Hear JFK's last two speeches, Fort Worth, November 22, 1963, restored

Kennedy walked out of the Hotel Texas into a light drizzle and spoke to a crowd waiting in the parking lot across the street. Then he went back inside and spoke at the breakfast in the ballroom, before the short flight to Dallas. White House recordings of both speeches survive at the JFK Library. The rally was recorded in the open air, with the crowd around him.

The full 13-minute breakfast recording and the 3 minute 33 second rally recording, with its announcer's introduction, are at the JFK Library (our rally clip runs 3:17 and stops where the speech ends).

Each pair is matched for loudness, so neither file wins by being louder. More than the noise changes. The tone does: measured at the same loudness, the restored breakfast opening carries about 7 dB more energy above 2 kHz than the original, and the rally is brighter by less. That reading alone doesn't say the voice is wrong. Separately, a trained listener told us the restored Kennedy sounds different in character, which is the question that matters, so listen to both. These files contain speech only: the cheers and the open-air noise are gone with the rest of the background. In the Diffio app the background comes back as its own track, with a slider to mix it in. For this page we used the speech alone.

The published text of the rally is at UC Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project.

He jokes about his wife: "Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it." He praises the city's B-58 bomber and its coming TFX fighter, and says that next month the United States will fire "the largest booster in the history of the world." He closes: "Here in this rain, in Fort Worth, in Texas, in the United States, we're going forward."

Twelve seconds of the rally, original above and restored below. Time runs left to right, pitch rises from bottom to top, and brighter means louder. In the original, crowd and open-air noise fill the gaps between his phrases; after restoration those gaps go dark.

Then he joked about who drew the crowds on the trip. Two years earlier in Paris, he said, he had introduced himself "by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I'm getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas."

Please use the credit line above when you publish the restored audio.

The same kind of restoration works on recordings closer to home: a grandfather's cassette, a reel of a town meeting, an oral history taped in a noisy hall. You can hear the result on three free uploads at diffio.ai; downloads need a paid plan.