Life magazine was preparing an issue documenting the corruption of Lyndon Johnson with information supplied by Attorney General Robert Kennedy when the President was gunned down in Dealey Plaza.

Local Live magazine freelancer Patsy Swank called magazine editor Richard Solley and told him about the film shot by Abraham Zapruder. Solley was there by evening and made the deal for Henry Luce and Life Magazine.

The issue theme quickly shifted from exposing Johnson's corruption to graphic images of the assassination in Dallas. Almost everyone saw what happened to the young president. Then, since Life owned all rights to the film, it was locked away out of public site.

That is where it stayed until Jim Garrison began looking into the activities of Clay Shaw. He had to subpoena the film to use as evidence. The magazine fought the request but Garrison prevailed. From that time several bootleg copies have found their way out for all to see.

LIFE The Day Kennedy Died: Remembering the Man and the Moment (Life Books)

Fifty years ago on November 22, 1963, in Dallas's Dealey Plaza, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline. LIFE magazine, the weekly pictorial chronicle of events in America and throughout the world, was quickly on the scene. The Kennedys had been our story: Jack and Jackie made the cover in his sailboat before they were married and he was a fresh-faced senator from Massachusetts, and the White House doors had remained open to LIFE throughout his presidency: Cecil Stoughton's photographs of Caroline and John-John in the Oval Office, Jackie's tour of the renovation, tense behind-the-scenes moments during 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis — all of this appeared in LIFE. We needed to be in Dallas.

The famous Zapruder film first appeared in LIFE, after being acquired by LIFE's Richard B. Stolley. Stolley also interviewed at the time Dallas police, Kennedy administration officials, members of the Oswald family, workers at Jack Ruby's bar. Jackie's first conversation after the murder was with Theodore H. White for LIFE, and in it she told the American people, for the first time, about the Camelot her late husband had imagined.