OPC members recall their work 50 years earlier covering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
When Kennedy died, Roy Rowan was having lunch in New York with his boss Henry Luce, the creator of the Time-Life magazine empire and its editor-in-chief. Rowan, who at the time was assistant managing editor of Life in charge of international news, was ordered to fly to the printing plant in Chicago and remake the magazine. It was Friday. Before the presses stopped, a few million copies were printed featuring Navy quarterback Roger Staubach and the upcoming Army-Navy game.
“We tore up the magazine, not knowing we would get the Zapruder film,” Rowan told The Courant in Hartford. Editors and production staff scrambled, with no time for color photos. Life was on the newsstands by Monday with the iconic black-and-white Zapruder images secured by Richard Stolley.
“Dick did a marvelous job of talking to Mr. Zapruder — in not being aggressive and not being belligerent, and so Zapruder sold him the film,” Rowan said.
Dan Rather was Southwest bureau chief in Dallas for CBS News but the job of reporting Kennedy’s visit fell to the late Bob Pierpont, the White House correspondent. Rather, a Texan native, had the role of handling logistics during Kennedy’s swing through Texas but he became the first to report the death of the president.
Rather said he was positioned just past where the motorcade was supposed to end, waiting for a cameraman to throw him film to be processed and used on CBS that night. “I didn’t hear any shots,” he told Marvin Kalb this November 22 in a conversation at the National Press Club. “I didn’t know what had happened. All I knew is that I thought I had seen the presidential limousine go by in just a nanosecond. Was that the presidential limousine? Was that the First Lady? What is this?”
He went to the nearby CBS affiliate and after hearing what happened, his instincts as a former police reporter kicked in. When there’s a shooting, call the hospital. The first time the switchboard hung up. The next time he was put through to a priest and a doctor who both said the president was dead. Meanwhile, the local CBS News director had the same information from a high-ranking hospital official. Rather gave the news on an open line to CBS Radio. The death was confirmed 15 minutes later.
Kalb asked Rather how he thought reporting from the assassination held up from a historical perspective.
“Was it done perfectly? Absolutely not. Were mistakes made? Of course they were,” Rather responded. “But taking into full account the four dark days, Friday when the president was assassinated, Saturday when his alleged assassin was being questioned, and Sunday, when still incredibly, the assassin was assassinated while in the hands of the police, and then Monday, when the First Lady orchestrated and planned an absolutely beautiful funeral in Washington that pulled the country together, I think journalism, on the first draft, did a better job than it often does on cataclysmic breaking news stories.”
On November 22, 1963, Seymour Topping was at The New York Times. It was a rare visit for that time in his career. He was traveling from Moscow, where he had been chief correspondent, en route to be the chief correspondent in Southeast Asia. Last month after receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Silurians, Topping told the group that moments after Tom Wicker flashed the news “it was discovered, inexplicably, that there was no advance obit for the young president.” Homer Bigart, a renowned war correspondent, and Topping were assigned the task. By 6:30 p.m., four and a half hours after the death was announced, they had written an obituary that filled a page of The Times.
Topping, who had met Kennedy in Saigon in 1951, said he spent a sleepless night at the Astor Hotel. “I wept for Kennedy. I wept for my country,” he said. “And I wondered what Kennedy would have done about Vietnam if he had lived.”
Jim Lehrer was a young reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald assigned that day to cover the president’s arrival and departure from Love Field. He saw Kennedy break protocol when he arrived by going to a fence to shake hands. Lehrer was supposed to stay at the airport until the president returned but after hearing the news and calling his office, he was told to go to the nearby hospital. He said he arrived just as it was announced that Kennedy was dead. He then was told that there was an arrest and he needed to get to the police office. He was able to go up to Lee Harvey Oswald when he arrived and asked: “Did you kill the president?” Oswald replied: “I didn’t kill anybody.” Lehrer said, “I wrote that down.” He said he still had the notebook.
The Times-Herald published new editions every hour. Lehrer said he is still pained that he, without checking further, called in a tip that an FBI agent told him a Secret Service agent had been killed along with Kennedy. The information was wrong. “In today’s world, that would have gone out like that,” he told The Daily Beast. The account was spiked by a reporter on rewrite who called the hospital and told Lehrer: “I saved your ass and your job.”
He stayed at the police station and was there when Oswald was brought into a late-night news conference. Lehrer realized later that during the conference he was standing near Jack Ruby. Lehrer’s had a federal government beat at the Times-Herald and spent the next six months “doing nothing but assassination stories.”
Lehrer’s novel about the assassination is previewed here.