His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a humiliating experience.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime. His first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. President Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House. But in the eyes of the world, this reticent man became a charismatic leader who, in his life and in his death, served as a symbol of purpose and hope. The contradictory realities of Kennedy’s life don’t match his global reputation. Visitors from all over the world have signed their names in the memory books, and many have written tributes: “Our greatest President.” “Oh how we miss him!” “The greatest man since Jesus Christ.” At least as many visitors write about the possible conspiracies that led to JFK’s assassination. The windows are cluttered once again with cardboard boxes, just as they had been on that sunny afternoon when Oswald hid there.

The museum itself is an oddity because of its physical connection to the event it illuminates the most memorable-and eeriest-moment of a visit to the sixth floor is when you turn a corner and face the window through which Oswald fired his rifle as Kennedy’s open car snaked through Dealey Plaza’s broad spaces below.

Every year, nearly 350,000 people visit the place where Lee Harvey Oswald waited on November 22, 1963, to shoot at the president’s motorcade. Kennedy, perhaps the most striking is the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, in the building that was once the Texas School Book Depository.

Kennedy courage book