Abstract
The huge dump of documents in Washington this autumn showed that more than half a century of effort failed to unearth more relevant facts about the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas, and its aftermath than the first wave of reporting provided at the time. The earliest efforts by newsmen who preferred hard news to fanciful theory created a worthy first draft of history, despite the efforts of a second wave to distort it.
On the Friday that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, most of the White House Press flew back to Washington with the remains. Stories from the capital dominated: the huge coffin, the widow in her bloodstained clothes, stunned nation, wondering world, new president.
Dallas had been left with the rump of the story. The essential facts were already out. Marine sharpshooter who spent four years in the Soviet Union after discharge. In Dallas with young Russian wife Marina because mother lived there. Given lift to job in Dallas book depository that morning with long parcel containing “curtain rods”. Cheap rifle found near depository window bore his prints. Arrested in movie theatre after shooting cop who stopped him. Plenty of questions hanging, though (what was a book depository?).
By nightfall, local reporters were outnumbered by the “Yankee Press”, as defensive Texans called out-of-state reporters, and correspondents from every British national newspaper, the BBC and ITN. I went down from the New York bureau of the Daily Mirror.
Oswald had, not surprisingly, been on the FBI watch list. Agents interviewed him only days earlier about a visit to a Cuban exile group in New Orleans, his birthplace. An international plot looked likely, although Soviet and Chinese governments speedily disavowed involvement.
Dallas did its polite best to make us feel we had come a long way for nothing. The assassination was a tragedy, sure, but the blame lay elsewhere. Oswald was obviously some kind of political kook, presumably a communist. People got shot in Texas all the time, you hear? We were fascinated by the matter-of-fact attitude to firearms and their frequent use. Dallas was the murder capital of the country.
First thing was to trawl through the version so far, recheck Oswald's movements. The neighbour and the long parcel. The dramatic cinema arrest. It was suggested the elderly rifle found might not be capable of getting off three shots in the time required. A local gunsmith produced an identical weapon and showed that it was. Plenty of experts affirmed that a Marine “sharpshooter” like Oswald could easily hit his target. Consensus emerged that the police version of Oswald's actions was plausible - so far as it went.
A priority was to get a look at Oswald, perhaps question him. We got district attorney Henry Wade to produce him, which gave Jack Ruby, the police groupie, the first sight of his prey.
The next high point would be Oswald's transfer from police headquarters to the county jail at the other end of main street on Sunday morning. After that, we could expect to be back a few months later for the trial of the century. Killing a president was not the federal offence it subsequently became and Wade planned a murder trial like any other to send Oswald to the electric chair.
Then Ruby blew the story open again and a second wave of reporters flooded the story with a mission to move it on. Already, about half the 100-strong media mob in the police basement belonged to the motley fringe attracted by great events: freelances, self-styled “investigators”, opportunist lawyers, fantasy publishers.
Soon their numbers doubled, swamping the story sites and creating the phenomenon that characterised the Dallas saga: its extraordinary power of distorting recollection. Old-timers - as first-wave reporters came to see themselves - were maddened by the readiness with which sources would change their stories. Most of them had never been exposed to the kind of pressure or persuasion exerted by incomers desperate for a new angle or support for a hypothesis, and many succumbed. People who 24 hours earlier had given a firm account of what they heard and saw would, a second or third time around, tell a completely different story. Some key sources became interview addicts, adapting so many versions to suit questioners that they could never find their way back to the original.
Reporters who had arrived while trails were fresh found themselves having to match or demolish (newsdesks usually preferred the former) second-wave stories based on false assumptions, misunderstandings or a wilful failure to check. Many a “mystery” got into print simply because a reporter - or an editor -refrained from asking an obvious question.
The first-wave reporters were as open as anyone to evidence that Oswald and/or Ruby had been involved in some kind of conspiracy But none was ever found. No first-waver I knew ever came to believe they were anything other than a couple of loose cannons from the gun-decks of the strange ship Dallas, rolled together by fate.
The first draft pulled together by those who kept their nerve has stood the test.
Postscript
Oswald was originally scheduled to be moved from the police building soon after 8am. Television networks asked for that to be changed to 10am so it could go live on network news. At the original time Ruby would have been home in bed.
Early television-assisted newspaper reporting
Not everyone believed the police would make a public procession of Oswald's transfer to the county jail, where a volatile mob was assembling. I thought he would have been quietly taken down there during the night. The media might be resentful but would see it had been a wise precaution. I stayed in my hotel across the street dictating an early story and watching the scene in the basement on television. The copytakers in London kept the script on their noticeboard for years. Reporter broke off, said Shit, they've shot him. Quick, put me over to the news desk.