I Heard JFK's Death Shots: A Reporter's Look Back At President John F. Kennedy's 1963 Assassination After 50 Years Read online



  I Heard

  JFK’s

  Death Shots

  A Reporter’s 2013 Look Back at President

  John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Assassination

  By Joseph H. Carter Sr.

  Fifty turbulent years following the crime

  A Reporter’s 2013 Look Back at President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Assassination

  I Heard

  JFK’s

  Death Shots

  A Reporter’s 2013 Look Back at President

  John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Assassination

  By Joseph H. Carter Sr.

  Copyright © 2013 by Joseph H. Carter Sr.

  Oklahoma, Texas, Washington D. C., and Florida

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  ISBN: 9781301055111

  Editor: Michelle K Lefebvre-Carter

  E-mail address: [email protected]

  A Perspective and Recollection 50 Years Later.

  A chronicle of the sounds, views and news reporting by a United Press International correspondent aboard the media bus November 22, 1963 at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

  Heard were three shots squeezed off by 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Killed was 46-year-old John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America.

  Reporting that Malcolm Kilduff, acting White House press secretary, announced the death of a President.

  Watching blood-soaked Jackie Kennedy follow the bronze coffin to a hearse at Parkland Hospital.

  Relaying to Jack Fallon, UPI news editor, the rendered account of the inauguration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson at Love Field in Dallas with a purloined dime.

  Stories on the wires of United Press International largely were under the by-line of Merriman Smith, dean of the White House Press Corps and UPI’s lead correspondent, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the day’s work. Carter was Smith’s back-up reporter.

  The personalized invitation to Joseph H. Carter Sr., also known as Joe Carter, for the luncheon where President John F. Kennedy had been scheduled fifty years ago to speak at Dallas, Texas. Moments before the entourage reached the Dallas Trade Mart, the three fatal shots were fired from a window in the School Book Depository. At that time, the press bus with Carter aboard was slowly performing a hard left turn directly below the sixth floor where Lee Harvey Oswald was perched. The shots rang out slowly over a seemingly eternal 6.2 seconds that changed America and impacted humanity.

  An ear-witness reflection by a newsman fifty years after Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots in Dallas, Texas and killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Thirty Fifth President of the United States of America.

  Joseph H. Carter Sr.

  Sounds of JFK’s Death Shots

  Fifty Years Following November 22, 1963

  Three rhythmic rifle shots shocked my ears, quickened my instincts and decidedly changed America that sunny afternoon of 1963. The sound and fury still echo in my memory and sends a cold message into tomorrow warning that some malodorous attitudes still are cocking guns.

  Squeezing the trigger with well-trained rhythm, the weapon was fired by a deranged and dishonored ex-Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald. The bullets hit a charismatic, promising president: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  At 12:30 p.m. November 22, 1963, in 6.2 seconds of meticulous trigger squeezing, the thirty-fifth chief executive of the United States of America was killed. Murdered. Assassinated.

  Like the inexplicable rancor, selfishness and pure hatred that obviously stirred in Oswald, large numbers of humans still have not learned the lessons of these passages in history.

  The fateful day of Oswald’s actions opened with welcomed rain for parched Texas. As President Kennedy moved from Fort Worth to Dallas, clouds had parted and the sun was shining by the appointed hour of tragedy.

  In downtown Dallas, from a sixth floor window of a ratty book depository building, Lee Harvey Oswald zeroed his rifle on John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  While Oswald had been drummed out of the Marine Corps as a misfit, the discharge occurred after he earned sharpshooter prowess with a rifle at government expense.

  With time and as information unfolded, I realized that in my own Army infantry training, I had scored the same basic sharpshooter rating as the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Twenty one years earlier, at Camp Roberts, California in 1952, as we stood erect but “at ease” on the mile-long asphaltic parade ground, I heard a one-star general proclaim:

  “Now you are a trained killer!”

  Over a loud speaker system, this also was heard by a scores of young American infantrymen who by and large were draftees forced into military service. I had volunteered.

  “Remember this,” the general intoned, “trigger squeeze is a tightening of the forefinger when sights are properly aligned so that I will not know when the rifle will fire.”

  That rudimentary lesson, I since have been told, traditionally is pounded into the ears of riflemen in training worldwide. In other words, don’t “pull” the trigger, squeeze it gently and let death fly.

  The reality often struck me that such long distance killing with a rifle was more impersonal than standing eyeball-to-eyeball with a victim and plunging a bayonet or knife into their life stream. Mankind’s inventions are wondrous. Guns make killing more distant along with erasing the specter of being splattered with blood.

  Other realities about American priorities and support of military since have struck me. The obvious is the Pentagon budget that far exceeds any other Nation’s.

  Next, although the United States lacks a federally supported college dedicated to teaching diplomacy, taxpayers pay all costs of top-funded universities for Army, Navy, and Air Force and Coast Guard officers. These military students—even football players—draw salaries at West Point, Annapolis and the Air Academy. Football players get scholarships—no salaries—at most competing schools.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was more lowly considered than a cadet or midshipman. Oswald was a simple Marine Corps volunteer. But Oswald was one who failed to meet standards of enlisted men and ultimately was discharged dishonorably. He was troubled in other major areas of his mind, his life and his thinking. Lee Harvey Oswald suffered an ugly upbringing by a decidedly unstable Mom.

  Nonetheless, the importance of trigger squeeze obviously had been learned well by Oswald as the President’s open-top limousine gunned onto Stemmons Freeway that Friday afternoon.

  A half century later, my brain harbors vividly the gunfire sounds of those 6-or-so seconds. Time and its passage continue to tell me that almost everything went topsy-turvy at 12:30 p.m., Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963.

  At that exact moment, the press bus where I sat as a reporter was exe
cuting a hard left turn at Dealey Plaza closely following Kennedy’s open top limousine.

  By physical measurement, my bus was directly below the School Book Depository window where Oswald cunningly had lodged his rifle and coldly had begun squeezing the trigger. My fellow news folk on that bus and I were decidedly closer to Oswald than was his target: President Kennedy.

  As a trained infantryman who had grown up in Red Fork, Oklahoma where guns boomed often, I instantly knew that I had heard shots fired by a weapon. Clearly: “bang, bang, bang.” Just like that! Measured trigger squeezes by an experienced rifleman.

  “Stop the bus,” I bolted from my seat. A White House staffer blocked my exit. Before his death and over the years when I encountered Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Sun-Times, he would recall my instant reaction with a touch of what I considered to be admiration, Lisagor opined that I should have been allowed to alight. Few of the reporters on the press bus seemingly were not as ear-tuned to gun fire. After all, this was my town in gun-slinging Texas and most of my colleagues lived in the East.

  The sound of gunshots sent people in the roadside crowd diving for cover that did not exist and they did not need. Rifle bullets are deadly only within their trajectory. Nonetheless, mothers fell to the ground to shield their kids. Sensibly, the motorcade, including my bus, surged ahead moving as fast as possible.

  In the blur, I witnessed a helmet-wearing motorcycle cop slam down his bike and romp up a hillside that I soon would describe to the United Press International