Fiftieth Anniversary

05:08 PM - November 21, 2011 — From the Winter 1964 issue

The Assassination: The Reporters’ Story

How journalists broke news of JFK’s death

By The Editors

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email
• Print
• One Page

Comments Post a Comment

Superb performances by Dugger and Wicker:

RONNIE DUGGER: “The Last Voyage of Mr. Kennedy,” The Texas Observer, November 29.

TOM WICKER: Times Talk (New York Times house publication), December.

Ronnie Dugger, The Texas Observer:

Dugger: [... As Kilduff lit a cigarette, the flame of his lighter quivered violently.]

Dugger: [The details were given to us by a pool reporter, Sid Davis…. I shall not soon forget the picture in my mind, that man standing on the trunk of a white car, his figure etched against the blue, blue Texas sky, all of us massed around him at his knees as he told us what had happened in that crowded compartment in Air Force One…].

Tom Wicker, The New York Times:

Wicker: [... We could not doubt, then, that it was serious. I had chosen that day to be without a notebook. I took notes on the back of my mimeographed schedule of the two-day tour of Texas we had been so near to concluding. Today, I cannot read many of the notes; on November 22, they were as clear as 60-point type.]

Wicker: [... The doctors had hardly left before Hawks came in and told us Mr. Johnson would be sworn in immediately at the airport... Many a campaign had taught me something about press buses and I ran a little harder, got there first, and went to the wide rear seat. That is the best place on a bus to open up a typewriter and get some work done. On the short trip to the airport, I got about 500 words on paper—leaving a blank space for the hour of Mr. Johnson’s swearing-in, and putting down the mistaken assumption that the scene would be somewhere in the terminal.]

#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Tue 22 Nov 2011 at 05:12 PM