Hugh Aynesworth knew he wouldn’t get to cover President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas even before arriving at The Dallas Morning News on Nov. 22, 1963. But when he got to the newsroom, he looked at the assignment sheet anyway.
“Sure enough, we were covering it from every angle imaginable, but I wasn’t one of the score that was to take part,” Aynesworth wrote months later. “Somebody asked me to sit on the city desk while they went to eat at the Trade Mart. I recall thinking, ‘The hell with it. If I am not good enough to write something about all this, I’ll just go look at the crowds or walk uptown. No sitting on the desk answering phones for me.’ ”
Soon after, the investigative reporter made his way to Dealey Plaza, where he saw — and reported on — Kennedy’s assassination, as well as the arrest and shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald.
His memories, and those of 51 other Morning News employees, were collected in the months after the assassination. And then they were more or less forgotten.
About a year ago, as the Morning News began planning its coverage of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, someone remembered those notes. Some had been collected digitally for the 40th anniversary, but they hadn’t been widely distributed and were now housed at a library at Southern Methodist University. Will Pry, mobile editor, began reading the 51 accounts from reporters, editors and photographers at work that day, as well as notes from days before and those that followed.
“And I was just immediately in awe,” he told Poynter on the phone.
It’s those stories, along with ones told by people in Dallas that day and forgotten histories, that make up JFK50.
The Morning News’ project launched in January, Tom Huang, Sunday and enterprise editor (and an adjunct faculty member at Poynter), said in a phone interview. The project recalls Kennedy’s assassination through videos, stories, public forums and a book collecting notes from reporters who covered the event.
“It’s also good journalism,” Pry said. “It’s journalism history.”
Explaining the unexplained
By now the story of Kennedy’s death is a well-worn narrative, said Alan Peppard, a columnist for the Morning News. Peppard wanted to go beyond that narrative, and he used research to do so.
“Once you suck all the marrow out of all the millions of books that are out there, you start reading the notes,” Peppard told Poynter in a phone interview.
Those notes are housed in many places, including the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, the LBJ Presidential Library, the National Archives, appendixes from both the Warren Commission report and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
“I wanted to explain the unexplained,” he said, “and look at what brought Kennedy, [Lyndon B.] Johnson, Oswald, John Connally and [Richard M.] Nixon all to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.”
For JFK50, Peppard has written four pieces, with a fifth on the way. In May, he wrote about April 10, 1963, when Oswald crept into the yard of former Major General Edwin A. Walker and fired a bullet that barely missed him.
While the country basked in the glamour of Jackie and Jack Kennedy, Walker voiced a dark counternarrative, an ethos that landed him on the Dec. 4, 1961, cover of Newsweek magazine headlined “Thunder on the Right.”
In the 50 years since, history has largely forgotten how the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Edwin Walker collided for an instant in the spring of 1963. Of the two men, only one had been charged with insurrection against the United States, had been recently released from a psychiatric detention facility and had been openly disdainful of John F. Kennedy: Edwin Anderson Walker of Dallas.
Peppard wrote about JFK’s forgotten campaign that brought him to Dallas in 1960. For that visit, the Morning News shot 325 photos, but only used three. The negatives bounced around for a while and then were put aside. Peppard asked a librarian at the Morning News for the photos from that day, and got the three that had been published. Nine months later, the librarian returned with all the found shots. They were out of chronological order, but Peppard put them back together with what he already knew about that day.
He also found color footage of Kennedy speaking in Dallas and putting on a cowboy hat. A few people had copies of the footage — one copy resided at the Sixth Floor Museum — but Peppard had to spend several months securing the rights.
Peppard wrote the story of Wednesday, Nov. 20, when Richard Nixon — whom Kennedy had defeated for the presidency in 1960 — arrived in Dallas with Joan Crawford for a bottling convention. On Nov. 21, Nixon spoke a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, and offered a blunt and dispassionate assessment of Kennedy’s presidency. His words ran the next day.
“It’s one of those things,” Peppard said. “Nobody remembers that.”
Reporters’ stories
Harvey Bogen, an assistant city editor, sat at his desk that day 50 years ago. He’d been on vacation but came in to help out. He started getting calls from people around the building, sharing what they’d just heard.
“He didn’t hear from a single journalist,” Pry said. “And that’s because the journalists who were out in the field followed their instincts and sprang into action. They were out reporting the story.”
Reporters then had less to work with than their counterparts do today, Pry thinks. But they were resourceful and brave: Pry found accounts of reporters running toward the sound of the gun shots.
Mary Elizabeth Woodward went to see the president during her lunch break. She was standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository and witnessed the shooting.
Woodward, now Mary Woodward Pillsworth, eventually left the newsroom and joined the Peace Corps. But she wrote about that day for the Morning News on Nov. 16.
“Arriving back at The News, the four of us were the first to report to editors in the building what had happened in Dealey Plaza,” she wrote. “Still lacking official confirmation — and without input from any other source — I began to compose, at age 24 years and two months, the story of my lifetime.”
Tony Zoppi, the Morning News’ entertainment columnist, was off that day 50 years ago. So he joined 100,000 others gathered a few blocks from the newsroom to see the president. After the shooting, he ran to Parkland Hospital, where he was turned away by the Secret Service.
Then, an ambulance pulled up. Inside sat a casket.
Zopi grabbed a corner of the casket, walked into the hospital and called the newsroom.
The president is dead, he reported. I just delivered the casket.
- Bob Baskin, former Washington Bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News, called in his story with a two-way radio in the parking lot at Parkland Hospital on Nov. 22, 1963. Leaning in the passenger’s window is photographer Joe Laird.
#JFK
For “JFK Assassination: The Reporters’ Notes,” Pry worked through accounts of the day, putting them into chronological order and piecing together a larger story from the many smaller ones recorded months later. The book contains that narrative, as well as the full notes from 22 people.
If an event like this happened today, Pry said, there would be thousands of movies like the famous Zapruder film. There’d be 40,000 “OMG, I just saw the president go by” tweets and 5,000 YouTube videos.
Back then, there was panic because people didn’t know what had happened. Now, the public is oversaturated with information — and Pry thinks people would have a hard time making sense of everything they’d seen.
Now, he thinks, the work of journalists still matters, “if only to make sense of the noise instead of bringing the story to light.”
The Morning News took on this project to share the memories of one generation with the next, Huang said — and to explain how the events of that day impacted a city.
“It’s amazing to me that 50 years later, the psychological trauma of the assassination still clouds people’s understanding of what happened,” Peppard said.
The assassination has become a part of Dallas’ identity, Huang and Pry both said. JKF50 isn’t trying to rewrite that history, but to tell it from the city where it happened, with stories from the people who were there and from the newsroom that covered it.
For more coverage related to the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination:
- CBS News will stream their 1963 coverage online beginning at 1:40 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 22.
- CBS also looked back at what happened in its own newsroom as events unfolded that day.
- PBS’ “One Central Standard Time” tells the story of Walter Cronkite’s coverage.
- Andrew Cohen wrote in The Atlantic about how to watch the CBS coverage, and what it says about early television journalism.
- History Channel is tweeting the events leading up to that day as they happened 50 years ago.
- In Tampa, WUSF looks back at the Florida trip Kennedy made before heading to Dallas with JFK In Tampa: The 50th Anniversary.
- Larry Lorenz, an emeritus professor of mass communications at Loyola University, writes about that day, when he worked for UPI.
- And Zap2It rounded up the coverage happening in the days leading up to the actual anniversary. That coverage includes:
- Discovery airs “JFK: The Lost Tapes” on Nov. 21.
- Also on Friday, NBC airs “Tom Brokaw Special: Where Were You?”
- History Channel airs “Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live.”
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