At 12:30 P.M., the assassin aimed his high-powered rifle from the sixth floor of a building in downtown Dallas and pressed the trigger. The bullet traveled downward. John F. Kennedy fell, mortally wounded …

A real-life story with the suspense and drama of Seven Days in May.

When a high-velocity bullet dealt John F. Kennedy the fatal blow, it was the eighth time an assassin had struck at our Presidents … Here is the astonishing story of these incredible murderers.

This is the book that changed a President’s mind about his personal safety.

Assassination in America adds a crucial historical dimension to our understanding of events which, while not exclusively an American phenomenon, have strongly influence the shaping of our national soul.

James McKinley vividly recreates the background and the drama surrounding the murders and attempted killings of twelve important national figures from President Lincoln to President Ford. No assassination was uncomplicated, and yet the book’s remarkable achievement is to examine the complex circumstances surrounding each murder and to draw parallels between them. Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, Schrank, Zangara, Weiss, Oswald, Ray, Sirhan and Bremer are names not nearly so well known as those of their victims. But they have lock-stepped through our history with guns and scarred psyches, with real ills and imagined causes that became excuses to kill. The strategies involved in planning the actual killings, the assassins’ personalities, the background issues of war, depression or racial hatred faced by the leaders themselves, and the nation’s often vicious reactions, shaped by fear and anger, are all reconstructed here in a provocative and challenging account.

McKinley admits, “A melancholy fact motivates this book: that of all living Americans only those born after 1975 have escaped the scarifying impact of politics by assassination. Singly and collectively, almost all of us have shivered in those dark winds … The course of politics in America was mightily affected by assassins.”

Jack Kennedy had it all. And he used it—his father’s fortune, and his own beauty, wit, and power—with a heedless, reckless daring. There was no tomorrow, and there was no secret that money and charm could not hide.

In this groundbreaking book, award-winning investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh shows us a John F. Kennedy we have never seen before, a man insulated from the normal consequences of behavior long before he entered the White House. His father, Joe, set the pattern with an arrogance and cunning that have never been fully appreciated: Kennedys could do exactly what they wanted, and could evade any charge brought against them. Kennedys wrote their own moral code.

And Kennedys trusted only Kennedys. Jack appointed his brother Bobby keeper of the secrets—the family debt to organized crime, the real state of Jack’s health, the sources of his election victories, the plots to murder foreign leaders, and the president’s intentions in Vietnam. As Jack’s closest confident and chief enforcer, Bobby attacked any potential family enemy with a savagery he was supposed to reserve for the criminals he was sworn to prosecute—the very criminal his father had enlisted.

The brothers prided themselves on another trait inherited from their father—a voracious appetite for women—and indulged it with a daily abandon deeply disturbing to the Secret Service agents who witnessed it. These men speak for the first time about their amazement at what they saw and the powerlessness they felt to protect the leader of their country.

By the end of his life, Jack Kennedy’s private recklessness was beginning to edge into his public life, putting him—and his nation—at risk. Now Seymour Hersh tells us the real story of a crisis-driven president who maintained a facade of cool toughness while negotiating private compromises unknown to even his closest advisors.

Experience the Four Days in November that Stunned a Nation

On November 22, 1963, one of the most shocking events in history jolted a nation and signaled the end of an era. President Kennedy Has Been Shot tells the minute-by-minute story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the dranatic days that followed.

Brought to you by the Newseum, the world's first interactive museum of news, President Kennedy Has Been Shot recounts those four days in November, including:

• President Kennedy’s assassination and the confusion that followed
• Lee Harvey Oswald’s captive, arrest and murder
• The moving presidential procession and funeral

This book and accompanying audio CD bring you the events as they happened, featuring:

• Remarkable eyewitness accounts of the reporters, photographers and White House staffers who were there
• Stunning and sward-winning photos of the tragedy and a nation in grief
• The actual broadcasts that told America the news, plus rarely heard Dallas police-radio transmission, White House communications and more

President Kennedy Has Been Shot takes you inside one of the country’s defining and most debated moments. Now you can read and listen to the story as it unfolded, filling in parts of the story you may have never heard and re-creating the story for generations to come.

This is the Story of the Death of a President…

Hear the actual broadcasts that shocked a nation and read the story from the vantage of the men and women who chased it down. Experience again, or for the first time, the minute-by-minute story of one of the most important events in American history.

Hear…

• The actual broadcasts of the earliest reports of the shooting
• An emotional Walter Cronkite announce the tragic news
• Chilling Dallas police-radio transmissions calling all units to the scene of the assassination
• Dramatic communication between the White House and Air Force One as it races toward Washington with newly sworn-in President Johnson
• Rarely heard phone calls from Johnson to Kennedy family members and government and civic leaders during his first moments in office
• The incredible live broadcast of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder

“November 22, 1963—chaos, confusion and tragedy in Dallas. Yet these journalists were able to get it right—with clarity, intensity and the upmost professionalism.”
—Tim Russert, NBC News