The JFK assassination.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Here it had all happened. The world's most powerful man, the youngest U.S. president ever elected with a beautiful woman by his side, shot dead in full view -- the third US president to die by an assassin's bullet. Twenty-seven years before, right on this street, a car full of people was ambushed by a killer or killers. Here, rolling down Elm Street at ten or twelve miles an hour, comes the presidential car SS100X , the black, stretch Lincoln Continental limousine, twenty-one feet long, over three tons in weight. I could see Secret Service Agent Clinton J. Hill leaping in desperation for the back of the open car; Mrs. Kennedy leaning over towards him --reaching out in a futile gesture to recover part of her husband's head, blown away by a bullet. It would lie in the street until the next day when it was recovered by a medical student, Billy Harper, and handed in to the authorities.

People everywhere, screaming and shouting, throwing themselves down onto the grass to avoid the fields of fire. And up on a four-foot-high concrete block to the right of the John Neely Bryan Pergola steps, Abraham Zapruder, hefting a 8mm Bell