When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963, 50th Anniversary Edition

206 Pages·2013·5.92 MB·English

by  Bob Huffaker

WHEN THE NEWS
WENT LIVE

WHEN THE NEWS
WENT LIVE
DALLAS 1963
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
BOB HUFFAKER, BILL MERCER,
GEORGE PHENIX, WES WISE
Foreword by Dan Rather
TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING
Lanham New York Boulder Toronto Plymouth, UK
▯ ▯ ▯ ▯
DEDICATION
To our KRLD colleagues and our fellow journalists who rose to the challenge of
1963. To my wife, Veva, and our sons, Kevin Huffaker and Zachary Vonler. To
John F. Kennedy’s memory. And to all who seek wisdom through lessons of
history. Bob Huffaker
To my wife of sixty-six years, Ilene, who persevered through my rambunctious
fifty years of broadcasting; our children, Laura, Evan, Martin and David, and
our beautiful and intelligent granddaughters, Maile, Emma, Myra, Rachel,
Sadie, Amaris, and Felicia; to the gallant journalists who preceded and taught
us, the wonderful people we served with, and to the young journalists who
follow: may you strive always to report the truth. And to our chief writer,
researcher, editor and friend, Bob Huffaker, without whose talent and
intelligence this would never have been written. Bill Mercer
To the reporters of today—from the journalists of yesterday. To my kids and
grandkids, and to Lyn Ellen Lacy, my Mystery Woman. George Phenix
To my wife, Sally, who was by my side at the Trade Mart when we got the awful
news; to my son, Westley, Jr., who placed flowers at the grassy knoll; to my
younger son and daughter, Wyn and Wendy, who gave of their time with their
father to journalism. To the gallant citizens of Dallas, who suffered excruciating
shock and pain, frustrating shame and unjustified blame, yet emerged with even
greater character and compassion. Wes Wise
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
W
e are grateful to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza for permissions
to reprint images and quote from archived KRLD News tapes in their Bob
Huffaker and other collections—and for their dedication to preserving the
memory of President John F. Kennedy, the history of his tragic death, and the
broader view of his life and U.S. history. These professionals are engaged in
outreach to the world, and in particular to its young.
We thank our CBS News colleagues Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer, and PBS
stalwart Jim Lehrer for their help and encouragement.
Daniel Irvin Rather, author of Rather Outspoken and managing editor of AXS
TV’s Dan Rather Reports, has been a friend and colleague since 1961, when he
became CBS Southwest Bureau Chief and began his long and distinguished
career with that network.
Bob Lloyd Schieffer, who moderates CBS’s Face the Nation and lends sanity
to Sunday mornings, is unusually qualified for that political hot seat, having
covered all four of the major Washington national assignments: the White
House, the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of State, and the United States
Congress. He has served CBS News in myriad on-air assignments since his first
anchor job at Fort Worth’s WBAP-TV. Before moving to television, he was a
reporter for the Fort Worth Star- Telegram, once hauling Marguerite Oswald to
Dallas police headquarters after her son shot the president.
We are grateful to James Charles Lehrer, who, as City Editor of the old Dallas
Times Herald, put up with Bob Huffaker and Frank Glieber invading his city
room to broadcast KRLD radio newscasts daily over a prehistoric olive-drab
microphone. Jim Lehrer went ahead to cut the trail for public television news,
co-founding what is now the PBS NewsHour with his partner Robert MacNeil,
and, from the days of his local public television Newsroom, providing a reliable
and determinedly undramatic voice of news to the world for four decades. His
fine book Tension City chronicles the history of U.S. televised presidential
debates. This soft-spoken ex-Marine moderator deserves special credit for not
decking either candidate during his twelfth nationally televised presidential
debate: the Obama-Romney spectacle of October 3, 2012, in Denver.
We thank our sturdy floor director Benny Molina, who stayed cool, friendly,
and professional through all of our broadcasts, especially those from police
headquarters in the uncertain hours and days after JFK’s assassination.
We are grateful to writer and reporter Dean Angel and our Dutch film chief,
Henk Dewit, who, during the frantic post-assassination days and nights, pushed
the 16mm black-and-white through the big developers faster than normal limits
just to get it on the air quicker—sometimes still a little damp and often streaked
with developing soup. Gentle-spoken Dean and placidly fierce Henk were a
good team. Dean had done his time in the U.S. Air Force, and Henk had done his
in a Nazi work camp. Neither of them would have been distracted by the Devil
himself.
We are glad that reporter Dick Wheeler joined KRLD News just in time to
land in the midst of this peculiar historic story. He became news director of
KRLD radio and then had the sense to sail away and live on his sailboat for
some idyllic days.
We thank our departed KRLD colleagues: wise news director Eddie Barker;
assistant news director Jim Underwood, a Marine veteran of Guadalcanal who
ran toward the shots in Dealey Plaza; cool-headed cameramen Jim English and
Gene Pasczalek; assignments editor Joe Dave Scott; Fort Worth correspondent
Steve Pieringer; reporter and anchor Warren Fulks; versatile Frank Glieber;
director Leigh Webb; film chief Henk Dewit; towering engineer Howard
Chamberlain, Bill Mercer’s bodyguard in the chaotic police headquarters; and
engineer Otto Nilson, an old shipboard radio operator who knew the stars.
We are grateful to, and for, the talented Janet Harris and Veva Vonler, whose
editorial wisdom guided this book, and Kay Banning for her detailed and
scholarly index.
Among our competitors who covered this dark story, we are grateful to Bert
Shipp, author of Details at Ten. Bert was WFAA-TV News, and plenty of fun.
We lift a cup to Hugh Aynesworth, the crew-cut Dallas Morning News
aeronautics and space reporter who witnessed the president’s murder in Dealey
Plaza, sped to the Texas Theater and covered the arrest of Lee Oswald, then was
with us in the police basement when Jack Ruby shot the young assassin to death.
Hugh’s book JFK: Breaking the News puts the facts in perspective.
To Kent Biffle, Dallas Morning News reporter and now author of A Month of
Sundays and a great body of fine writing, who was among reporters held inside
the Texas School Book Depository while police combed the place just after
Oswald’s hasty departure.
To Mike Cochran of the Associated Press, author of Texas vs. Davis and
Deliver Us from Evil, who carried Oswald’s coffin to the grave and is still a fine
and prolific writer.
And to the late and beloved Alex Burton, author of Just One Kiss, Baby, for
leaving his native Canada to soothe our tears with erudite and indomitable wit
that was kind and well aimed.
Bob Huffaker, 2013
FOREWORD
T
here are times when it seems like yesterday. But more often it feels like an
episode from another lifetime, and one feels fully the fifty years that separate us
now from November 22, 1963.
Time does funny things to how we look back at history’s landmarks, whether
they are ones of triumph, like the first moon landing, or of tragedy, like the
killing of a president. The millions of unfolding moments and perspectives that
make up our understanding of an event in real time become condensed, distilled,
and abbreviated into a handful of images and impressions. From the remove of
passing decades we begin to imagine that we have gained a bird’s-eye view of
how things went. Seen from this vantage point, subtleties fade, and the confused
and chaotic starts to appear orderly. The vagaries of chance seem in hindsight to
become inexorable, fated.
So it has been with the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
and the dark days that followed. Today, mention of that time conjures the
newsreel that has become our mental shorthand for all that happened in Dallas:
the morning arrival at Love Field, Jackie’s dress and pillbox hat, Abraham
Zapruder’s devastating footage of the fatal shot, the swearing in of President
Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One, Jack Ruby’s deadly lunge toward Lee
Harvey Oswald. We see these things in our minds’ eyes, and we tell ourselves
that we have something approaching the full picture.
There are, famously and still, enough arguments, theories, and claims about
the hows and whys of what happened in Dealey Plaza to fill a good-sized library.
But the broader story, the story of a nation’s descent into grief and shock over
four unforgettable days, has hardened over the years into an apparently orderly
and seamless narrative. Such is the view from afar.
For those who were in Dallas that day, though, the view was very different.
The minutes, hours, and days after President Kennedy was shot provided no
The minutes, hours, and days after President Kennedy was shot provided no
ready answers about just what was going on, what would happen next, or what
any of it meant. There was, instead, a jumble of images, impressions, and
information, very little of which had yet taken coherent form. Uncertainty
reigned, not tidy story lines. For millions of Americans transfixed by the terrible
breaking news, television emerged as a way to keep track of it all. But the
journalists who brought the story to the television airwaves could only rely on
their skill, their experience, and their stamina to make sense of what was clearly,
at the time, the biggest story of their lives.
This book tells the stories of four men who were at the very epicenter of it all.
Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix, and Wes Wise were among those
responsible for covering the assassination and its aftermath for KRLD, the
Dallas CBS television and radio affiliate. From the presidential motorcade to
Parkland Hospital, from Lee Harvey Oswald’s shooting to the trial and lonesome
death of Jack Ruby, they were there, on the inside. The view they were afforded
of these events was unique; the tales they have to tell, one of a kind.
People often ask me “what it was really like” to be in Dallas on the day
Kennedy was shot. It’s a difficult question, one which I can only answer with my
own, personal impressions. They are strong, and vivid, but they are necessarily
and by definition limited. When the News Went Live provides an eloquent
answer to that tough question, as four newsmen who were there, on the ground,
tell how it “really was” through their eyes and ears.
Dan Rather, CBS News