I Heard JFK's Death Shots: A Reporter's Look Back At President John F. Kennedy's 1963 Assassination After 50 Years Page 6
decades later, there in Oklahoma following days in production for Kuralt’s show, Birnbaum and I spent two nights matching recollections on the assassination. Also along were CBS-tv photographer Isadore Bleckman and Michelle Lefebvre-Carter. Bleckman, with UPI-Movietone News, had been in Dallas in 1963 at the police station to film Oswald’s transfer from the jail. His camera was running the moment that Jack Ruby leaped from the crowd and fatally shot Oswald. In the tumult, Bleckman and camera were knocked to the floor. Bleckman was less talkative at the Oklahoma dinners, but concurred with our conversation. In fact, we each seemed to agree on all points.
Birnbaum said “let’s write a book, Joe.” Our collaboration was launched in November, 1991. We would strive to rebut the numerous misguided theories and “damn lies” about the assassination. In that period, the movie “JFK” was released to our greatest chagrin.
Then, in 1993, Random House published Gerald Posner’s masterful Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Using 607 pages, Posner achieved every goal that Birnbaum and I had envisioned. Our book project had been pre-empted and sensibly halted. Posner excelled. Years after Posner’s book was published, public doubts still brewed.
For a half century I have felt fully assured the major media got the facts correct on November 22, 1963. Not all of the stories that I wrote were the best that possibly could have been written, but I excuse myself, noting that UPI’s slogan was “Deadline Every Minute.” Sometimes filing an incomplete report to meet pressures as newspapers go to press and newscasts begin can short-circuit full research.
During those harried months of late 1963, most of the “neighborhood reactions” I learned from my wife. My daytime hours were spent sleeping, enjoying my young son, attending family business then with long nights working under high pressure.
Yet, the angry moods of 1963 have often reared ugly heads through the years and into contemporary times. The right wing attacks on President Barack Obama seem to echo much of the ugliness and hatred that Jim Kukar, other newsmen and I detected and reported during the Kennedy and Johnson years.
Yet, in a weird way conditioned by attitudes of the time, I’m convinced that the cluttered mind of Lee Harvey Oswald died believing he had performed a noble and patriotic service to mankind by killing President Kennedy.
Some people opine that Oswald simply sought fame at any price. Certainly, Oswald was heinously twisted. While free to believe whatever struck his mind, Oswald was wrong in his reaction. But so were the critics like General Walker, the spitters of Adlai Stevenson and howling mob that threatened Lady Bird and Vice President Johnson.
For simple, twisted minds, these extremist breed permissiveness and legitimize lurid actions across society. While liberals have been blamed, I strongly believe it was the crazy fundamental religionist and right wing propagandists who have most seriously poisoned the spirit of America.
I felt their hatred during the riots that followed the senseless assassination of Martin Luther King. I felt their anger when I tromped through mud of “Resurrection City” of 1968 in Washington D. C.
Similar anger swelled amid Vietnam War protest rallies and again when in Delray Beach, Florida 2012, folks staged a minor march in sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street protests.
“The last time Republicans cared about me I was an embryo,” one of the grey-haired ladies proclaimed on a sign she wore at the beach.
The anger dwelled in Lee Harvey Oswald. Little he knows, but he lingers into infamy and ignobility. Oswald and Ruby surely lack the greatness that I imagine each had perceived as they practiced their separate lawless marksmanship. And, we think of the inherent danger that Oswald marksmanship and my own rifle prowess although I now own only a Red Ryder B-B gun given to me by Clide Valentine, a high school buddy from Red Fork.
I never shot that gun although my marksmanship remained and was financed by the military establishment of the USA deemed necessary to meet noble needs for national defense.
###
About the Author
An erstwhile newsman and published biographer of humorist Will Rogers, Joseph H. Carter Sr. served as a White House aide of two presidents and on the staffs of members of Congress.
Carter is author of twin 2013 memoirs. I Heard JFK’s Death Shots is a reporter’s look back at President John F. Kennedy’s November 23, 1963 Assassination 50 years later. The Unique Challenges of Writing for LBJ recounts his White House experiences during the final months of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House years.
A United Press International correspondent on the press bus covering President John F. Kennedy’s November, 1963 campaign swing into Dallas, Carter was directly below the Texas School Book Depository window where he heard the three assassination shots.
Five years later, Carter was tapped as a speech writer and political advance man for President Johnson where he joined diplomatic missions to Central American countries and to the July, 1968 Honolulu summit on Vietnam.
During a two decade stint as director of Oklahoma’s Will Rogers Memorial Commission, Carter authored the Gibbs-Smith 2006 book The Quotable Will Rogers; the 1991 HarperCollins (Avon) biography Never Met A Man I Didn’t Like: The Life and Writing of Will Rogers; Terrell Publishing’s Will Rogers: A Pictorial Tribute to an American Legend and wrote the text of Archivist Pat Lowe’s official bibliography and genealogy book published by Will Rogers Heritage, Inc.
Carter launched the successful five-volume Papers of Will Rogers published by the University of Oklahoma Press. As a free-lance writer, he was author of a three-part, award-winning series in American Cowboy magazine during 2006 and wrote a cover story for Route 66 magazine.
Carter was credited in Playbill for work on “The Will Rogers Follies: A Life Revue” in 1991 where the Broadway musical won six Tony Awards and played 982 performance at the Palace Theatre before launching a series of national tours.
Often cast in the role of Wiley Post for the Broadway show, Carter also played 180 performances in a one-man Will Rogers show in Branson, Missouri and performed in the Will Rogers role at other venues.
joecarter1932@hotmail.com