Zoom in: The longest-married American presidential couple tied the knot in 1946 in their small hometown of Plains, Georgia, after knowing each other almost their whole lives. (In fact, Jimmy Carter’s mother, who was a nurse, helped deliver baby Rosalynn.)

• Carter called marrying Rosalynn “the best thing I ever did.”
• The couple returned to Plains after leaving the White House and remained based there ever since — in the same house they built in 1961.
• A graduate of Georgia Southwestern College and valedictorian of her high school, Rosalynn ran the office of the family’s peanut business.
• She was a full-fledged campaigner throughout her husband’s political life, often traveling solo as they crisscrossed his district when he ran for state senate, then all of Georgia, and later, the country.
• While in the White House, she was known to sit in on cabinet meetings and was the original first lady to set up a policy office in the East Wing.
• The Carters celebrated 75 years of marriage in July 2021 with a party that included 300 guests, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, singer Garth Brooks and civil rights icon Andrew Young.

Immediately after the assassination, leading journalists and political figures insisted that Kennedy was a victim of a “climate of hate” in Dallas and across the nation created by racial bigots, the Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Communist zealots. Such groups had committed acts of violence across the South against blacks and civil rights workers in the months and years leading up to the events in Dallas. Some declared that the same forces must have been behind the murder of Kennedy. They claimed that JFK had been killed because of his support for a civil rights bill. Kennedy family members joined in because they wanted the slain president to be remembered with Abraham Lincoln as a martyr to the cause of racial justice. The repetitive commentary about hatred and bigotry circulated rapidly through the media in the days after the assassination, almost as if coordinated or directed from a high level.

Oswald defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in 1959, vowing that he could no longer live under a capitalist system. He pledged to turn over military secrets to Soviet authorities and may have done so. He returned to the United States with his Russian wife in 1962, disappointed with life under Soviet Communism but not disabused of his Marxist beliefs or his contempt for America. By 1963, Oswald had transferred his political allegiance to Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba. 

In April 1963, Oswald tried to shoot Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general, as Walker sat at a desk in his dining room. (The bullet struck a window frame, and Walker was unhurt.) Walker was the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society and a figure then in the news because of his opposition to school integration, his criticisms of President Kennedy, and his demand that the United States overthrow the Castro regime. The rifle Oswald used in his attack on Walker was the same one he used seven months later to shoot Kennedy. Oswald’s wife was well aware that he had taken a shot at Walker and had reason to think he might try to strike again. Dallas police did not identify Oswald as the assailant in the Walker case until after Kennedy’s assassination.

Oswald’s motives for shooting Kennedy were undoubtedly linked to his desire to interfere with the president’s campaign to overthrow Castro’s government. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had promised to abandon his campaign to overthrow Castro by force. But the war of words between the two governments continued, and so did clandestine plots by the Kennedy administration to assassinate Castro. President Kennedy, along with Robert Kennedy, pressed the CIA to do something to get rid of the Cuban dictator. As late as November 18, less than a week before the assassination, Kennedy called on the Cuban people to throw out the Castro regime.

These undercover plots were obviously known to CIA officials who orchestrated them, but they were not revealed to the Warren Commission during its investigations in 1964. This was classified information, and in any case far too explosive to reveal to the public. (The plots were disclosed in a separate congressional investigation in the 1970s.) Lacking this information, the commission could not piece together a complete picture of Oswald’s purposes in carrying out the assassination, and thus concluded that he had acted on personal (not ideological) motives.

John F. Kennedy’s assassination was an event of the Cold War. There can be little doubt about this in view of Oswald’s activities in the months leading up to it. Nevertheless, America’s liberal leadership interpreted it as an event in the civil rights crusade—an assassination that occurred because President Kennedy stood up for civil rights in opposition to far-right opinion in Dallas and across the South.

This interpretation sowed endless confusion about the motives of the assassin and the meaning of the event. It made no sense to arrest a Communist for the assassination, then blame conservatives and right-wingers for the crime. The vacuum of meaning was filled, however, by a host of conspiracy theories, claiming that JFK was a victim of right-wing plots. It was no wonder that many Americans, after hearing claims about civil rights, hatred, and bigotry in connection with the assassination, decided that Oswald must not have been the assassin after all. That idea pushed the real assassin, along with his motives and far-left ideology, into the background in accounts of the event, and it came close to airbrushing his deed out of the historical record.