John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time (18:30 UTC) on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.[1][2] Kennedy was fatally shot by a sniper while traveling with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie, in a presidential motorcade. A ten-month investigation from November 1963 to September 1964 by the Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, and that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald before he could stand trial.

In 1964, the Warren Commission submitted the unpublished portion of the assassination records to the National Archives, where it was to be sealed and locked away until 2039 (75 years later). This was to serve as protection for innocent persons who might be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case. However, due to the popularity of Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, and because of the public outcry, it led to the passage of The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. This Act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The Act also requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full, and be available in the collection no later than 25 years after the date of enactment. From 1994 to 1998, almost all of all Warren Commission documents had been released to the public. The resulting collection consists of more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures and artifacts. By 2017, all existing assassination-related documents will be made public.