferrie had been part of a larger CIA scheme to kill Kennedy and frame Oswald. In the 34-day trial conducted in 1969, Garrison played the Zapruder film and argued that the backwards motion of Kennedy's head after the fatal shot was indicative of a shooter in front on the grassy knoll.

After a brief deliberation, the jury found Shaw not guilty. Mark Lane interviewed the jurors after the trial and stated that some believed that Shaw likely was involved in a conspiracy but that there was insufficient evidence to convict. Lane's claims have been disputed by playwright James Kirkwood -a personal friend of Clay Shaw-who said that he met several jurors who denied ever speaking to Lane. Kirkwood also questioned Lane's claim that the jury believed that there was a conspiracy: jury foreman Sidney Hebert told Kirkwood, "I didn't think too much of the Warren Report either until the trial. Now I think a lot more of it than I did before."

According to academic E. Jerald Ogg, the Shaw trial is now widely regarded as a "travesty of justice"; Kirkwood likened the trial to a Spanish Inquisition hearing. Other observers have characterized the proceedings as relying on homophobia. It remains the only trial to be brought for the Kennedy assassination. In 1979, former CIA director Richard Helms testified that Shaw had been a part-time contact of the Domestic Contact Service of the CIA, through which Shaw volunteered information from his travels abroad, mostly to Latin America. However, according to Max Holland, some 150,000 Americans were contacts. In 1993, the PBS program obtained a group photograph that featured Ferrie and Oswald together at a 1955 cookout for the Civil Air Patrol: Ferrie had denied ever knowing Oswald.

Ramsey Clark Panel

The panel organized by Attorney General Ramsey Clark (pictured with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968) found that two bullets struck Kennedy from behind.

Excluding Chief Justice Warren, the members of Warren Commission did not view the photographs or X-rays taken during Kennedy's autopsy. According to Warren, this was to avoid having to publicly release the explicit material to "sensation mongers". Due to persistent speculation, in February 1968, Attorney General Ramsey Clark convened a panel of four medical experts to examine the photographs and X-rays from the Kennedy autopsy. Their findings concurred with the Warren Commission: Kennedy was struck by two bullets, both from behind.

Rockefeller Commission

In 1975, President Gerald Ford-who had been a member of the Warren Commission a decade prior-established the United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, better known as the Rockefeller Commission after its chairman, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The commission received a mandate to determine if any domestic activities by the CIA were unlawful and to make appropriate recommendations: accordingly, it also re-examined the Kennedy assassination.

The Rockefeller Commission first proposed that the backwards motion of Kennedy following the fatal shot-which conspiracy theorists claim is indicative of a shot from the grassy knoll-was due to a "seizure-like neuromuscular reaction".

After five months of investigation, the Rockefeller Commission submitted its report to President Ford. The report reviewed the medical evidence and agreed that Kennedy had been killed by two shots from behind. Refuting Garrison's claims that the backwards motion of Kennedy's head seen on the Zapruder film was indicative of a grassy knoll shooter, the commission found that "such a motion would be caused by a violent straightening and stiffening of the entire body as a result of a seizure-like neuromuscular reaction to major damage inflicted to nerve centers in the brain". The later HSCA suggested that the " propulsive effect resulting from brain matter" ejected from the exit wound may have been responsible. Pathologist Vincent Di Maio testified before the HSCA that the notion of a "transfer of momentum" from a grassy knoll bullet was unfounded and something from " Arnold Schwarzenegger pictures".

The Rockefeller Commission also sought to determine whether CIA operatives-particularly E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis-were present in Dealey Plaza during the assassination, and whether they were among the " three tramps" pictured shortly after the assassination. The commission found no evidence for these claims. It also inquired into purported connections between the CIA and Oswald and Ruby, for which it found no evidence and concluded was "farfetched speculation". They concluded that there was "no credible evidence of CIA involvement".

Church Committee

Church Committee report (Book II)

In 1975, following the Watergate scandal and the revelation of CIA misconduct by Seymour Hersh (the CIA's so-called " Family Jewels"), the U.S. Senate launched the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-better known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church. The committee was to investigate all improper and unlawful actions by the CIA and FBI, both foreign and domestic. Due to persisting theories, the Church Committee organized a subcommittee (staffed by Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart) to examine CIA and FBI conduct pertaining to the assassination.

In its final report, the Church Committee concluded that there was no evidence of a CIA- or FBI-led conspiracy. They found that the original investigation into the assassination was "deficient" and criticized the FBI and CIA for withholding information from the Warren Commission. In particular, it noted that knowledge of the CIA's many failed attempts to assassinate Castro may have significantly affected the course of the investigation. Moreover, the Church Committee revealed that the CIA had conspired with the Mafia in these plots against Castro. These revelations led to further public scrutiny of the assassination.

United States House Select Committee on Assassinations

As a result of increasing public and congressional skepticism of the Warren Commission's findings and the transparency of government agencies, in 1976 the House Select Committee on Assassinations was created to investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and that of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The HSCA conducted its inquiry until 1978 and issued its final report the following year, concluding that Kennedy was likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. They concluded that there was a "high probability" that a fourth shot was fired from the grassy knoll, but they stated that this shot missed Kennedy. Concerning the conclusions of "probable conspiracy", four of the twelve committee members wrote dissenting opinions.

The HSCA also concluded that previous investigations into Oswald's responsibility were "thorough and reliable" but did not adequately investigate the possibility of a conspiracy, and that federal agencies performed with "varying degrees of competency". Specifically, the FBI and CIA were found to be deficient in sharing information with other agencies and the Warren Commission. Instead of furnishing all relevant information, the FBI and CIA only responded to specific requests and were still occasionally inadequate. Furthermore, the Secret Service did not properly analyze information it possessed prior to the assassination and was inadequately prepared to protect Kennedy.

The chief reason for the conclusion of "probable conspiracy" was, according to the report's dissent, the subsequently discredited acoustic analysis of a police channel Dictabelt recording. In accordance with the recommendations of the HSCA, the Dictabelt recording and acoustic evidence of a second assassin was subsequently reexamined. In light of investigative reports from the FBI's Technical Services Division and a specially appointed National Academy of Sciences Committee determining that "reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman", the Justice Department concluded "that no persuasive evidence can be identified to support the theory of a conspiracy" in the Kennedy assassination.

JFK Act and Assassination Records Review Board

Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK spurred the "JFK Act", which mandated the release of all relevant classified files.

In 1991, Oliver Stone's film renewed interest in the assassination and particularly in the still-classified files relating to the killing. In response, Congress passed the JFK Records Act, which called for the National Archives to collect and release all assassination-related documents within 25 years. The act also mandated the creation of an independent office, the Assassination Records Review Board, to review the submitted records for completeness and continued secrecy. From 1994 until 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board gathered and unsealed about 60,000 documents comprising over 4 million pages.

A 1998 staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board contended that brain photographs in the Kennedy records may not be of Kennedy's brain, reportedly showing much less damage than Kennedy sustained. Dr. Boswell refuted these allegations. The board also found that, conflicting with the photographic images showing no such defect, several witnesses (at both Parkland hospital and the autopsy) remembered a large wound in the back of Kennedy's head. The board, and board member Jeremy Gunn, stressed the problems with witness testimony, urging people to weigh all of the evidence, with due concern for human error, rather than take single statements as "proof" for one theory or another.

All remaining assassination-related records were scheduled to be released by October 2017, with the exception of documents certified for continued postponement by succeeding presidents due to "identifiable harm... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure." President Donald Trump said in October 2017 that he would not block the release of documents, but in April 2018-the deadline he set to release all JFK records-Trump blocked the release of some records until October 2021. President Joe Biden, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, delayed the release further, before releasing 13,173 unredacted documents in 2022. A second group of files were unsealed in June 2023, at which point 99 percent of documents had been made public.

Conspiracy theories

The Kennedy assassination has been described as "the mother of all conspiracies". For decades, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans believe there was a conspiracy; some 1,000 to 2,000 books-mostly pro-conspiracy-have been written about the killing. Across different theories, Oswald's role varies from co-conspirator to entirely innocent. Common culprits include the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. military, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex, Vice President Johnson, Castro, the KGB, or some combination thereof. Bugliosi estimated that a total of 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people had been accused in various assassination theories.

Conspiracy theorists often argue that there were multiple shooters-a "triangulation of crossfire"-and that the fatal shot was fired from the grassy knoll and struck Kennedy in the front of the head. Individuals present in Dealey Plaza have been the subject of much speculation, including the three tramps, the umbrella man, and the purported Badge Man. Conspiracy theorists argue that the autopsy and official investigations were flawed or, at worst, complicit, and that witnesses to the Kennedy assassination met mysterious and suspicious deaths.

Conspiracy theories have been espoused by notable figures, such as L. Fletcher Prouty, Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy, who believed that elements of the U.S. military and intelligence communities had conspired to assassinate the president. Governor Connally also rejected the single-bullet theory, and President Johnson reportedly expressed doubt regarding the Warren Commission's conclusions prior to his death. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his father believed that the Warren Report was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship" and that John F. Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy, possibly involving Cuban exiles and the CIA. Communist rulers like Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev believed that Kennedy had been killed by right-wing Americans. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey has argued that Oswald killed Kennedy as part of a Soviet conspiracy.

Political impact and memorialization

Congress authorized the minting of a new 50-cent piece, the Kennedy half dollar, in December 1963.[294]

On November 27-five days after the assassination-President Johnson delivered his " Let Us Continue" speech to Congress. Effectively an inaugural address, Johnson called for the realization of Kennedy's policies, particularly on civil rights; this effort soon materialized as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Confusion surrounding Johnson's succession led to the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S Constitution, which was adopted in 1967 and affirmed that the vice president became president upon the president's death.

On November 29, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11129, renaming Florida's Cape Canaveral-a name borne since at least 1530-to Cape Kennedy. NASA's Launch Operations Center, located on the cape, was also renamed as the Kennedy Space Center. The federal government honored Kennedy in other ways, such as replacing the Benjamin Franklin half dollar with the Kennedy half dollar, and renaming Washington, D.C.'s long-planned National Culture Center as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. New York City's airport was also renamed as the John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Kennedy's assassination also resulted in an overhaul of the Secret Service and its procedures. Open limousines were eliminated, staffing was significantly increased, and specialized teams like counter-sniper units were established. The agency's budget has also increased, from $5.5 million in 1963 (equivalent to $42 million in 2013) to over $1.6 billion by the 50th anniversary in 2013.

Cultural impact and depictions

They say they can't believe it; It's a sacrilegious shame.

Now, who would want to hurt such a hero of the game?

But you know I predicted it; I knew he had to fall.

How did it happen? Hope his suffering was small.

Tell me every detail, for I've got to know it all,

And do you have a picture of the pain?

John F. Kennedy's assassination was the first of four major assassinations during the 1960s, coming two years before the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and five years before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. For the public, Kennedy's assassination mythologized him into a heroic figure. Although scholars typically regard Kennedy as a good but not great president, public opinion polls consistently find him the most popular post-WWII president.

Kennedy's murder left a lasting impression on many worldwide. As with the attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, and, much later, the September 11 attacks in 2001, asking "Where were you when you heard about President Kennedy's assassination?" became a common topic of discussion. Journalist Dan Rather opined that the Kennedy assassination will be discussed "a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, in somewhat the same way as people discuss the . Different people read Homer's description of the war and come to different conclusions, and so it shall be for Kennedy's death."

Along with Oliver Stone's JFK, the assassination has been portrayed in several films: the pro-conspiracy, Dalton Trumbo-written Executive Action (1973) was the first feature film to depict the assassination. Besides explicit portrayals, some critics have argued that the Zapruder film-which itself has been featured in many films and television episodes-advanced cinéma vérité or inspired more graphic depictions of violence in American cinema. Many works of literature have also explored the killing, such as Don DeLillo's 1988 novel in which Oswald is a CIA agent, James Ellroy's 1995 work American Tabloid, and Stephen King's 2011 time travel novel . The assassination has also been featured in several musical compositions, such as Igor Stravinsky's 1964 piece Elegy for J.F.K. and Phil Ochs' 1966 song " Crucifixion", which reportedly brought Robert Kennedy to tears. Other songs include " Abraham, Martin and John" (1968) and Bob Dylan's " Murder Most Foul" (2020).

Artifacts, museums, and locations today

An "X" in the Dealey Plaza roadway marks where the fatal bullet struck Kennedy.[328]

In 1993, the National Park Service designated Dealey Plaza, the surrounding buildings, the overpass, and a portion of the adjacent railyard as a National Historic Landmark District. The Depository and its Sixth Floor Museum, operated by the city of Dallas, draw over 325,000 visitors annually.

The Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One at the time of the assassination is on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force; Kennedy's limousine is at the Henry Ford Museum. The Lincoln Catafalque, on which Kennedy's coffin rested in the Capitol, is exhibited at the Capitol Visitor Center. Jacqueline's pink suit, autopsy X-rays, and President Kennedy's blood-stained clothing are in the National Archives, with access controlled by the Kennedy family. Other items in the Archives include Parkland Hospital trauma room equipment; Oswald's rifle, diary, and revolver; bullet fragments; and the limousine's windshield. The Texas State Archives preserve Connally's bullet-punctured clothes; the gun Ruby used to kill Oswald came into the possession of Ruby's brother Earl, and was sold in 1991 for $220,000 (equivalent to $439,000 in 2022).

At the direction of Robert F. Kennedy, some items were destroyed. The casket in which Kennedy's body was transported from Dallas to Washington was dropped into the sea, because "its public display would be extremely offensive and contrary to public policy".

Notes and references

1. ^ This photo and a similar one are known as the "backyard photographs"; according to Bugliosi, it is one of the pieces of evidence most damning for Oswald. Oswald told Dallas police that the photographs were not genuine and that someone must have superimposed his head. Marina Oswald testified that she took the pictures.

2. In 1964, KGB Agent ^ Yuri Nosenko defected to the United States. He divulged that Soviet intelligence surveilled Oswald, regarded him as mentally unstable, and had no association with him. Although the FBI trusted Nosenko, the CIA believed that he was a mole and convinced the Warren Commission not to interview him.

3. ^ Jack Dougherty, the only witness who saw Oswald enter the Depository on the morning of the assassination, testified to the Warren Commission that he did not remember seeing Oswald with any package. Bugliosi questioned his reliability as a witness: Dougherty's father told FBI agents on November 23 that his son "had considerable difficulty in coordinating his mental facilities with his speech".

4. Bugliosi notes that Lee Bowers Jr. did not mention the "commotion" in an earlier affidavit, in which Bowers did take time to list all other suspicious happenings like circling vehicles with "^ Goldwater for '64" stickers. Moreover, conspiracy theorist Jim Moore questions whether Bowers could even have seen the area. Bowers testified that he "threw [the] red-on-red [signal]" just after the fatal shot, but the grassy knoll was partially obstructed from Bowers' position at the work panel.

5. ^ Lieutenant Day of the Dallas police examined the weapon prior to its seizure by the FBI. He found and photographed fingerprints on the trigger housing. Although Day believed the prints to be those of Oswald's right middle and ring fingers, the ridges were not clear enough to make a positive identification. Day then discovered a palm-print on the barrel underneath the wooden stock. He tentatively identified it as Oswald's, but was not able to photograph or analyze it in more depth as the FBI took the Carcano. In D.C., FBI fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona found the photographs and extant prints to be "insufficient" as to make any conclusion. The rifle was returned to the Dallas police on November 24. Five days later, the FBI made a positive identification using a card from Day.

6. In 1973, due to Floridians' discontent with the change, Florida Governor ^ Reubin Askew mandated that Cape Kennedy be referred to as Cape Canaveral on all state documents and maps. The U.S. Board of Geographic Names accepted the name change later that year.

Works cited

Government and institutional documents and reports

Hoover, J. Edgar (December 1, 1963). Reaction of Soviet and Communist Party Officials to JFK Assassination (PDF) (Report). National Archives.

Warren, Earl (1964). Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. United States Government Printing Office. ASIN B0065RJ63E.

Clark, Ramsey (1968). 1968 Panel Review of Photographs, X-Ray Films, Documents and Other Evidence Pertaining to the Fatal Wounding of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas (Report). United States Government Printing Office.

Stokes, Louis (1979). Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives (Report). United States Government Printing Office. Archived from the original on April 3, 2020.

Assassination Records Review Board (September 30, 1998). "Chapter 1: The Problem of Secrecy and the JFK Act" (PDF). Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board. United States Government Printing Office. p. 6. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 11, 2021.

Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics. National Research Council. 1982. doi:10.17226/10264. ISBN 9780309253727. Archived from the original on December 6, 2013.

Assassination Records Review Board (September 30, 1998). Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board (PDF) (Report). United States Government Printing Office. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 11, 2021.

Warren Commission documents, exhibits, and testimonies

Journal articles

News publications and websites

External links

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Assassination of John F. Kennedy - Wikipedia

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On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was in the vehicle with his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, Nellie, when he was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by former U.S.

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Assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, an event that had a profound impact on the civil rights movement in the United States.

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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Enacted to address housing discrimination by prohibiting the refusal to sell or rent a dwelling to any person based on race, color, religion, or national origin, aiming to ensure equal housing opportunities for all.

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LBJ’s final, great legislative achievement of the civil rights era

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Marked the end of direct American involvement in the Vietnam War, following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. South Vietnam would later lose the war and Vietnam is communist to this day.

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29th March 1973: Final US troops withdraw from Vietnam

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Involving the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex, leading to revelations of widespread abuses of power and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

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It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in "hush money" to the burglars.

Then, Nixon and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI 's investigation of the crime. This was a more serious crime than the break-in: It was an abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice.

Meanwhile, seven conspirators were indicted on charges related to the Watergate affair. At the urging of Nixon's aides, five pleaded guilty to avoid trial; the other two were convicted in January 1973.

By that time, a growing handful of people-including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee-had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up. Anonymous whistleblower " Deep Throat " provided key information to Woodward and Bernstein.

A handful of Nixon's aides, including White House counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury about the president's crimes; they also testified that Nixon had secretly taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office. If prosecutors could get their hands on those tapes, they would have proof of the president's guilt.

Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of 1973. His lawyers argued that the president's executive privilege allowed him to keep the tapes to himself, but Judge Sirica, the Senate committee and an independent special prosecutor named Archibald Cox were all determined to obtain them.

When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. (These events, which took place on October 20, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre.) Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some-but not all-of the tapes.

Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel. On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon's former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. The jury, unsure if they could indict a sitting president, called Nixon an "unindicted co-conspirator."

In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. While the president dragged his feet, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution.

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The Watergate Scandal - Timeline, Deep Throat & Nixon's Resignation | HISTORY

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A June 1972 break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters led to an investigation that revealed multiple abuses of power by the Nixon administration and a vote by the House Judiciary Committee for impeachment.

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a political scandal in the 1980s involving the covert sale of weapons to Iran by the U.S. government to fund Nicaraguan Contra rebels, leading to Congressional investigations and convictions.

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a trade agreement signed in 1994 between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, aiming to eliminate barriers to trade and investment and promote economic cooperation in North America.

Clinton Impeachment centered on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice related to his extramarital affair.

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Table of Contents

Read a brief summary of this topic

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), controversial trade pact signed in 1992 that gradually eliminated most tariffs and other trade barriers on products and services passing between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The pact effectively created a free-trade bloc among the three largest countries of North America. NAFTA went into effect in 1994 and remained in force until it was replaced in 2020.

Background

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was inspired by the success of the European Economic Community (1957-93) in eliminating tariffs in order to stimulate trade among its members. Proponents argued that establishing a free-trade area in North America would bring prosperity through increased trade and production, resulting in the creation of millions of well-paying jobs in all participating countries.

A Canadian-U.S. free-trade agreement was concluded in 1988, and NAFTA basically extended that agreement's provisions to Mexico. NAFTA was negotiated by the administrations of U.S. Pres. George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and Mexican Pres. Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Preliminary agreement on the pact was reached in August 1992, and it was signed by the three leaders on December 17. NAFTA was ratified by the three countries' national legislatures in 1993 and went into effect on January 1, 1994.

Provisions

NAFTA's main provisions called for the gradual reduction of tariffs, customs duties, and other trade barriers between the three members, with some tariffs being removed immediately and others over periods of as long as 15 years. The agreement ensured eventual duty-free access for a vast range of manufactured goods and commodities traded between the signatories. "National goods" status was provided to products imported from other NAFTA countries, banning any state, local, or provincial government from imposing taxes or tariffs on such goods.

NAFTA also contained provisions aimed at securing intellectual-property rights. Participating countries would adhere to rules protecting intellectual property and would adopt strict measures against industrial theft.

Other provisions instituted formal rules for resolving disputes between investors and participating countries. Among other things, such rules permitted corporations or individual investors to sue for compensation any signatory country that violated the rules of the treaty.

Additional side agreements were adopted to address concerns over the potential labour-market and environmental impacts of the treaty. Critics worried that generally low wages in Mexico would attract U.S. and Canadian companies, resulting in a production shift to Mexico and a rapid decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States and Canada. Environmentalists, meanwhile, were concerned about the potentially disastrous effects of rapid industrialization in Mexico, given that country's lack of experience in implementing and enforcing environmental regulations. Potential environmental problems were addressed in the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), which created the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) in 1994.

Further provisions of NAFTA were designed to give U.S. and Canadian companies greater access to Mexican markets in banking, insurance, advertising, telecommunications, and trucking.

Criticism

Many critics of NAFTA viewed the agreement as a radical experiment engineered by influential multinational corporations seeking to increase their profits at the expense of the ordinary citizens of the countries involved. Opposition groups argued that overarching rules imposed by NAFTA could undermine local governments by preventing them from issuing laws or regulations designed to protect the public interest. Critics also argued that the treaty would bring about a major degradation in environmental and health standards, promote the privatization and deregulation of key public services, and displace family farmers in signatory countries.

Effects

NAFTA produced mixed results. It turned out to be neither the magic bullet that its proponents had envisioned nor the devastating blow that its critics had predicted. Mexico did experience a dramatic increase in its exports, from about $60 billion in 1994 to nearly $400 billion by 2013. The surge in exports was accompanied by an explosion in imports as well, resulting in an influx of better-quality and lower-priced goods for Mexican consumers.

Economic growth during the post-NAFTA period was not impressive in any of the countries involved. The United States and Canada suffered greatly from several economic recessions, including the Great Recession of 2007-09, overshadowing any beneficial effects that NAFTA could have brought about. Mexico's gross domestic product (GDP) grew at a lower rate compared with that of other Latin American countries such as Brazil and Chile, and its growth in income per person also was not significant, though there was an expansion of the middle class in the post-NAFTA years.

Little happened in the labour market that dramatically changed the outcomes in any country involved in the treaty. Because of immigration restrictions, the wage gap between Mexico on the one hand and the United States and Canada on the other did not shrink. The lack of infrastructure in Mexico caused many U.S. and Canadian firms to choose not to invest directly in that country. As a result, there were no significant job losses in the U.S. and Canada and no environmental disaster caused by industrialization in Mexico.

Expansion of the agreement

Although NAFTA failed to deliver all that its proponents had promised, it continued to remain in effect. Indeed, in 2004 the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) expanded NAFTA to include five Central American countries ( El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua). In the same year, the Dominican Republic joined the group by signing a free trade agreement with the United States, followed by Colombia in 2006, Peru in 2007, and Panama in 2011. According to many experts, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that was signed on October 5, 2015, constituted an expansion of NAFTA on a much-larger scale.
Peter Bondarenko

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North American Free Trade Agreement | Definition, Purpose, Members, Replacement, & Provisions

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North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), controversial trade pact signed in 1992 that gradually eliminated most tariffs and other trade barriers on products and services passing between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The pact effectively created a free-trade bloc among the three largest countries of North America.

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centered on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice related to his extramarital affair.

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The impeachment of Bill Clinton was initiated by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998, against Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, on two charges, one of perjury and one of obstruction of justice.

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the 2000 U.S. presidential election, marked by a controversial recount in Florida, legal battles culminating in the Supreme Court's decision to stop the recount, and Bush's ultimate victory despite losing the popular vote.

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Bush v. Gore

Full case name
George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr. and Joseph Lieberman, et al.

Docket no.
00-949

Citations

531 U.S. 98 (more)

121 S. Ct. 525; 148 L. Ed. 2d 388; 2000 U.S. LEXIS 8430; 69 U.S.L.W. 4029; 2000 Cal. Daily Op. Service 9879; 2000 Colo. J. C.A.R. 6606; 14 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 26

Argument
Oral argument

Decision
Opinion

Prior

Judgment for defendant, Fla. Cir. Ct.; matter certified to Florida Supreme Court, Fla. Ct. App.; aff'd in part, rev'd in part, sub nom. Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd. v. Harris, 772 So. 2d 1273 (2000); cert. granted, stay granted, 531 U.S. 1036 (2000).

In the circumstances of this case, any manual recount of votes seeking to meet the December 12 "safe harbor" deadline would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Florida Supreme Court reversed and remanded.

Chief Justice

William Rehnquist

Associate Justices

John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor
Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
David Souter · Clarence Thomas
Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer

Per curiam

Concurrence

Rehnquist, joined by Scalia, Thomas

Dissent

Stevens, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer

Dissent

Souter, joined by Breyer; Stevens, Ginsburg (all but Part III)

Dissent

Ginsburg, joined by Stevens; Souter, Breyer (Part I)

Dissent

Breyer, joined by Stevens, Ginsburg (except Part I-A-1); Souter (Part I)

U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 2, amend. XIV; 3 U.S.C. § 5

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in Florida's 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately. On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm." Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.

In a 5-4 per curiam decision, the Court ruled, strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, it held that the use of different standards of counting in different counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution; the case had also been argued on Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor with only Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist. The Court then ruled as to a remedy, deciding against the remedy proposed by Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter to send the case back to Florida to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard before the scheduled December 18 meeting of Florida's electors in Tallahassee. Instead, the majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 " safe harbor" deadline set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), , which the Florida Supreme Court had stated that the Florida Legislature intended to meet. The Court, holding that not meeting the "safe harbor" deadline would violate the Florida Election Code, rejected an extension of the deadline to allow the Florida court to finish counting disputed ballots under uniform guidelines requested in a remedy proposed by Breyer and Souter. That deadline arrived two hours after the release of the Court's decision.

The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was among the most controversial in U.S. history, overturning a ruling by the Supreme Court of Florida to finish the recount, giving Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes. Florida's votes gave Bush, the Republican nominee, 271 electoral votes, one more than the 270 required to win the Electoral College. This meant the defeat of Democratic candidate Al Gore, who won 267 electoral votes but received 266, as a " faithless elector" from the District of Columbia abstained from voting. Media organizations later analyzed the ballots and found that, under specified criteria, the original, limited recount of undervotes of several large counties would have resulted in a Bush victory, though a statewide recount would have shown that Gore received the most votes. Florida later retired the punch-card voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case.

In the United States, each state conducts its own popular vote election for president and vice president. The voters are actually voting for a slate of electors, each of whom pledges to vote for a particular candidate for each office in the Electoral College. Article II, § 1, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution provides that each state legislature decides how electors are chosen. Referring to an earlier Supreme Court case, McPherson v. Blacker, the Court noted that early in U.S. history, most state legislatures directly appointed their slates of electors.

Today, state legislatures have enacted laws to provide for the selection of electors by popular vote within each state. While these laws vary, most states, including Florida, award all electoral votes to the candidate for either office who receives a plurality of the state's popular vote. Any candidate who receives an absolute majority of all electoral votes nationally (270 since 1963) wins the presidential or vice-presidential election.

Close-up view of satellite trucks parked by the Florida State Capitol during the 2000 presidential election vote dispute

On November 8, 2000, the Florida Division of Elections reported that Bush won with 48.8% of the vote in Florida, a margin of victory of 1,784 votes. The margin of victory was less than 0.5% of the votes cast, so a statutorily mandated automatic machine recount occurred. On November 10, with the machine recount apparently finished in all but one county, Bush's margin of victory had decreased to 327 votes.

According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, later analysis showed that 18 counties-accounting for a quarter of all votes cast in Florida-did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount, but "No one from the Gore campaign ever challenged this view" that the machine recount had been completed. Florida's election laws allow a candidate to request a county to conduct a manual recount, and Gore requested manual recounts in four Florida counties- Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade-that generally vote Democratic and would be expected to find more votes for Gore. Gore did not request any recounts in counties that generally vote Republican. The four counties granted the request and began manual recounts. But Florida law also required all counties to certify their election returns to the Florida secretary of state within seven days of the election, and several of the counties conducting manual recounts did not believe they could meet this deadline.[citation needed ]

On November 14, the statutory deadline, the Florida Circuit Court ruled that the seven-day deadline was mandatory but that the counties could amend their returns at a later date. The court also ruled that the secretary of state, after "considering all attendant facts and circumstances", had discretion to include any late amended returns in the statewide certification. Before the 5 p.m. deadline on November 14, Volusia County completed its manual recount and certified its results. At 5 p.m. on November 14, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced that she had received the certified returns from all 67 counties, while Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties were still conducting manual recounts.

Harris issued a set of criteria by which she would determine whether to allow late filings, and she required any county seeking to make a late filing to submit to her, by 2 p.m. the following day, a written statement of the facts and circumstances justifying the late filing. Four counties submitted statements, and after reviewing the submissions, Harris determined that none justified an extension of the filing deadline. She further announced that after she received the certified returns of the overseas absentee ballots from each county, she would certify the results of the presidential election on November 18. But on November 17, the Florida Supreme Court enjoined Harris from certifying the election while it heard appeals from the various cases in progress. On November 21, it allowed continuation of the manual recounts and delayed certification until November 26.

Florida Supreme Court

By December 8, 2000, there had been multiple court decisions about the presidential election in Florida. On that date, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, ordered a statewide manual recount of undervotes. On December 9, ruling in response to an emergency request from Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the recount. The Court also treated Bush's application for relief as a petition for a writ of certiorari, granted that petition, requested briefing from the parties by 4 p.m. on December 10, and scheduled oral argument for the morning of December 11.[citation needed ]

Although opinions are rarely issued in connection with grants of certiorari (a minimum of four of the nine justices must vote in favor of the grant), Scalia filed an opinion concurring in the Court's decision, writing that "a brief response is necessary to [Stevens's] dissent". According to Scalia,

Stevens's dissenting opinion was joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. According to Stevens,

A number[which? ] of legal scholars have agreed with the dissenters' argument that Bush failed to carry the "heavy burden" of demonstrating a "likelihood of irreparable harm".

The oral argument in Bush v. Gore occurred on December 11. Theodore Olson, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, delivered Bush's oral argument. New York lawyer David Boies argued for Gore.

During the brief period when the U.S. Supreme Court was deliberating on Bush v. Gore, the Florida Supreme Court provided clarifications of its November 21 decision in Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris (Harris I), which the U.S. Supreme Court had requested on December 4 following arguments in the case of Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board.

Because of the extraordinary nature and argued urgency of the case, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bush v. Gore on December 12, a day after hearing oral argument.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is the U.S. Constitutional provision on which the decision in Bush v. Gore was based.

Article II, § 1, cl. 2 of the Constitution specifies the number of electors per state, and, most relevant to this case, specifies the manner in which those electors are selected, stipulating that:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors...

This clause arguably gives power to only one branch of Florida's state government: the state legislature.

Section 2 of the Electoral Count Act, now codified in 3 U.S.C. § 5, regulates the "determination of controversy as to appointment of electors" in presidential elections. Of particular relevance to this case was the so-called " safe harbor" provision, which assures Congress's deference to states in their appointments of electors if done by a specified deadline:

Since the electors were set to meet December 18, the discretional "safe harbor" deadline was December 12, just one day after the Court heard oral arguments in this case.

According to 28 U.S.C. § 1257:

Final judgments or decrees rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had, may be reviewed by the Supreme Court by writ of certiorari where the validity of a treaty or statute of the United States is drawn in question or where the validity of a statute of any State is drawn in question on the ground of its being repugnant to the Constitution, treaties, or laws of the United States...

Theodore Olson represented Bush

The Court had to resolve two different questions to fully resolve the case:

Were the recounts, as they were being conducted, constitutional?

If the recounts were unconstitutional, what was the appropriate remedy?

Three days earlier, the five-Justice majority had ordered the recount stopped, and the Court had to decide whether to restart it.

Bush argued that recounts in Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause because Florida did not have a statewide vote recount standard. Each county determined on its own whether a given ballot was valid. Two voters could have marked their ballots in an identical manner, but the ballot in one county would be counted while the ballot in a different county would be rejected, because of the conflicting manual recount standards.

Gore argued that there was indeed a statewide standard, the "intent of the voter" standard, and that this standard was sufficient under the Equal Protection Clause. Furthermore, he argued that the consequence of ruling the Florida recount unconstitutional simply because it treated different voters differently would effectively render every state election unconstitutional and that each voting mechanism has a different rate of error in counting votes. Voters in a "punch-card" county have a greater chance of having their votes undercounted than voters in an "optical scanner" county. If Bush prevails, Gore argued, every state would have to have one statewide method of recording votes to be constitutional.

David Boies represented Gore

This was the most closely decided issue in the case. The arguments presented by counsel did not extensively address what the Court should do if the Court were to find an equal protection violation. But Gore did argue briefly that the appropriate remedy would not be to cancel all recounts, but rather to order a proper recount.

Bush also argued that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling violated Article II, § 1, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution. Essentially, Bush argued that the Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of Florida law was so erroneous that its ruling had the effect of making new law. Since this "new law" had not been enacted by the Florida legislature, it violated Article II. Bush argued that Article II gives the federal judiciary the power to interpret state election law in presidential elections to ensure that the intent of the state legislature is followed.

Gore argued that Article II presupposes judicial review and interpretation of state statutes, and that the Florida Supreme Court did nothing more than exercise the routine principles of statutory construction to reach its decision.

In brief, the breakdown of the decision was:

Five justices agreed that there was an Equal Protection Clause violation in using differing standards of determining a valid vote in different counties, causing an "unequal evaluation of ballots in various respects". The per curiam opinion (representing the views of Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) specifically cited that:

Palm Beach County changed standards for counting dimpled chads several times during the counting process;

Broward County used less restrictive standards than Palm Beach County;

Miami-Dade County's recount of rejected ballots did not include all precincts;

The Florida Supreme Court did not specify who would recount the ballots.

The per curiam opinion also identified an inconsistency with the fact that the Florida statewide recount of rejected ballots was limited to undervotes. The opinion implied that a constitutionally valid recount would include Florida's overvotes, not just its undervotes. The opinion expressed concern that the limited scope of Florida's recount would mean that, unlike some undervotes found to be reclaimable, valid votes among the overvotes would not be reclaimed. Furthermore, if a machine had incorrectly read an overvote as a valid vote for one of two marked candidates instead of rejecting it, Florida would wrongly count what should be an invalid vote.

Breyer and Souter disagreed with the majority, pointing out that Bush presented no evidence in any court of uncounted legal overvotes and did not see any problem in Florida's decision to limit its recount to undervotes. The dissents of Breyer and Souter were full dissents. Unlike the five-justice majority, each identified an equal protection concern that did not rise to the level of a constitutional violation, and proposed a remedy different from the majority's remedy. A dissenting opinion does not create precedent nor does it become a part of case law. Under the American legal system, dissenting court opinions are not considered valid holdings and are not included in the court's ruling. Nothing in Breyer's or Souter's dissents can be construed as part of any decision by the Court.

In dissenting, Ginsburg wrote that, for better or worse, disparities were a part of all elections and that if an equal-protection argument applied in any way, it surely applied more to black voters.

Five justices agreed that December 12 (the date of the decision) was the deadline Florida had established for recounts in keeping with 3 U.S.C. §5 (Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas in support; Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer opposed). Souter, joined by Breyer, Ginsburg and Stevens, wrote, "But no State is required to conform to §5 if it cannot do that (for whatever reason); the sanction for failing to satisfy the conditions of §5 is simply loss of what has been called its 'safe harbor.' And even that determination is to be made, if made anywhere, in the Congress." Souter and Breyer would have remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court to permit that court to establish uniform standards of what constituted a legal vote for a manual recount of all rejected ballots using those standards.

Three justices (Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) argued that the Florida Supreme Court had acted contrary to the intent of the Florida legislature. Four (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) specifically disputed this in their dissenting opinions, and the remaining two (O'Connor and Kennedy) declined to join Rehnquist's concurrence on the matter.

In its per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that the Florida Supreme Court decision calling for a statewide recount violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Kennedy has since been identified as the opinion's primary author. In addition to writing the opinion, he included Souter, Breyer and Stevens as agreeing that there were equal protection "problems" without consulting them. Stevens demanded his name be removed from the draft opinion, which Kennedy agreed to only after Stevens pulled his name from Breyer's dissent. Breyer also objected in private. The New York Times reported that Kennedy's opinion "later caused some confusion by its reference to 'seven justices of the court' who 'agree that there are constitutional problems with the recount.' That was true, but it was also beside the point." Later interviews by Vanity Fair indicated that Breyer and Souter were trying to appeal to Kennedy to join them on the remedy, rather than agreeing that an equal protection violation had occurred. Jack Balkin, writing in Yale Law Journal, considered this a cheap trick to construct the illusion of a larger majority, likening it to "saying that two doctors agree that a patient is sick, but one wants to use leeches, and the other wants to prescribe antibiotics".

The Court held that the Equal Protection Clause guarantees to individuals that their ballots cannot be devalued by "later arbitrary and disparate treatment". Even if the recount was fair in theory, it was unfair in practice. The record, as weighed by the Florida Supreme Court, suggested that different standards were seemingly applied to the recount from ballot to ballot, precinct to precinct, and county to county, even when identical types of ballots and machines were used.

According to the Court, the statewide standard (that a "legal vote" is "one in which there is a 'clear indication of the intent of the voter'") could not guarantee that each county would count the votes in a constitutionally permissible fashion. The Court stated that the per curiam opinion's applicability was "limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities." But the Court did not identify those complexities, nor did it explain (or apparently consider) why the absence of a constitutionally acceptable standard for counting votes, which was the basis for the Court's ruling, would not have invalidated the entire presidential election in Florida.

Critics later pointed out that the court had denied certiorari on equal protection grounds when Bush first sought Supreme Court review. Law clerks who worked for Kennedy and O'Connor at the time later said they believed the justices settled on equal protection as grounds for their decision, rather than Article II, because they thought it would seem fairer.

The Court ruled 5-4 that no constitutionally valid recount could be completed by a December 12 "safe harbor" deadline. The Court asserted that "the Supreme Court of Florida has said that the legislature intended the State's electors to 'participat[e] fully in the federal electoral process,' as provided in 3 U.S.C. § 5." The Court therefore effectively ended the proposed recount, because "the Florida Legislature intended to obtain the safe-harbor benefits of 3 U.S.C. §5." Souter said bluntly, "The 3 U.S.C. §5 issue is not serious." Breyer's dissent stated, "By halting the manual recount, and thus ensuring that uncounted legal votes will not be counted under any standard, this Court crafts a remedy out of proportion to the asserted harm. And that remedy harms the very fairness interests the Court is attempting to protect."

Four justices (Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer) had dissented from the Court's earlier (December 9) decision, by the same five-justice majority, to grant Bush's emergency request to stop the recount and grant certiorari. In their dissents from the Court's December 12 per curiam opinion, Breyer and Souter acknowledged that the counting up until December 9 had not conformed with equal protection requirements. But Souter and Breyer favored remanding the case to the Florida Supreme Court for the purpose of crafting specific guidelines for how to count disputed ballots, in contrast to the majority's decision to halt the recount altogether. The actual counting had ended with the December 9 ruling, issued three days before any deadline.

The dissenting opinions strongly criticized the majority for involving the Court in state-level affairs. Stevens's dissent (joined by Breyer and Ginsburg) concluded as follows:

What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

The per curiam opinion did not technically dismiss the case and instead "remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion." Gore's attorneys therefore understood that they could fight on and could petition the Florida Supreme Court to repudiate the notion that December 12 was final under Florida law.

Despite this, Gore dropped the case-and conceded the election to Bush shortly afterward-reportedly because he was not optimistic about how the Florida justices would react to further arguments and, as one of his advisers put it, "the best Gore could hope for was a slate of disputed electors". In addition, Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley argued that fighting on was futile because even if the Florida Supreme Court defied the U.S. Supreme Court and ordered a new recount, "the GOP would take them straight back to Washington, where the [U.S.] Supreme Court would repeat: 'You ain't going to count, okay? So quit bothering us.'"

On remand, the Florida Supreme Court issued an opinion on December 22 that did not dispute whether December 12 was the deadline for recounts under state law. This was disputed in a concurring opinion by Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw, who nevertheless expressed deference to the U.S. Supreme Court's view on this issue and also argued that, in any case, the Florida Supreme Court would (in his opinion) be unable to craft a remedy that would satisfy all the U.S. Supreme Court's equal protection, due process, and other concerns.

Rehnquist's concurring opinion, joined by Scalia and Thomas, began by emphasizing that this was an unusual case in which the Constitution requires federal courts to assess whether a state supreme court has properly interpreted the will of the state legislature. Usually, federal courts do not make that type of assessment, and indeed the per curiam opinion in this case did not do so. After addressing this aspect of the case, Rehnquist examined and agreed with arguments that the dissenting justices of the Florida Supreme Court had made.

Rehnquist also mentioned that he, Scalia, and Thomas joined the Supreme Court's per curiam opinion and agreed with the legal analysis presented there.

The ruling also states: "the state legislature's power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by state legislatures in several States for many years after the framing of our Constitution. ... The State, of course, after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors."

Bush v. Gore prompted many strong reactions from scholars, pundits and others, with a majority of publications in law reviews being critical. A Georgetown Law Journal analysis found that 78 scholarly articles were published about the case between 2001 and 2004, with 35 criticizing the decision and 11 defending it.

The most closely decided aspect of the case was the key question of what remedy the Court should order, in view of an Equal Protection Clause violation. Gore had argued for a new recount that would pass constitutional muster, but the Court instead chose to end the election. Citing two Florida Supreme Court opinions, Gore v. Harris (December 8, seemingly in error) and Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris (November 21, footnote 55), the U.S. Supreme Court asserted that "the Florida Supreme Court has said that the Florida Legislature intended to obtain the safe-harbor benefits of 3 U.S.C. § 5" and that "any recount seeking to meet the December 12 date will be unconstitutional". This assertion has proven very controversial.

Finding that reasoning unpersuasive, Michael W. McConnell writes that the two Florida court opinions the Supreme Court cited supply no authoritative pronouncement of an absolute deadline. As better support for December 12 as the deadline under state law, McConnell points to two footnotes in the Florida Supreme Court's December 11 response on remand in Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris (Harris I), which he says must not have come to the justices' attention. Footnotes 17 and 22 called the safe harbor date of December 12 an "outside deadline". Therefore, he writes, although these passages may not justify the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, since the Court did not rely on them, "the Court may have reached the right result for the wrong reason". These footnotes state:

[17] What is a reasonable time required for completion will, in part, depend on whether the election is for a statewide office, for a federal office or for presidential electors. In the case of the presidential election, the determination of reasonableness must be circumscribed by the provisions of 3 U.S.C. § 5, which sets December 12, 2000, as the date for final determination of any state's dispute concerning its electors for that determination to be given conclusive effect in Congress ... [22] As always, it is necessary to read all provisions of the elections code in pari materia. In this case, that comprehensive reading required that there be time for an elections contest pursuant to section 102.168, which all parties had agreed was a necessary component of the statutory scheme and to accommodate the outside deadline set forth in 3 U.S.C. § 5 of December 12, 2000.

According to Nelson Lund, former law clerk to O'Connor and associate counsel to George H. W. Bush, a dissenter might argue that the Florida Supreme Court on remand in Harris I was discussing the "protest provisions of the Florida Election Code, whereas the issues in Bush v. Gore arose under the contest provisions". In retort to himself, Lund writes that the Florida court's decision in the contest case did not mention any alternative possible deadlines. Peter Berkowitz writes, "Perhaps it would have been more generous for the Court to have asked the Florida court on remand whether 'outside deadline' referred to contest-period as well as protest-period recounts." Abner Greene points to evidence that "the Florida Supreme Court thought all manual recounts-whether protest or contest-must be completed no later than December 12." Nevertheless, Greene concludes "lack of clarity about the Florida Supreme Court's views on the safe-harbor provision should have resulted in a remand to that court for clarification", in addition to the remand of December 4. The Court in Bush v. Gore did remand the case instead of dismissing it, but the remand did not include another request for clarification. Louise Weinberg argues that even giving the U.S. Supreme Court the benefit of the doubt that it acted appropriately in intervening in Florida state law, its actions should be deemed unconstitutional because its intervention was not coupled with any kind of remedy aimed at determining the election's actual outcome.

Arguably, the Florida Supreme Court, after having stated on December 11 that December 12 was an "outside deadline", could have clarified its views on the safe-harbor provision or reinterpreted Florida law to state that December 12 was not a final deadline under Florida law, which the U.S. Supreme Court did not forbid the Florida Supreme Court from doing. Lund states that, as a practical matter, the Florida Supreme Court was unlikely to have actually been capable of conducting and completing a new constitutionally valid recount by the December 18 deadline for the meeting of the Electoral College.

Michael Abramowicz and Maxwell Stearns argue that if the Florida Supreme Court had clarified or reinterpreted Florida state law on remand, then the U.S. Supreme Court might have struck down the Florida Supreme Court's action as a violation of Article II of the Constitution. Abramowicz and Stearns point out that while Kennedy and O'Connor did not join Rehnquist's Article II concurrence, they did not explicitly oppose it either, and thus kept the door open to nullifying a future ruling of the Florida Supreme Court on Article II grounds. Abramowicz and Stearns also argue that if the Bush v. Gore decision genuinely allowed the Florida Supreme Court to clarify or reinterpret Florida state law and thus to order a new manual recount, then Souter and Breyer likely would have joined the opinion-which they did not. Laurence Tribe has a similar view on this issue, arguing that "[e]ven assuming the leeway [in regard to the remedy] the Court theoretically left open was real, the window it had failed to slam shut was hardly the sort of opening through which anyone would dare to crawl."

Limitation "to present circumstances"

Some critics of the decision argue that the majority seemed to seek refuge from their own logic in the following sentence in the majority opinion: "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities." The Court's defenders argued that this was a reasonable precaution against the possibility that the decision might be read too broadly, arguing that in the short time available it would be inappropriate to attempt to craft language spelling out in greater detail how to apply the holding to other cases. But critics interpreted the sentence as stating that the case did not set precedent in any way and could not be used to justify any future court decision, and some suggested that this was evidence the majority realized its holding was untenable. Regardless of whether the majority intended the decision to be precedential, several federal courts have cited it in election cases, as did a lawyer for a Republican congressional candidate during legal arguments coincident with the 2020 United States presidential election.

According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, " Bush v. Gore broke David Souter's heart. The day the music died, he called it. It was so political, so transparently political, that it scarred Souter's belief in the Supreme Court as an institution" (italics in original).

Various authors have claimed that conservative Republican-appointed justices ruled against Gore in this case for partisan reasons. Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz writes:

Chapman University School of Law professor Ronald Rotunda responded that Democratic-appointed justices of the Florida Supreme Court also ruled against Gore:

There has also been analysis of whether several justices had a conflict of interest that should have forced them to recuse themselves from the decision. On several occasions, Rehnquist had expressed interest in retiring under a Republican administration; one study found that press reports "are equivocal on whether facts existed that would have created a conflict of interest" for him. At an election night party, O'Connor became upset when it was reported that Gore had won Florida, her husband explaining that they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona. Both justices remained on the Court until Bush's second term, with Rehnquist dying in 2005 and O'Connor retiring in 2006. According to Steven Foster of the Manchester Grammar School:

The day after Thanksgiving, when the conservative justices agreed to hear Bush's appeal in the case of Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board (excluding Bush's equal protection claim), the opposing justices were convinced that the majority intended to reverse the Florida Supreme Court and shut down the recount. They began drafting a dissent before this case was argued before them, a dissent that was temporarily shelved upon the Court's unanimous remand to the Florida court.

The liberal law clerks noted that Scalia later had begun campaigning for the stay of the Florida court's December 8 recount order before the Court had received Gore's response to Bush's request, and was so incensed at Stevens's dissent in the matter of the stay and grant of certiorari that he requested the release of opinions be delayed so that he could amend his opinion to include a response to Stevens. Kennedy is also reported to have sent out a memo accusing the dissenters of "trashing the court". Later, court personnel, as well as Ron Klain, speculated that there was an unspoken understanding that the judges on the winning side would not retire until after the next election, as a way of preserving some sense of fairness. No justices retired during President Bush's first term.

It has been argued that none of the justices voted in a way that was consistent with their prior jurisprudence, though George Mason University law professor Nelson Lund has challenged this conclusion, arguing that, unlike in suspect classification cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has never actually required a showing of intentional discrimination in fundamental rights cases, such as Bush v. Gore. The five conservative justices decided to involve the federal judiciary in a matter that could have been left to the states, while also expanding previous U.S. Supreme Court interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause. Meanwhile, the liberal justices all supported leaving the matter in the hands of a state and also sometimes advocated in favor of a narrower reading of existing Equal Protection Clause precedents. This bolstered the perception that the justices used their desired result to drive their reasoning. David Cole of Georgetown Law argued that, as a way of trying to rehabilitate the court's image after Bush v. Gore, the Court became more likely to reach a liberal decision in the four years after Bush v. Gore than it had been before the case, and that the conservative justices were more likely to join the liberals rather than the other way around.

In 2001, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of 175,010 ballots that vote-counting machines had rejected from the entire state, not just the counties that conducted manual recounts. The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The study was conducted over a period of 10 months. Based on the review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes. On the other hand, under scenarios involving review of limited sets of ballots uncounted by machines, Bush would have kept his lead. In one such scenario-Gore's request for recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties-Bush would have won by 225 votes. In another scenario (if the remaining 64 Florida counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots the Florida Supreme Court ordered on December 8, applying the various standards that county election officials said they would have used), Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.

The scenarios involving limited sets of ballots included the completed uncertified recount by Palm Beach County, which nevertheless had excluded a set-aside cache of dimpled ballots with clear indications of intent, an uncounted net gain of 682 votes for Gore. In contrast, the scenarios involving all uncounted ballots statewide considered all votes from Palm Beach County, subjected to various standards of inclusion. The Washington Post qualified the tallies conducted by the NORC consortium with the statement: "But no study of this type can accurately recreate Election Day 2000 or predict what might have emerged from individual battles over more than 6 million votes in Florida's 67 counties."

Further analysis revealed that black-majority precincts had three times as many rejected ballots as white precincts. "For minorities, the ballot survey found, a recount would not have redressed the inequities because most ballots were beyond retrieving. But a recount could have restored the votes of thousands of older voters whose dimpled and double-voted ballots were indecipherable to machines but would have been clear in a ballot-by-ballot review."

Several articles have characterized the decision as damaging the reputation of the court, increasing the view of judges as partisan, and decreasing Americans' trust in the integrity of elections, an outcome Stevens predicted in his dissent. Part of the reason recounts could not be completed was the various stoppages ordered by the various branches and levels of the judiciary, most notably the Supreme Court. Opponents argued that it was improper for the Court (by the same five justices who joined the per curiam opinion) to grant a stay that preliminarily stopped the recounts based on Bush's likelihood of success on the merits and possible irreparable injury to Bush. Although stay orders normally do not include justification, Scalia concurred to express some brief reasoning to justify it, saying that one potential irreparable harm was that an invalid recount might undermine the legitimacy of Bush's election (presumably if, for example, it were to find that Gore should have won). Supporters of the stay, such as Charles Fried, contend that the stay's validity was vindicated by the ultimate decision on the merits and that the only thing the stay prevented was a recount "done in an unconstitutional way".

Some critics argued that the Court's decision was a perversion of the Equal Protection Clause and contrary to the political question doctrine. Scott Lemieux of University of Washington points out that if recounting votes without a uniform statewide standard were truly a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, this should have meant that the initial count, which also lacked a uniform standard, was itself unconstitutional. On the other hand, Geoffrey R. Stone has expressed sympathy with the Court's equal protection reasoning, even though Stone was dismayed by what he saw as the sudden and suspect conversion of Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas to that equal protection principle. According to Stone:

Stevens's criticism of the Court in his dissent for questioning the impartiality of Florida's judiciary was itself criticized by Lund, a former law clerk for O'Connor. Professor Charles Zelden faults the per curiam opinion in the case for, among other things, not declaring that the nation's electoral system required significant reform, and for not condemning administration of elections by part-time boards of elections dominated by partisan and unprofessional officials. Zelden concludes that the Court's failure to spotlight this critical flaw in American electoral democracy made a replay of Bush v. Gore more likely, not less likely, either in Florida or elsewhere. In 2013, O'Connor, who had voted with the majority, said that the case "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation". She added, "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.' ... And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."

A Vanity Fair article quotes several of the court's clerks at the time who were critical of the decision. They note that, despite the per curiam opinion's declaration that the case was taken "reluctantly", Kennedy had been rather enthusiastic about taking the case all along. They felt at the time, as had many legal scholars, that the case was unlikely to go to the Supreme Court at all. In fact some of the justices were so certain that the case would never come before them that they had already left for vacations.

Editorials in the country's leading newspapers were overwhelmingly critical of the decision. A review by The Georgetown Law Journal found that the nation's top newspapers, by circulation, had published 18 editorials criticizing the decision and six praising it. They similarly published 26 op-eds criticizing the decision and eight defending it. Polls showed a range of reactions, with 37-65% of respondents believing that personal politics influenced the justices' decisions, depending on the poll. A Princeton Survey poll recorded 46% of respondents saying that the decision made them more likely to suspect partisan bias in judges in general. An NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll showed that 53% of respondents believed that the decision to stop the recount was based mostly on politics. A 2010 Slate article listed the case as the first in a series of events that eroded American trust in the results of elections, noting that the number of lawsuits brought over election issues has more than doubled since Bush v. Gore.

1. ^

2. "Florida Ballots Project". National Opinion Research Center. Archived from the original on December 17, 2001.

3. ^ Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd. v. Harris, 772 So.2d 1220 (November 21, 2000). Late-filing criteria are at note 5. See The American Presidency Project for other documents related to the 2000 election dispute.

4. ^ See Fla. Stat. § 102.141(4). "The 2000 Florida Statutes, Title IX, Chapter 102, Section 141". Archived from the original on April 1, 2005. (This archived version of the Florida statute is dated July 2, 2001, and is from Archive.org.)

5. ^ "Election 2000 Timeline". PG Publishing Co., Inc. December 17, 2000.

6. ^ Toobin, Jeffrey. "Too Close to Call". Random House, 2002, p. 66.

7. ^ See Fla. Stat. § 102.166. "The 2000 Florida Statutes, Title IX, Chapter 102, Section 166". Archived from the original on April 1, 2005. (This archived version of the Florida statute is dated July 2, 2001, and is from Archive.org.)

8. ^ See Fla. Stat. § 102.112. "The 2000 Florida Statutes, Title IX, Chapter 102, Section 112". Archived from the original on April 21, 2001. (This archived version of the Florida statute is dated April 21, 2001, and is from Archive.org.)

9. ^ "Leon County Judge Rules on Certification" (PDF).

10. ^ "Text: Florida Recount Results".

11. For example, the ^ concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore cited the December 6, 2000, decision in Touchston v. McDermott, 234 F.3d 1130 Archived December 9, 2008, at the Wayback Machine (11th Cir. 2000).

12. ^ "Supreme Court of Florida No. SC00-2431 Gore v. Harris 772 S2d 1243". Findlaw. December 8, 2000.

13. Bush v. Gore on Application for Stay.

14. ^ Transcript and audio of oral arguments in Bush v. Gore, via Oyez.org. Retrieved 2008-06-05.

15. Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000)

16. ^ Gillman, Howard (July 5, 2003). The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election. University of Chicago Press. p. 82. ISBN 9780226294087.

17. "Scalia and Stevens clash over recount stay in Bush v. Gore". CNN. December 11, 2000. Archived from the original on May 8, 2009.

18. ^ Id. "...if petitioners mean to say that all votes must be tabulated under a fixed and mechanical standard (e.g., the "two-corner chad rule"), their approach would render unconstitutional the laws of States that hinge the meaning of the ballot on the intent of the voter..." Paragraph 3 in Argument, Part III-A.

19. ^ "Bush v. Gore". Oyez Project. "Noting that the Equal Protection clause guarantees individuals that their ballots cannot be devalued by 'later arbitrary and disparate treatment,' the per curiam opinion held that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional."

20. ^ Lund, Nelson Robert (March 2002). "The Unbearable Rightness of Bush v. Gore". Cardozo Law Review. 23 (4). George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 01-17: 1242. doi:10.2139/ssrn.267874. SSRN 267874.

21. Nelson Lund in this 2002 article suggests that one type of ballot being referred to here could have "both a clean [machine readable] hole for one candidate and a dimpled or indented chad for another candidate[,]" which, according to Lund, were quite common. Lund cites the ^ Gore v. Harris trial testimony of Judge Charles Burton (Palm Beach County elections official), who explained that for "one of the patterns that we saw quite frequently", a clear punch and a nearby dimple, the canvassing board "conclude[d] that the clear intent of the voter" was a vote for the candidate that "they actually punched out, ... a fully punched chad demonstrated that that was their intent."

22. See Trial Transcript, ^ Gore v. Harris, No. 00-2808 (Leon Cty. Jud. Cir. Dec. 2, 2000), at 262-264 (testimony of Judge Charles Burton) [transcript available at https://web.archive.org/web/20020118072636/http://election2000.stanford.edu/].

23. ^ Friedman, Richard D. (2001). "Trying to Make Peace with Bush v. Gore (Symposium: Bush v. Gore Issue)". Florida State University Law Review. 29 (2): 825. [T]here may have been some voters whose ballots were improperly counted because they punched two holes but the machine only read one, and those ballots would not be recounted. Well, perhaps, but there could not have been very many of these ballots, and to discover them would require reviewing every punch-card ballot in the state; neither candidate was complaining about these, and neither was asking for a full recount. The Florida Supreme Court should have been entitled to restrict the recount to categories of ballots that appeared most likely to present problems. (cite omitted)

24. ^

25. ^ "Bush v. Gore". Legal Information Institute. December 12, 2000.

26. Justices Breyer and Souter stated:^

It is true that the Equal Protection Clause does not forbid the use of a variety of voting mechanisms within a jurisdiction, even though different mechanisms will have different levels of effectiveness in recording voters' intentions; local variety can be justified by concerns about cost, the potential value of innovation, and so on. But evidence in the record here suggests that a different order of disparity obtains under rules for determining a voter's intent that have been applied (and could continue to be applied) to identical types of ballots used in identical brands of machines and exhibiting identical physical characteristics (such as "hanging" or "dimpled" chads).

27. Toobin, Jeffrey (2007). ^ The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court , pp. 184, (Doubleday, New York, NY).

28. ^ Gore v. Harris, 773 So. 2d 524 Archived June 25, 2008, at the Wayback Machine (December 22, 2000). Only Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw, in a concurring opinion, disputed that December 12 was the deadline for recounts under state law. Justice Shaw had joined the dissenting opinion in Gore v. Harris before the ruling in Bush v. Gore.

29. ^

30. Lund, Nelson. ^ "The Unbearable Rightness of Bush v. Gore" in The Longest Night: Polemics and Perspectives on Election 2000, page 176 (University of California Press, Arthur Jacobson and Michel Rosenfeld, eds. 2002).

31. Berkowitz, Peter and Wittes, Benjamin. ^ "The Lawfulness of the Election Decision: A Reply to Professor Tribe", Villanova Law Review, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2004.

32. Greene, Abner. "Is There a First Amendment Defense for Bush v. Gore?", 80 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1643 (2005). Greene points to footnotes 21 and 22 in Gore v. Harris, 772 S2d 1243 (December 8, 2000), as evidence that the Florida Supreme Court thought all recounts had to be completed by December 12, 2008.

33. Weinberg, Louise. ^ [1] Archived September 17, 2004, at the Wayback Machine in When Courts Decide Elections: The Constitutionality of Bush v. Gore, 82 Boston University Law Review 609 (2002), p. 33.

In Bush v. Gore, on the contrary, the Court actively prevented the completion of a halted state recount, never having ruled on the merits either of the challenge or the election and never having adjudicated the validity of Bush's certification or Gore's request for a recount. Instead, the Court selected the next President of the United States in the absence of a completed election-the ultimate political act. A meaningful remand in Bush v. Gore, or completing the election under the Court's own supervision, would have preserved the Constitution from this assault.

34. Lund, Nelson (April 26, 2001). "The Unbearable Rightness of Bush v. Gore". Cardozo Law Review. 23 (4): 1221. SSRN 267874.

35. Lund, Nelson. "A Very Streamlined Introduction to Bush v. Gore" (PDF). George Mason University School of Law.

36. ^ Tribe, Laurence H. (2002). "Lost at the Equal Protection Carnival: Nelson Lund's Carnival of Mirrors" (PDF). Constitutional Commentary. 19: 619. hdl:11299/169401.

37. ^ Fliter, John. "Review of The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right". Archived from the original on May 16, 2006.

38. Charles L. Zelden, Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008) ISBN 0-7006-1593-8.

39. ^ Lund, Nelson. "The Unbearable Rightness of Bush v. Gore" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 17, 2005. ... it's important to remember that overly broad holdings can be worse than those that are too narrow. Broad holdings may effectively decide future cases that are factually dissimilar in ways that should be legally distinguished.

40. ^ Spillenger, Clyde. "Supreme court fails to argue recount ruling". UCLA Today. Archived from the original on December 1, 2008. This observation is the very antithesis of the rule of law.

41. ^ Toobin, Jeffrey (2012). The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. Doubleday. p. 123.

42. ^ Rotunda, Ronald (2003). "Yet Another Article on Bush v. Gore" (PDF). Ohio State Law Journal. 64: 283.

43. ^ Neumann, Richard K. Jr. (Spring 2003). "Conflicts of interest in Bush v. Gore: Did some justices vote illegally?". Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. 16: 375.

44. ^ Foster, Steven (2006). The Judiciary, Civil Liberties and Human Rights. Edinburgh University Press. p. 80. ISBN 0-7486-2262-4.

45. ^ Lund, Nelson (2009). "Bush v. Gore at the Dawning of the Age of Obama" (PDF). Florida Law Review. 61: 1001-1010.

46. Fessenden, Ford. ^ "Ballots Cast by Blacks and Older Voters Were Tossed in Far Greater Numbers", The New York Times (November 12, 2001).

47. ^ "Why Roberts did it". Chicago Tribune. July 2, 2012. Archived from the original on July 3, 2019.

48. ^ Balkin, Jack M. (June 2001). "Bush v. Gore and the Boundary Between Law and Politics". Yale Law Journal. 110 (8): 1407-1458. doi:10.2307/797581. JSTOR 797581.

49. ^ "The legacy of Bush v. Gore". The Week. December 9, 2010.

50. "Bush v. Gore, On Application for Stay" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on November 14, 2016.

51. Fried, Charles. ^ "An Unreasonable Reaction to a Reasonable Decision" in Bush V. Gore: The Question of Legitimacy, page 12 (Yale University Press, Bruce Ackerman ed. 2002): "The outrage against the stay by 673 law professors is, to say the least, overwrought. If the decision on the merits was justified, the stay becomes irrelevant. Yes, it did shut down the counting three and a half days earlier, but by hypothesis that counting was being done in an unconstitutional way."

52. Tribe, Laurence H., "The Unbearable Wrongness of Bush v. Gore". George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 03-33; Harvard Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 72. Available at SSRN: ^ https://ssrn.com/abstract=431080

53. ^ The dissent by Justice Stevens in Bush v. Gore stated, "What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

54. ^ Glanton, Dahleen (April 27, 2013). "O'Connor questions court's decision to take Bush v. Gore". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on May 4, 2013.

Works related to Bush v. Gore at Wikisource

Text of Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000) is available from:Cornell Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)

After Bush v. Gore by Retro Report

Tony Sutin: Presidential Election Law

Peter Berkowitz & Benjamin Wittes: "The Lawfulness of the Election Decision"

Bugliosi, Vincent (January 18, 2001). "None Dare Call It Treason". The Nation.

Adam Cohen: "Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named?", Editorial Observer, The New York Times, August 15, 2006.

Text and audio of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments - Bush v. Gore

Video highlight of Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Wells opening Gore v. Harris argument on November 20, 2000

Video highlights of November 20, 2000, and December 7, 2000, oral arguments in Gore v. Harris in front of Florida Supreme Court

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Bush v. Gore Full case name George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr. and Joseph Lieberman, et al. Docket no. 00-949 Citations 531 U.S. 98 (more ) 121 S. Ct. 525; 148 L. Ed. 2d 388; 2000 U.S. LEXIS 8430; 69 U.S.L.W. 4029; 2000 Cal. Daily Op.

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a global military and political campaign initiated by the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, aimed at combating terrorism and its sponsors around the world.

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-- President George W. Bush, October 11, 2001

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush announced a comprehensive plan to seek out and stop terrorists around the world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were part of the Global War on Terror, or "GWOT," but the term was also used to describe diplomatic, financial, and other actions taken to deny financing or safe harbor to terrorists. Coalition partners from around the world also participated in the GWOT.

On March 11, 2006 an Iraqi Army Soldier gives a local Iraqi boy a new Iraqi national flag and a new school backpack, while handing out anti-terrorist leaflets and information in the city of Taji during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM in support of the Global War on Terrorism. (6671173)

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban stop harboring members of al-Qaeda, and warned that the GWOT would not end until terrorism was eradicated.

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

-- President George W. Bush, September 20, 2001

On September 24, 2001, the President announced that he had signed an executive order to freeze the assets of terrorist groups and other entities that funded terrorist activity. This was the beginning of efforts to deny financing to terrorists and terrorist groups.

And, by the way, this list is just a beginning. We will continue to add more names to the list. We will freeze the assets of others as we find that they aid and abet terrorist organizations around the world. We've established a foreign terrorist asset tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.

-- President George W. Bush, September 24, 2001

Select speech cards used by President George W. Bush to announce the invasion of Afghanistan, October 7, 2001. From the White House Treaty Room, the President informed the nation that military action - Operation Enduring Freedom - would remove the Taliban regime and eliminate al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

On October 7, 2001, the President announced that the United States had begun military action in Afghanistan. The initial strikes were against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and Taliban military installations. In addition to military action, the United States and Coalition allies would provide humanitarian aid to the citizens of Afghanistan.

At the same time, the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we'll also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith. The United States of America is an enemy of those who aid terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name.

-- President George W. Bush, October 7, 2001

Once the GWOT had begun, the United States used a military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a detention facility for terrorists. In early 2002, the White House released a fact sheet on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees were to be tried under military commissions. These commissions were struck down by the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, after which the United States Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

President George W. Bush addresses the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, September 23, 2002.

In 2002 and early 2003, the United States began exerting pressure on Iraq to follow through on its commitments to improve human rights, release prisoners, break ties with terrorists, and destroy weapons of mass destruction. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell each addressed the United Nations regarding the dangers of Saddam Hussein's regime and its refusal to disarm.

On March 19, 2003, the efforts culminated in military operations to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Although combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended, other aspects of the Global War on Terror - such as efforts to prevent the financing of terrorism - continue to this day.

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On January 4, 2006, President George W. Bush makes remarks on the global war on terror to an audience at the Pentagon, following a Department of Defense briefing with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Admiral Ed Giambastiani, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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a U.S. law passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, granting expanded surveillance and law enforcement powers to the government in the name of national security and counterterrorism efforts.

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Delayed Notice Search Warrants: A Vital and Time-Honored Tool for Fighting Crime

Field Report on the PATRIOT Act

The Department of Justice's first priority is to prevent future terrorist attacks. Since its passage following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Patriot Act has played a key part - and often the leading role - in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life. While the results have been important, in passing the Patriot Act, Congress provided for only modest, incremental changes in the law. Congress simply took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to preserve the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges posed by a global terrorist network.

The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life and Liberty
(Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)

Congress enacted the Patriot Act by overwhelming, bipartisan margins, arming law enforcement with new tools to detect and prevent terrorism: The USA Patriot Act was passed nearly unanimously by the Senate 98-1, and 357-66 in the House, with the support of members from across the political spectrum.

The Act Improves Our Counter-Terrorism Efforts in Several Significant Ways:

1. The Patriot Act allows investigators to use the tools that were already available to investigate organized crime and drug trafficking. Many of the tools the Act provides to law enforcement to fight terrorism have been used for decades to fight organized crime and drug dealers, and have been reviewed and approved by the courts. As Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) explained during the floor debate about the Act, "the FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What's good for the mob should be good for terrorists." (Cong. Rec., 10/25/01)

Allows law enforcement to use surveillance against more crimes of terror.Before the Patriot Act, courts could permit law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance to investigate many ordinary, non-terrorism crimes, such as drug crimes, mail fraud, and passport fraud. Agents also could obtain wiretaps to investigate some, but not all, of the crimes that terrorists often commit. The Act enabled investigators to gather information when looking into the full range of terrorism-related crimes, including: chemical-weapons offenses, the use of weapons of mass destruction, killing Americans abroad, and terrorism financing.

Allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trained to evade detection. For years, law enforcement has been able to use "roving wiretaps" to investigate ordinary crimes, including drug offenses and racketeering. A roving wiretap can be authorized by a federal judge to apply to a particular suspect, rather than a particular phone or communications device. Because international terrorists are sophisticated and trained to thwart surveillance by rapidly changing locations and communication devices such as cell phones, the Act authorized agents to seek court permission to use the same techniques in national security investigations to track terrorists.

Allows federal agents to ask a court for an order to obtain business records in national security terrorism cases. Examining business records often provides the key that investigators are looking for to solve a wide range of crimes. Investigators might seek select records from hardware stores or chemical plants, for example, to find out who bought materials to make a bomb, or bank records to see who's sending money to terrorists. Law enforcement authorities have always been able to obtain business records in criminal cases through grand jury subpoenas, and continue to do so in national security cases where appropriate. These records were sought in criminal cases such as the investigation of the Zodiac gunman, where police suspected the gunman was inspired by a Scottish occult poet, and wanted to learn who had checked the poet's books out of the library. In national security cases where use of the grand jury process was not appropriate, investigators previously had limited tools at their disposal to obtain certain business records. Under the Patriot Act, the government can now ask a federal court (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), if needed to aid an investigation, to order production of the same type of records available through grand jury subpoenas. This federal court, however, can issue these orders only after the government demonstrates the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a U.S. person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a U.S. person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment.

2. The Patriot Act facilitated information sharing and cooperation among government agencies so that they can better "connect the dots." The Act removed the major legal barriers that prevented the law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense communities from talking and coordinating their work to protect the American people and our national security. The government's prevention efforts should not be restricted by boxes on an organizational chart. Now police officers, FBI agents, federal prosecutors and intelligence officials can protect our communities by "connecting the dots" to uncover terrorist plots before they are completed. As Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) said about the Patriot Act, "we simply cannot prevail in the battle against terrorism if the right hand of our government has no idea what the left hand is doing" (Press release, 10/26/01)

Prosecutors and investigators used information shared pursuant to section 218 in investigating the defendants in the so-called "Virginia Jihad" case. This prosecution involved members of the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center, who trained for jihad in Northern Virginia by participating in paintball and paramilitary training, including eight individuals who traveled to terrorist training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001. These individuals are associates of a violent Islamic extremist group known as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), which operates in Pakistan and Kashmir, and that has ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. As the result of an investigation that included the use of information obtained through FISA, prosecutors were able to bring charges against these individuals. Six of the defendants have pleaded guilty, and three were convicted in March 2004 of charges including conspiracy to levy war against the United States and conspiracy to provide material support to the Taliban. These nine defendants received sentences ranging from a prison term of four years to life imprisonment.

3. The Patriot Act updated the law to reflect new technologies and new threats. The Act brought the law up to date with current technology, so we no longer have to fight a digital-age battle with antique weapons-legal authorities leftover from the era of rotary telephones. When investigating the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, for example, law enforcement used one of the Act's new authorities to use high-tech means to identify and locate some of the killers.

Allows victims of computer hacking to request law enforcement assistance in monitoring the "trespassers" on their computers. This change made the law technology-neutral; it placed electronic trespassers on the same footing as physical trespassers. Now, hacking victims can seek law enforcement assistance to combat hackers, just as burglary victims have been able to invite officers into their homes to catch burglars.

4. The Patriot Act increased the penalties for those who commit terrorist crimes. Americans are threatened as much by the terrorist who pays for a bomb as by the one who pushes the button. That's why the Patriot Act imposed tough new penalties on those who commit and support terrorist operations, both at home and abroad. In particular, the Act:

Eliminates the statutes of limitations for certain terrorism crimes and lengthens them for other terrorist crimes.

The government's success in preventing another catastrophic attack on the American homeland since September 11, 2001, would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, without the USA Patriot Act. The authorities Congress provided have substantially enhanced our ability to prevent, investigate, and prosecute acts of terror.

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