Police held as chief suspect Lee Oswald, said to be a self-styled Communist who once renounced his US citizenship and unsuccessfully sought to become a Russian citizen. The chairman of a "Fair Play for Cuba" committee, he was arrested in a cinema after a policeman had been killed.

The new President is the Vice-President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a 55-year-old native Texan, who took the oath of office in Dallas at five minutes to four at the hands of a woman judge and later arrived in Washington with the body of the dead President.

This is being written in the numbed interval between the first shock and the harried attempt to reconstruct a sequence of fact from an hour of tumult. However, this was the first assassination of a world figure that took place in the age of television, and every network and station in the country took up the plotting of the appalling story. It begins to form a grisly pattern, contradicted by a grisly preface: the projection on television screens of a happy crowd and a grinning President only a few seconds before the gunshots.

The President was almost at the end of his two-day tour of Texas. He was to make a luncheon speech in the Dallas Trade Mart building and his motor procession had about another mile to go. He had the warmest welcome of his trip from a great crowd at the airport.

The cries and pleas for a personal touch were so engaging that Mrs Kennedy took the lead and walked from the ramp of the presidential plane to a fence that held the crowd in. She was followed quickly by the President and they both seized hands and forearms and smiled broadly at the people.

Muffled shots

The Secret Service and the police were relieved to get them into their car, where Mrs Kennedy sat between the President and John B. Connally, the Governor of Texas. The Dallas police had instituted the most stringent security precautions in the city's history: they wanted no repetition of the small but disgraceful brawl that humiliated Adlai Stevenson in their city when he attended a United Nations rally on October 24.

The motorcade was going along slowly but smoothly when three muffled shots, which the crowd first mistook for fireworks, cracked through the cheers. One hit the shoulder blade and the wrist of Governor Connally who was taken with the President to the hospital, where his condition is serious.

The other brought blood trickling from the temple of the sitting President. His right arm flopped from a high wave of greeting and he collapsed into the arms of Mrs Kennedy, who fell unharmed. She was heard to cry "Oh no" and sat there all the way cradling his head in her lap.

The President was taken to the emergency room of the Parkland Hospital and Governor Connally was taken into the surgery. Mrs Kennedy went in with the living President and less than hour later came out with the dead man in a bronze coffin, which arrived shortly after two priests had administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church.

The body was escorted by Generals Clifton and McHugh, the President's chief military and air force Aides, to the Dallas Airport and flown thence to Washington.

Within an hour of the President's death, the Secret Service had found a sniper's nest inside the building from which the first witnesses swore the bullets had been fired. It is a warehouse for a school text book firm, know as the Texas School Depository, on the corner of Elm and Houston Streets.

In an upper room, whose open window commanded the route of the Presidential motorcade, the Servicemen found the remains of a fried chicken and a British .303 rifle with a telescopic sight. Alongside it lay three empty cartridges. Later, the police said they had also discovered a German Mauser gun.

Plane turns back

The chief White House press secretary, Mr Pierre Salinger, was in a plane with four Cabinet members on a goodwill trip to Japan. The plane turned around in mid-Pacific and headed back to Hawaii and then on to Washington.

In the Senate, it so happened that the President's brother, Edward Kennedy, a freshman Senator from Massachusetts, was presiding when the chief Democratic whip, Senator Mike Mansfield, went to the rostrum and told him the news. The Senator put down his gavel and went from the chamber.

At the United Nations, the General Assembly was called into plenary session and the Secretary-General, U Thant, simply said that it was his solemn duty to express for all of them "the most profound sorrow at this tragic event and to convey our condolences to the family and to the Government and people of the United States."

Mr Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, and other Cabinet officials were on the way to Japan. Their plane turned back. President Kennedy's brother, the Attorney-General, Mr Robert Kennedy, was in Washington. Within an hour he and his younger brother, Edward, a Massachusetts Senator, were driven to Andrews Air Force base for a flight to Dallas.