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In 1962 Edward Kennedy was elected to the president's former Senate seat in Massachusetts. Their sister Eunice's husband, R. Sargent Shriver, Jr., became director of the Peace Corps. Their sister Jean's husband, Stephen Smith, was preparing to manage the Democratic Party's 1964 presidential campaign. Another sister, Patricia, had married Peter Lawford, an English-born actor who served the family as an unofficial envoy to the entertainment world. All Americans knew who Rose, Jackie, Bobby, and Teddy were, and most could identify Bobby's wife as Ethel and Teddy's wife as Joan. But if the first family had become American royalty, its image of perfection would be tainted years later by allegations of marital infidelity by the president (most notably, an affair with motion picture icon Marilyn Monroe) and of his association with members of organized crime.
 
 
Assassination
 
President Kennedy believed that his Republican opponent in 1964 would be Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. He was convinced that he could bury Goldwater under an avalanche of votes, thus receiving a mandate for major legislative reforms. One obstacle to his plan was a feud in Vice President Johnson's home state of Texas between Governor John B. Connally, Jr., and Senator Ralph Yarborough, both Democrats. To present a show of unity, the president decided to tour the state with both men. On Friday, November 22, 1963, he and Jacqueline Kennedy were in an open limousine riding slowly in a motorcade through downtown Dallas. At 12:30 PM the president was struck by two rifle bullets, one at the base of his neck and one in the head. He was dead upon arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Governor Connally, though also gravely wounded, recovered. Vice President Johnson took the oath as president at 2:38 PM. Lee Harvey Oswald , a 24-year-old Dallas citizen, was accused of the slaying. Two days later Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner with connections to the criminal underworld, in the basement of a Dallas police station. A presidential commission headed by the chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren , later found that neither the sniper nor his killer "was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy," but that Oswald had acted alone. The Warren Commission, however, was not able to convincingly explain all the particular circumstances of Kennedy's murder. In 1979 a special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives declared that although the president had undoubtedly been slain by Oswald, acoustic analysis suggested the presence of a second gunman who had missed. But this declaration did little to squelch the theories that Oswald was part of a conspiracy involving either CIA agents angered over Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs fiasco or members of organized crime seeking revenge for Attorney General Bobby Kennedy's relentless criminal investigations. Kennedy's assassination, the most notorious political murder of the 20th century, remains a source of bafflement, controversy, and speculation.