I still find it awkward to tell people, “Fifty years ago…..” and then tell them what I remember from that time.
Sixty years ago today, I had been the producer of the noon news at KOMU-TV. I was in graduate school at the University of Missouri and working as a graduate assistant instructor in the radio newscasting class which also involved being the assistant news director at KFRU Radio, anchoring some of the student-wrtiten newscasts on that station (this was before the Journalism School created KBIA where some students get their first taste of broadcast newswritig and anchoring), so I couldn’t anchor at Channel 8. So I produced the noon newscast that reported President Kennedy had gone to Texas to assure Texans that he was not going to dump Lydon Johnson as his running mate in 1964.
We left the station at 12:30, about the time shots rang out at Dealy Plaza in Dallas.
When I walked through the front door of the rooming house at 508 S. Ninth Street (now one of at least three houses in which I lived that are now gone), one of the guys upstairs shouted down, “Is that Priddy?”
“Yeah.”
“You getter get up here! The President’s been shot!”
The people upstairs had been listening to KFRU and had heard ABC’s Don Gardiner break in with the first word of the shooting. Most commemorations of the event today focus on Walter Cronkite and CBS-TV. But it was Don Gardiner, normally the morning news voice on WABC in New York, who interrupting a middle of the road music show from WABC that was fed down the network between network news programs.
(105) JFK’S ASSASSINATION (ABC RADIO NETWORK) (NOVEMBER 22, 1963) – YouTube
Gardiner’s first bulletin about 12:33 p.m. CST came from United Press International correspondent Merriman Smith who was in the fifth car behind the presidential limousine as it moved from Dallas’ Love Field toward the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to deliver a luncheon speech.
Nick George, who is announced early in the broadcast as the New York Editor for ABC, later became a teacher at the journalism school and was an influential figure in the development of some early Missourinet reporters.
As you will hear, events unfolded quickly and the reporters—mainly Smith and AP’s Jack Bell .
In 1963, reporting from remote sites was, to say the least by today’s standards, extremely primitive.
The White House press pool reporter’s car had a radiotelephone in it, the only mobile phone available to the 58 reporters in the pool. Pool reporters rotated from the back seat to the front and it ws Smith’s day in front. Smith grabbed the radiotelephone and dictated a FLASH (the highest priority item to go out on the wire service) to Dallas UPI Bureau rookie Wilborn Hampton, who typed it into the distribution teletype machine, showed it to his editor, Jack Fallon, who shouted, “Send it!”
UPI sent it out at 12:34:
“DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI) – THREE SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”
As the word went out and Gardiner started his broadcast, Smith was crouched in the front seat of the car while the AP’s bell was beating on his back and demanding, “Give me the goddamn phone!” But Smith wouldn’t give it up and continued to give information to the bureau. “On a story of this magnitude,” Smith later said, “I was not about to let it go until I new the office had it all.”
It took six minutes to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Smith gave the phone to Bell who called the Dallas AP burau—and couldn’t get through. Smith ran up to the presidential limousine where he saw Texas Governor John Connally wounded. “I could not see the president’s wound. But I could see blood spattered around the interior of the rear seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president’s dark gray suit.”
Smith turned to Clint Hill, the Secret Service officer who was in the followup far and ran to the presidential limousine, jumped on the back and shielded Mrs. Kennedy with his body as the car sped to thehospital, and asked, “How bad was he hit, Clint.”
“He’s dead, Smitty,” said Hill. Smith dashed into the hospital, took a telephone from a room clerk and started dictating the information you will hear Gardiner pass along to listeners that day. Most of what you hear Gardiner reporting is based on Smith’s coverage.
UPI ran another FLASH at 1:35 that Kennedy had been declared dead. AP was two minutes behind.
The event was an important one for radio and particularly for television. For the first hours, the story belonged to radio. Newspapers already had gone to press for their afternoon editions. Several put out bulleting editions. But in the early going, the story belonged to radio.
We had no satellites to relay the story as it unfolded. There were telephones and wire services and that was all there was. Television relied on film that had to be shot and developed, mostly black and white (because color television was just beginning) and often not even processed as positive images. We would shoot silent negative film and the television control room could electronically reverse the polarity of the film and the viewers saw black and white pictures.
KFRU’s newsroom was in the Columbia Tribune building at 7th and Cherry Streets (it’s partly a candy store and partly a restaurant now) because the station was half-owned by the Waters family that also owned the Tribune.
The main studios were out on the eastern business loop. In Studio A, the main studio, a slver pipe rose up behind the control board and curved toward the announcer’s position. The pipe contained wiring that was hooked to a small red light. That was the network bulletin light. If the network wanted to break in on programming, that light would come on and the board operator was immediately to flip a switch that put the network on the air. When that light came on, the board operator that day, perhaps Bill Younger who worked the afternoon shift threw that switch.
I quickly walked the four or five blocks to the KFRU newsroom to huddle with Eric Engberg, the news director and fellow graduate student—-Eric later had a long career as a CBS correspondent—and we started planning local reaction stories to run when the network broke away from its coverage for its local stations to report.
I was sent out toget reaction from Senator George Parker and Representative Larry Woods.
ABC did not break until Monday morning before coming back to broadcst the funeral.
I got to know, to a lesser degree in most cases but in a greater degree in one case, some of thosewho brought us the news that day. Nick George, for example, became an acquaintance.
The one I knew best is the one who broke the news of Kennedy’s death on national television. Eddie Barker was the news director of KRLD-TV and radio in Dallas that day and was at the Trade Mart preparing a broadcast of the Predident’s speech. Word already had reached him that something had happened in the motorcade and moments late the motorcade roared past the mart. He went on the air, broadcasting what he could learn. One of his friends who was at the mart was a doctor at Parkland who went to a telephone and called the hospital emergency room where an acquaintance told him the president was dead.
Eddie’s friend saw he was “struggling to maintain a coherent broadcast with the limited information availability,” walked over and whispered into his ear, “Eddie, he’s dead.”
“The words sent a cold chill running down my spine. I didn’t want to believe them, but the source was too good. I then made a decision that has caused a lot of comment in the years since that strangely brilliant Friday afternoon. I told an audience that included the whole CBS network that a reliable source had confirmed to me that President Kennedy was dead. What I didn’t know was tht my shocking report caused a lot of anxiety at cBS News Headquarters in New York,” he recalled in his autobiography, Eddie Barker’s Notebook several years later, Shortly after that, Walter Cronkite told viewers, “We just had a report from our correspondent, Dan Rther, in Dallas that he has confirmed tht President Kennedy is dead.” There still had been no official confirmation.
At 1:37, our time, CBS news editor Ed Bliss—and other of those I came to know well—gave Cronkite the AP bulletin that Cronkite is often seen reading to his audience when the story is recounted on TV today.
Dan Rather is often credited with passing along the first word of Kennedy’s death. Rather, who was the new chief of the CBS New Orleans bureau, had been on the other side of the railroad overpass west of Dealy Plaza, closer to the Trade Mart, when the motorcade flew past He ran to the Dallas CBS bureau and started working the phones to Parkland Hospital. The doctors all were busy but an operator told him two priests were in a hallway nearby. One of them told Rather, “The President has been shot and he is dead.” Rather, his The Camera Never Blinks, said he asked, “Are you certain of that” and the priest, who was there to perform the last rites, respoded, “Yes, unfortunately, I am.”
Rather called Barker and told him what he had. Eddie had just talked to the doctor. They did not know that three people at CBS, New York were listening on the broadcast loop that had been set up for Barker’s broadcast of the speech. Before Rather could tell those listening, Barker, in his broadcast that he thought was only local in Dallas, announced a source from Parkland had told him the president is dead. Rather chimed in, “Yes, yes, that’s what I hear, too. That he’s dead.”
It wasn’t official. But CBS radio and television went with it.
It was only a short time later, as you will hear if you listen to the ABC account, that it was reported a Dallas policeman, later identified as J.D. Tippett, had been shot and killed. And within a few minutes, a suspect named Lee H. Oswald had been picked up.
The night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had slept late that day but rushed to the office when he heard of the shooting. The newspaper started printing special editions that were snapped up by the public as soon as they hit the streets. “Inside the city room it was bedlam,” recalled then-CBS correspondent Bob Shieffer in his book, This Just In. When word came that Oswald was going to be held in the Fort Worth jail, Schiefer dashed there and was present when Oswald was brought in.
“Early in my police reporting days, I learned a truck from the cops. People will sometimes blurt out the truth if they are surprised by the question, so I jumped in front of the handcuffed suspect, who was between two detectives, and shouted, ‘You song of a bitch, why did you do it?’”
‘”Well, I didn’t,’ he said as the cops hustled him into the lockup.”
Schiefer was just settling in back at his newsroom desk when the phone rang. A woman asked him if someone could give her a ride to Dallas. Schiefer responded heatedly, “Lady, this is not a taxi, and besides, the president has been shot.”
“I know. They think my son is the one who shot him.”
“Where do you live?” Schieffer. “I’ll be right over to get you.”
On the way to Dallas, said Schieffer, she seemed more concerned about herself than about the death of a president. “She railed about how Oswald’s Russian-born wife would get sympathy while no one would ‘remember the mother.’”
When Oswald’s wife and mother heard the news, they had the presence of mind to get a lawyer, John Thorne. Police placed the family in protective custody. Several weeks later, Eddie Barker called Thorne and expressed an interest in interviewing the Marina, how a widow. Thorne, who Barker did not know, surprised him by saying, “She watches you every evening nd I’ll be glad to ask her.” The interview was arranged during which time she told him in her Russian-accented English, “I think Lee shoot Kenedy.”
Don Gardiner died in 1977. Bob Schieffer, 86, is a podcaster— “Bob Schieffer’s ‘About the News’ with H. Andrew Schwartz.”—retired as the host of Face the Nation in 2015 and embarked on a singing career. Eddie Barker died in 2012.
Dan Rather is 92 and still likes to stir the stuff. He was fired from CBS in 2006 after some reports using unauthenticated documents to report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War-era service. After working on the cable channel now known as AXSTV for several years. Rather joined the Youngturks YouTube channel and five years ago began writing a news letter called “Steady,” on Substack.
All of those you hear in the ABC coverage are gone now.
Merriman Smith committed suicide in 1970. Some say he was despondent about the death of his son in Vienam and perhaps suffered from PTSD from witnessing the Kennedy murder. Jack Bell died in 1975. Clint Hill is 91 and is the last surviving person to be in the presidential limousine that day.
At Jefferson City radio station KLIK that day, news director Jerry Bryan checked the UPI wire just after climbing the stairs to the third-floor newsroom in a pre-Civil War building on Capitol Avneue and checked the UPI machine before going home to lunch.
He picked up the telephone and called the on-air studio down on the second floor and started telling listeners what Merriman Smith was sending him. He continued to report via telephone until station engineer Ed Scarr put together enough cable to run a microphone from the studio up two flights of stairs and down the hall to the newsroom so Jerry had a microphone. The station operated only during daylight hours in those days and did not have a national network. Bryan was the Don Gardiner of Jefferson City that day until the station signed off at 5:30. A reel-to-reel recorder in the newsroom was set up to turn on automatically during the “Missouri Party Line Show” when a phone call came in from a listener. Bryan’s call to the studio triggered the recorder, which had a large reel of tape on it. His early coverage that day was recorded, by accident, and still exists. Jerry resigned in 1967 and became the press secretary to Governor Hearnes and now lives in St. Louis.
His assistant news director, who had come to Jefferson City from KFRU at the start of 1967 replaced him. His memories, which have been shared at length with you in this entry, remain vivid–as do the memories of many.
Walter Cronkite, who died in 2009, was a native of St. Joseph, Missouri. He attended the unveiling in 1999 of bronze bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There were two speakers at that ceremony that evening—Governor Carnahan and me.
The next day, he was introduced in the House and in the Senate and made brief remarks. The press corps in the senate was seated at a table on the floor to the right of the dais and when Walter walked in, we made him sit at the press table with us.
For the next fifteen years that I covered the Senate from that table, I always made sure that when a new reporter joined us at the table, I made sure that person knew that was Walter’s chair they were sitting in and they were expected to do him honor with their reporting.
Before Walter Cronkite became the icon he became at the CBS Evening News desk, he had a program on Sunday afternoons called You Are There, during which historical events were portrayed. He always finished the broadcast by proclaiming,
“What sort of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that altered and illuminate our time. And you were there.”
November 22nd started “like all days.” But it was filled with events that altered and illuminate our time.
And I was “there.”
