On Nov. 22, 1963, Ray Shurtleff was standing in front of Ford’s Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln had been shot almost 100 years earlier. A student at Northeastern University, Shurtleff had just started his co-op at the National Archives and was taking in Washington, D.C., history during his lunch break. Little did Shurtleff know that he was about to become a part of history himself. When he got back to the archives, the news had just broken that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. ”All the federal employees were released,” Shurtleff said. “I rode on a bus going by the White House and the flags were at half-staff. It went down pretty quickly.”
What followed was a whirlwind journey that took Shurtleff from the archives to the center of one of the most important events in modern U.S. history. At 21 years old, before he had even completed his bachelor’s degree, he became the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission, the government body set up to investigate JFK’s assassination.
