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

lift it from the wheeled cart and set it inside the hearse.”

  Directly behind the casket walked Mrs. John Fitzgerald (Jackie) Kennedy. In the bright sunlight, her pink outfit was visibly awash with her husband’s blood. I could detect no residual brains.

  It was a stark moment. The lady was poised. I wasn’t. I still recall the gasp, the dryness in my throat. Mrs. Kennedy simply walked to the hearse then took a seat while the rear door was closing. There sounded a strange silence on the second floor--somewhat protected from the noise of the driveway by a glass window--as newsmen watched. Through the years, those moments would stage vivid re-runs through my mind. It was haunting. Still is.

  Seconds and minutes passed. Bursting through a guarded second floor door of the hospital, acting White House Press Secretary Mac Kilduff stepped upon a make-shift platform behind a desk.

  He held a cigarette in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. Needlessly, I recall, he softly said:

  "Quiet!”

  Then, after muttering some words about catching his breath, Kilduff read from the paper held in a shaky hand:

  “President Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock Central Standard Time of a gunshot wound in the brain.”

  Kilduff continued talking as I raced toward Hampton and repeated Kilduff’s statement to Fallon. The official pronouncement of the death of President Kennedy was heralded around the globe on the wires of United Press International, a great news agency that later fell from grace because of economics.

  Years later, Kilduff and I became companions in Washington D. C. He told me that he had been a professional bureaucrat working in passports at the State Department when Kennedy’s press team ordered him “detailed” to the White House some 18 months or so before the Dallas trip. The swing across Texas was his first as chief spokesman on JFK’s first re-election campaign tour. The true press secretary, Pierre Salinger, had decided to join a team flying westward to study alternatives about the war in Vietnam.

  Kilduff’s job throughout the trip had been testy and the press conference at Parkland Hospital was the first he ever conducted. It also was the first time that I had ever heard the shots of a presidential assassination.

  In 1968 when we had become colleagues, Kilduff and I agreed on this fact: the President surely was killed instantly. Kennedy’s brains and blood were visible in the open-top limousine. The evidence in 1963 was blood that dried slowly in the empty convertible limousine lodged in the Parkland Hospital parking lot.

  In our long conversations, Kilduff told me that at LBJ’s request, he had delayed the official announcement to allow the Johnsons to leave the hospital and begin the perilous drive to Air Force One.

  When Kilduff confirmed JFK’s death in Dallas, I had noted tears in his eyes. As pals in Washington, I concluded that he was the victim of some sort of allergy that bred watering in his eyes. I never was certain whether or not he wept at Parkland Hospital. .

  Visibly weeping was Marianne Means, the White House correspondent for Hearst newspapers and the only female reporter among the press corps. Years later, Means and I had meaningful and long talks about November 22, 1963 in Dallas. She admitted to crying. I can’t remember whether I ever shed a tear from my eyes. Only within my heart.

  Concluding his brief announcement and comments there on the second floor of Parkland Hospital, Kilduff directed the accredited newsmen, each wearing the special “Dallas” White House badge, to quickly return to the buses that had managed to escape the log-jam at the Trade Mart and had brought most reporters to the hospital.

  As we loaded onto the bus with no sure indication about where we were headed, the bus lurched toward Love Field and I left Hampton behind with the responsibility of the coveted pay telephone.

  The bus loaded with newsmen arrived in the same area of the airport tarmac where smiling Jackie and Jack Kennedy had deplaned at 11:38 a.m., some three hours earlier.

  Off the buses, newsmen milled about largely in seeming disbelief about the shots that we heard, the words Kilduff had spoken and the events that had unfolded. Each was contemplating the stories they would write. We waited. There were soft conversations, but mostly restraint. Some were weeping. We gazed across the tarmac, fenced off from where we waited, where were parked Air Force One, Air Force Two and a charted press plane. Very busy crew members were working around the aircrafts.

  Then, a cabin door opened and down a walkway came pool reporter Sid Davis of Westinghouse Radio stations. He walked toward the crowd of waiting newsmen, came through a gate and spied a milk crate.

  Less conspicuously, U. S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes left the plane and departed the airport without making an appearance or speaking to the media. She was largely unnoticed just like Nixon had been hours earlier. I don’t recall seeing a single woman walking toward the parking lot.

  With UPI’s Merriman Smith aboard Air Force One along with the corpse and widow of JFK, the newly sworn-in President Lyndon Baines Johnson, his wife Lady Bird and the remnants of the Kennedy Administration staff, pilots started the engines. Shortly, it would soar toward Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, outside of Washington D. C.

  On the Love Field tarmac, the cool, seasoned radio newsman Sid Davis stepped upon his milk crate and spoke.

  On well-worn copy paper that also had recorded notes on Kilduff’s words that I had raced to the phone and read to Fallon, I then wrote words heard from Davis who rationed out details of what he had witnessed moments earlier.

  Like Davis and others, UPI’s Merriman Smith had watched the Judge Hughes administered the oath of office to the 36th President of the United States of America at 2:38 p.m., less than two hours after John F. Kennedy had been medically pronounced dead.

  Like other newsmen witnesses of the event except Sid Davis, Smith had no physical means to report the historic matter until Air Force One landed some hours later.

  As the pool reporter standing on the milk crate, Sid Davis had dutifully and professionally briefed the huddle of fellow reporters on what he had witnessed and what he had heard. He was exacting and correct.

  Then as the “traveling” White House press corps members rushed to the back-up plane, I necessarily was among those Dallas-based reporters left behind.

  Immediately, it was my solemn task to feed Davis’ information to Jack Fallon to be written then dispatched on the worldwide wires of United Press International.

  Up until about 3 p.m., most of the World had been told that President John F. Kennedy was dead and that Texas Governor John B. Connally was critically wounded. The status of America’s leadership had remained as mysteriously unknown as the welfare, safety and whereabouts of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

  At the moment, I was among the few with the information, the training and the wire service to reveal information to the Free World that it now had a new uninjured, fully empowered leader who was flying safely toward the White House.

  From my reporting of what Davis announced and Fallon’s writing, the inauguration of LBJ as thirty sixth president; the safety of the new President; the handling of JFK’s body and events of the day spread to worldwide news rooms. Then, broadcasters and print media repeated the words to humanity with amazing speed and accuracy.

  Other than my “green” grassy knoll misinformation, most facts that stood the test of time were quickly reported by multiple news agencies. Fortunately for humanity, stories written under great deadline pressure have been proven to be essentially correct even as details have unfolded throughout passing decades.

  However, it only was then, as I stood alone at about 3 p.m. on the tarmac hearing Air Force One soar into the heavens, that I realized I lacked the necessary dime to finance a pay telephone call to Fallon to relay Davis’ information.

  Would the UPI wires remain silently ignorant of some few gaps in key facts including an inauguration until I solved the dilemma? Not owning a dime? Being minus a shiny ten-cent piece?

  I had worked the overnight shift at the UPI bureau in Dallas starting
at 10 p.m. Thursday. Now it was nearing twilight time on Friday. I was dimeless and miles from the newsroom.

  During that span of some 20 hours, including my own by-line story about Texas politics, I had edited, rewritten some and submitted to the worldwide wires a main lead article under Merriman Smith’s name summarizing the Kennedy visit.

  As other news worthy matter materialized, my rewrite journalist, Leo Welter, and I filed bits and pieces of news to the main and local wires of UPI. It was a tiring overnight job but Welter and I were pleased with our efforts.

  Welter, who had left a better paid job as an air traffic controller to become a newsman, was mature, calm and literate. Leo Welter was a world-class writer but he simply was fresh to the news business but quickly learning the trade.

  At 6 a.m., Welter and I had completed our regular shift. Because of staff shortages, Fallon had assigned me as back-up man for Smith, the celebrated “dean” of the White House press corps.

  Hoping there would be little untoward to report, I had expected to hear the President speak, enjoy a typical Texas steak luncheon then sojourn home after telephoning an early afternoon report to Fallon.

  By 7 a. m, Welter and I had consumed hearty breakfasts. While often we would have an after work beer at 6 a. m., we settled that morning for breakfast instead. We shared a view of “no drinking while working”