Sixty Years Ago

[ChrisLong]

Sixth grade. Miss Davis left the room briefly and came back crying. There was a community TV on a roller cart that just happened to be in our room at that time. She turned it on to the news. I really don't remember much else. Some classmates have said that we were sent home so I guess I went home. My mom was a housewife so she was home. I don't know about the kids who didn't have anybody at home at that time. Mom was very pro-Nixon, but sad nonetheless that this could happen.

 

[maumann]

Not hogging at all.
It's also worth mentioning that Dan Rather was on two phone lines with a CBS radio producer in New York and Eddie Barker of KRLD. The producer thinks Rather is confirming Kennedy is dead while Rather is actually discussing said possibility with Barker. As Rather has told the story, he quickly hears anchor Alan Jackson announcing JFK's death with attribution to Rather.
Dan's sphincter got real, real tight.

News gathering in real time was messy in 1963, just as it is today. The people we revere for their roles in telling the tale of that day were making the sausage live, and you can see all the glitches and confusion play out as more facts get handed to them. I had my Challenger moment in 1986, and I hopefully tried to sound competent and professional with absolutely zero information to go on other than a big ball of flame in the sky overhead.

I'm certain all of us have had varying shades of "OH ****!" stories at some point in our careers. You do your best. You learn. You're better for it.

Maybe I'm getting cynical, but a JFK/9-11 sized story now would be cluttered with "instant analysis" and posturing. Plus a ton of stammering and eyebrow frowning. I just don't think this era of communicators has the poise to sum up a situation consisely and clearly with very little to go on. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, although I really don't want the nation to go through that type of disaster again.

Don Lemon couldn't even utter a coherent sentence standing in a building where a tornado just hit.

 

[kickoff-time]

One of the more interesting stories to come out of the JFK assassination was the end of comedian Vaughn Meader's career.

He did an uncanny impersonation of JFK and his album, "The First Family" even won a Grammy for Album of the Year. But Kennedy's death basically also was the death for Meader as well.

JFK Impersonator Vaughn Meader: Death of a Career

 

[Liut]

News gathering in real time was messy in 1963, just as it is today. The people we revere for their roles in telling the tale of that day were making the sausage live, and you can see all the glitches and confusion play out as more facts get handed to them. I had my Challenger moment in 1986, and I hopefully tried to sound competent and professional with absolutely zero information to go on other than a big ball of flame in the sky overhead.

I'm certain all of us have had varying shades of "OH ****!" stories at some point in our careers. You do your best. You learn. You're better for it.

Maybe I'm getting cynical, but a JFK/9-11 sized story now would be cluttered with "instant analysis" and posturing. Plus a ton of stammering and eyebrow frowning. I just don't think this era of communicators has the poise to sum up a situation consisely and clearly with very little to go on. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, although I really don't want the nation to go through that type of disaster again.

Don Lemon couldn't even utter a coherent sentence standing in a building where a tornado just hit.

If something like that happens again, I will find a CBS radio affiliate airing the network's wall-to-to wall coverage for reasons you have stated. IMHO, there still exist some very good network broadcast journalists regulated to the "basement" of radio.

 

[tea and ease]

I was 5 years old, and as I said on another thread I look very similar to Caroline Kennedy. Much more so the younger we go. I remember people starting to stop us to comment on it, yet I didn’t understand the significance of this sudden interest. I do now. And I think that’s why I’m shy. Too much.

 

[HanSenSE]

I was only 3 when it happened so have no memories. The A&E broadcast (it appears not to be on) is one of my windows to the events.

 

[justgladtobehere]

Anybody read Libra by DeLillo. Just remembered I read that.

 

[Amy]

I have a vivid memory of sitting in my second grade classroom and Mrs. Barnes standing in the doorway crying, telling us the President had been shot and sending us home. The only problem with that is I was in first grade. My guess is Mrs. Barnes did come to my first grade classroom and, since she was my teacher the next year, it got jumbled together in my memories. I checked with my brother who was also in grade school that year. He remembers a teacher coming in, whispering something to his teacher, then she told the class and sent them home. I don’t think we walked home together, although it feels like we should have.

Since my first memory is wrong, I’m not sure about the rest of them, but I think I remember getting home and the whole family already there, sitting in the den watching TV. And pretty much being ignored while everyone was glued to the TV for days. I know I didn’t understand what happened when Ruby shot Oswald. I was totally confused about who Ruby was and who got shot. My brother remembers seeing the shooting. My sister has bitched that she missed this big moment of history because that was when she finally took a break from watching TV.

 

[LanceyHoward]

If something like that happens again, I will find a CBS radio affiliate airing the network's wall-to-to wall coverage for reasons you have stated. IMHO, there still exist some very good network broadcast journalists regulated to the "basement" of radio.

Is there still a "basement" of radio left? I know the hourly network news broadcasts stopped a long time ago. Does CBS, or any other network, produce radio reports for its affiliates? For example, in Denver, KOA has a morning news block but I think they only have one street reporter. And that guy may be the only radio reporter in the city.

60 years ago the leading radio stations were generally co-owned by the television stations and shared newsrooms. But those duopolies were banned by the FCC in the 70's Then in the early 80's the FCC did away with the requirement that a radio station had to program some news. As stations were sold the radio and television stations were separated and the radio newsrooms discontinued.

 

[Driftwood]

My mom was three days removed from her 18th birthday. She is currently three days removed from her 78th, and has been binge watching JFK stuff for a month.
My dad was in the Army in Germany. He said they'd just come in off duty. He collapsed on his bed. A horn sounded, and an announcement came across "The President has been killed. We are headed to the East German border."

 

[Liut]

Is there still a "basement" of radio left? I know the hourly network news broadcasts stopped a long time ago. Does CBS, or any other network, produce radio reports for its affiliates? For example, in Denver, KOA has a morning news block but I think they only have one street reporter. And that guy may be the only radio reporter in the city.

1. Yes.
2. CBS radio still airs hourly news broadcasts. It also provides long-form programming for affiliates, as well as packaged reports to major market stations. As for others, Fox radio does hourlies. As far as I know, ABC radio still does top-of-the-hour reports but haven't stumble onto one of late.

 

[Liut]

After thinking about it more, let me just add a little bit to my original response to maumann:
I'd probably be checking out NPR, as well.
In addition, in the likely event that CBS radio turned things over to the television side, I'd hang with them. For how long, don't know. I respect Norah O'Donnell, big fan of Major Garrett, to a lesser extent ditto John Dickerson, ditto Jeff Pegues. But it would probably try to get Gayle King involved. She has a hard time reading the teleprompter on any given day. Cannot imagine her being able to handle all the ad-libbing that would be involved.
I was on the air the morning of 9-11 at an ABC affiliate. ABC radio's New York news department did an outstanding job in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Later, they turned it over to Peter Jennings and that was fine. He was also outstanding but ... as I think maumann would agree, Jennings and his contemporaries were of a different era ... and breed.
EDIT: Neglected to mention Margaret Brennan.

 

[SFIND]

Well, I'll be one of the contrarians apparently and I'll go my grave believing there was a conspiracy, and Oswald was certainly not acting on his own. I can see his patsy statement as believable, or at the very least, can buy Starman's comment that the machinery was put in place to allow this to happen by higher powers.

Has it been proved? I guess that would be a negative. But just way too many strange occurrences to allow me to come to the conclusion a guy who was allowed to flit back and forth to Russia during the height of the Cold War pulled the trigger on his own (from a window I believe that wasn't even the best shot/sightline to complete the kill on the 6th floor) and then he conveniently gets snuffed out two days later by a guy with mob ties who is allowed access to walk right in and take him out.

Not to mention the inconsistencies in the doctors reports from Parkland vs Bethesda, the frickin' magic bullet, a lot of people related to the event dying unusual and early demises, et cetera et cetera.

I've seen both of the documentaries mentioned above, and as assuring as they are in stating there is no conspiracy, there are a number of good books (High Treason by Groden and Livingstone, Crossfire by Marrs to name a couple) that at the very least should leave one very uneasy accepting the solo Oswald theory as fact.

You can go ahead and fit me for my tinfoil hat--I'm comfortable in how I feel about this event and what I believe really happened.

Enjoy your tinfoil hat.

The single bullet is fact, computer models have proven it. No magic involved. (Another horrible legacy of Stone's film; Jennings' doc destroys how he presented it.)

The "inconsistencies" between Parkland and Bethesda were debunked by NOVA, which filmed Parkland docs confirming the autopsy photos match their memories of treating Kennedy.

Plenty of testimony and documentary evidence re: Oswald "flittering back and forth" exisists from Soviets (both from his time in USSR, and in Mexico in '63) and the Cubans (from embassy visit in Mexico). Plenty of other US citizens went to/defected to USSR during Cold War.

Ruby was friends with Dallas cops. Took care of them at his clubs. He was at the police station not infrequently. He was a low-level, boisterous, temperamental mobster who would have been a horrible pick for such a job.

Gerald Posner's book Case Closed tears apart much of what others (like the two books you mentioned) have suggested.

 

[HanSenSE]

I remember during 1/6, ran out to my car during my meal break for an update and KCBS had tapped into the broadcasts of the CBS Radio affiliate in Washington. Thought of that during the early moments of the Niagara Falls crash when CNN was interviewing all the regular suspects on a possible terrorist angle. And I kept thinking. "I want information, not speculation. Can't they go to the local affiliates?"

 

[SFIND]

FRONTLINE AND NBC ARE IN ON IT!

People can believe what they want.

If you want to **** on the work of well-regarded investigative journalists and **** on what actual evidence shows, be my guest.

 

[qtlaw]

Enjoy your tinfoil hat.

The single bullet is fact, computer models have proven it. No magic involved. (Another horrible legacy of Stone's film; Jennings' doc destroys how he presented it.)

The "inconsistencies" between Parkland and Bethesda were debunked by NOVA, which filmed Parkland docs confirming the autopsy photos match their memories of treating Kennedy.

Plenty of testimony and documentary evidence re: Oswald "flittering back and forth" exisists from Soviets (both from his time in USSR, and in Mexico in '63) and the Cubans (from embassy visit in Mexico). Plenty of other US citizens went to/defected to USSR during Cold War.

Ruby was friends with Dallas cops. Took care of them at his clubs. He was at the police station not infrequently. He was a low-level, boisterous, temperamental mobster who would have been a horrible pick for such a job.

Gerald Posner's book Case Closed tears apart much of what others (like the two books you mentioned) have suggested.

The conspiracy believers defy explanation because if they applied their think of a "possible conspiracy" to their day to day life they would not get anything done and would not be vaccinated and protected against every known virus to mankind.

They think that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, simply having a contrary "feeling" or "thought" is enough to cancel out the overwhelming evidence.

Well let's apply that to the food they eat, the cars they drive, the medicine they ingest, the surgical procedures that they are subjected to. That is all based on scientific analysis and testing, relying on the known and rejecting the "unknown" or "unproven".

 

[Liut]

I remember during 1/6, ran out to my car during my meal break for an update and KCBS had tapped into the broadcasts oh the CBS Radio affiliate in Washington. Thought of that during the early moments of the Niagara Falls crash when CNN was interviewing all the regular suspects on a possible terrorist angle. And I kept thinking. "I want information, not speculation. Can't they go to the local affiliates?"

At least get someone from their Buffalo affiliate on-air before a CNN crew arrives. Someone can correct me (maybe things of changed) but when I was in television, we were a CBS affiliate with some sort of cross-affiliation with CNN. But that was a long time ago.
But to your first point, it's so frustrating to watch a group of talking heads on a set with additionals sitting in their house just blabbering on and on when they hardly know any facts yet.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

Amazing how Walter Cronkite was able to ad-lib so deftly, with only scraps of information available being handed to him from every direction at once, some correct, others not so. There's no one I can think of who could hold that kind of composure under stressful conditions like that now without resorting to opinions and heresay.

And the fact that he felt like he needed to remove his glasses to talk to the camera was fascinating as well. He also chokes up just after reading the official announcement.

He was one of a kind.

In Cronkite’s autobiography, he said that when he got off the air, he went to his office to decompress. He said a phone rang outside his office, and, with no secretary around, he picked the phone up himself. He said a woman called and said to tell that Walter Cronkite that she thought it was terrible that he choked up on the air.

Cronkite then identified himself to the woman, called her an idiot and hung up.

 

[maumann]

In Cronkite’s autobiography, he said that when he got off the air, he went to his office to decompress. He said a phone rang outside his office, and, with no secretary around, he picked the phone up himself. He said a woman called and said to tell that Walter Cronkite that she thought it was terrible that he choked up on the air.

Cronkite then identified himself to the woman, called her an idiot and hung up.

Reminded me of the way Jim McKay said, "They're all gone" when word of the firefight at the Munich Airport reached him during the Israeli athlete massacre in 1972.

 

[Liut]

In Cronkite’s autobiography, he said that when he got off the air, he went to his office to decompress. He said a phone rang outside his office, and, with no secretary around, he picked the phone up himself. He said a woman called and said to tell that Walter Cronkite that she thought it was terrible that he choked up on the air.

Cronkite then identified himself to the woman, called her an idiot and hung up.

Awesome pull. In Gary Paul Gates' excellent history of CBS News through the late 1970s, he wrote Cronkite slammed the phone down so hard that Uncle Walter initially thought he had broken it.