I Heard JFK's Death Shots: A Reporter's Look Back At President John F. Kennedy's 1963 Assassination After 50 Years
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Division desk until 6 a.m. Sunday. After I surrendered responsibilities of the desk to another newsman, I helped with the heavy load of writing, seeking information on the telephone and editing copy. Then I trudged home for needed sleep.
Mid-Sunday morning, I was roused from sleep by my wife who exclaimed: “Somebody shot him!”
“Sure, sure,” I recall saying, “I was there.”
“No,” Beverly shouted from her station in front of our television set, “they shot the guy who shot Kennedy.”
Grabbing a fast breakfast, I then hurled toward the bureau and into the burden of presenting all possible and verified events of those more growingly gruesome November days.
Days sizzled into weeks then months. The work load was staggering for the overnight editor of the United Press International southwest division. The standard wire service guild (union) journeyman wage of $4 an hour was more than merited.
The toughest challenge then became the business of knocking down lies, verifying rumors or checking for truth in all arenas.
Lies were deliberately fabricated and spread in books, magazines and on broadcasts. Fallon was masterful in overseeing the daily chores.
Decades later, like dozens of others, Fallon and I were quoted at length in a book published by Washington D. C.’s Newseum, where I had deposited the original press badges and my other documents related to the JFK assassination. The reflective tome, quoting thirty-three journalists was titled: President Kennedy Has Been Shot.
For days and weeks after those three shots, it was my job to write, to edit and to seek truth during the 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. shifts. I filed hundreds of news stories to serve early morning news casts and to meet deadlines of afternoon newspapers. Fallon often was there to assure stories were fully reported, tersely written and carefully edited.
Over these long nights, in my reflection, the UPI, Associated Press, Reuters and most major newspapers knocked down the falsehoods and continued to point to a never-dying fact: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and crazily in shooting President Kennedy.
Oswald’s rumored conspirators included the Mafia, the Soviets and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Oswald had been booted out of Russia as a misfit . He was interviewed by Aline Mosby of UPI during the time he was in the communist country and had married a local woman who became mother of his two children.
Mosby later said Oswald “struck me as being a rather mixed up young man of not great intellectual capacity or training, and somebody that the Soviet Union wouldn’t certainly be interested in…”
The Mafia had its own cadre of skilled killers who knew how to escape and certainly would not have hailed a cab and shot an innocent cop then sit in a movie theater while making a quick getaway.
Don Bohning’s 2006 book, The Castro Obsession, scoffed at a Cuban link. Veteran Latin America editor for the Miami Herald, Bohning with superb resources told this writer: “Castro had no, repeat zero, involvement in the JFK assassination.”
I often asked: who would conspire with such a loose cannon as Oswald? My answer based on being a crime reporter in several cities-- no thinking or even an unstable person. Oswald just happened to have a job and a mail order rifle and enough Marine Corps training to know how to aim and squeeze the trigger.
Likewise, strip joint operator Jack Ruby killed Oswald impulsively and perhaps out of heathen revenge. Before dying of cancer, Ruby often was interviewed and never could sensibly explain his actions.
The heralded “Warren Commission” led by the Republican chief justice with a bi-partisan membership had staged long hearings, ordered many avenues of governmental investigations and, in the words written by President Johnson “was dispassionate and just.”
That Commission reached the same conclusion that hundreds of investigative reporters working outside of the government continued to reach. Those minute-to-minute, day-to-day reports by the majority of responsible media on the scene November 22 and during those months afterwards concurred with what the Warren Commission published and certified.
Beyond question the free press and Warren Commission both found that a major threshold in history was spelled in those six-odd seconds when Lee Harvey Oswald--acting alone--had gingerly squeezed off three on-target rifle shots. The multiple factors that allowed this 24-year-old man the physical position, the meager resource and the power to execute are beyond easy reckoning. The set-up was reckless.
With the same recklessness, Oswald abandoned his incriminating rifle, raced down six flights of stairs, hailed a cab for a get-away-car, with a small concealed pistol shot Dallas policeman J. D. Tippett and walked zanily toward a movie house and settled into a seat to be captured with only a minor struggle.
A mind muddled by a despicable Mother and a failed life had, in a mirror image of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, changed the World as we knew it.
In this environment, wire services like UPI were loaded with responsibilities and limited budgets. Newspapers and broadcasters demanded great services for low prices. They got bargains. The quality of news reports during this tenuous era have fared superbly within the annals of history and beyond the Warren Commission.
An example of the pressure on the overnight editor at UPI Dallas is best recalled by me when on Christmas Eve, 1963, my colleague Leo Welter had the night off and I worked alone on stories for the morning television and newspaper needs. During the course of that holiday evening just days following the assassination, I wrote individual stories about Christmas expectations in the lives Lee Oswald’s widow Marina and children; his mother, Marguerite Oswald; the widow and children of Policeman J. D. Tippett; Oswald’s jailed murder suspect Jack Ruby, and another major yarn about some machine-gun toting robbers rampaging across Texas.
These five, and perhaps even more, were headlined for the “daily A-Wire budget” that cleared the Dallas bureau for a final editing and were among some 21 “A” wire stories dispatched by the main desk in New York.
While newscasts were demanding and some newspapers had Christmas Day editions, the need for copy was stable. Wire service news coverage runs “twenty-four/seven” all year long.
Numbed by the torment of this passage of history, I unwisely accepted a news job offer in Honolulu, perhaps the slowest news town on earth albeit a most romantic setting. I disliked the newspaper that hired me. The management didn’t like me.
Shortly, I left Hawaii and joined a lively, upstart Oklahoma City daily paper dubbed The Oklahoma Journal. I wrote crime and political news, opinion columns and editorials. I supported the Vietnam War and Johnson Administration.
Over many years, I defended the accuracy of reporting about the assassination but was rebuffed to the point of surrender. The public seemed to prefer the myths, the weird theories and plain lies. It was disheartening and I felt helpless in making my case.
After watching the movie, “JFK,” my seven-year-old nephew asked me “why did LBJ have Kennedy killed?” I trembled. Why did Oliver Stone see fit to produce such a distorting movie? I tremble still.
In February, 1968, I was beckoned by my old friend James R. Jones, a top aide to President Johnson, to join the White House staff as a writer. Soon, Chief of Staff Marvin Watson dispatched me to the Johnson-Humphrey re-election committee to be the White House man on the ground for the Nebraska primary.
While changing planes in Kansas City heading to Omaha, I telephoned a cousin. To Juanita Carter, I explained my mission that Sunday night of March 31. She exploded:
“Did you hear what the President said on television?”
“I was briefed on the message,” I replied.
“Then why are you going to Nebraska?” she said. “The President said he would not seek re-election.”
Since my plane was ready to depart, I scrambled aboard. I was shaken and shaking. I offered the stewardess a $20 bill for a drink. She declined my request because she lacked change. The gentleman in the adjoining seat remarked that “this guy needs a drink. I’ll buy.” That evening, my Omaha colleague Mart
y Hauan and I polished off a bottle of scotch.
Returning to Washington, I was reinstated as a White House staff assistant and enjoyed an interesting year of limited activity as LBJ quietly watched Richard Nixon polish off Hubert Humphrey and dash the heart out of the Great Society.
Tramping around Capitol Hill while Republicans ruled, I became a hand maid to an ingenious Congresswoman named Julia Butler Hansen, a Washington state Democrat who knew both the science and the art of legislation. She taught me much.
Years later, I returned to my native Oklahoma and ultimately became director of the Will Rogers Memorial Commission. “Sunday Morning With Charles Kuralt” dispatched Bernard Birnbaum to Claremore to produce a segment on Will Rogers and my biography on the Oklahoma cowboy-philosopher that was freshly published by Avon.
This had brought a “Sunday Morning” team to Claremore, Oklahoma where I lived. Moments after Oswald fired the shots, director Bernie Birnbaum had rushed from New York to Dallas to produce assassination stories for CBS-tv and especially for ex-UPI newsman Walter Cronkite’s evening broadcasts. Birnbaum discovered Dan Rather for his on-the-scene talent. Perhaps prejudiced because Cronkite and I both had manned the night desk in Kansas City for United Press, I long had felt CBS television coverage of the assassination beat its competition. Birnbaum-Rather-Cronkite were great.
Nearly three