| Sixty years ago this afternoon, stunned onlookers witnessed the shooting of President John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, in Dallas. Millions more would watch the tragedy on TV. The days that followed, which included the vigilante killing of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, on live TV, were among the strangest in American history. “Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved,” John Updike wrote in The New Yorker. “Only the dream on television was real.” Six decades later, Updike’s words still impart an otherworldly feeling: something “unsearchably significant” has happened; the newly widowed First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, has become “the Queen of Hades,” “the beautiful bride of grief.” The “dream should not be forgotten,” Updike urged, and it hasn’t been. In the ensuing years, The New Yorker has published numerous pieces about the assassination and its aftermath, as well as portraits of the key figures. You’ll find a selection below—plus a profile of the President as a young man, when he was a wartime hero, leading his men while adrift at sea. | 
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