The Press: Covering the Tragedy

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Never before in history had such momentous news traveled so far so fast. Never before had so many people stood almost immediate witness to a worldshaking event. Within an hour of President Kennedy's assassination, the tragic word had been transmitted to every corner of the earth.

The news went farthest and fastest by radio and TV. In the U.S., all three major networks, alerted by wire service bulletins, set every camera and every newscaster to covering the story of the President's assassination. CBS announced that it was suspending all other programs and all commercials until after Kennedy's funeral on Monday. NBC and ABC made similar announcements but left open the time when they would resume normal schedules.

Center-Screen. Television wasted no time making the most of its advantages over printed journalism, which can hardly match its immediacy or visual impact. Words and pictures reached all the way to Japan, by television signals bounced off the U.S. satellite Relay I. Even before Lee Oswald was formally charged with the murder, CBS put on the air an Oswald interview taped by a New Orleans station last August. ABC telecast a film taken from inside the warehouse where the killer had knelt; the camera played on a litter of chicken bones. Each moment of the unfolding story flashed before millions of eyes: Jacqueline Kennedy, her suit and stockings still bloodstained, getting into a Dallas hearse with her husband's body; the coffin arriving at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington; Lyndon Johnson speaking haltingly through his first public words as President.

On Sunday, the networks were just settling to the sombre task of accompanying the cortege to the Capitol when they switched to Dallas to record Oswald's transfer to the County Jail. To their own astonishment, they caught instead what beyond all doubt was history's most public crime. The cameras caught everything: the gunman lurching into center-screen, detectives raining down on him and wrenching the gun away, Oswald being rushed to the ambulance, his hand dragging limply along the concrete floor.

Outrage & Loss. Newspapers had their greatest impact beyond television's reach, and there they brought the message home as no transitory broadcast could ever do. In Munich, crowds waiting impatiently for the first editions broke into scuffles when the supply proved inadequate; in Rio, beleaguered news vendors called for police protection. Dailies in South Korea's capital, Seoul, were trapped by a time differential, worked all night with skeleton staffs to publish extras at dawn.

Throughout the U.S., the assassination drove all other news off Page One —and sometimes took over almost an entire paper. Predictably, among the nation's newspapers the New York Times's coverage was unique in its thoroughness. The Times gave its first 16 pages to the story and found room for nearly everything—including a separate appraisal of Lee Oswald's marksmanship as a marine (NOT A CRACK SHOT, ran the questionable headline). The Times assigned 40 men to the story in New York, sent six other reporters winging to the aid of Tom Wicker, who was in Dallas with the presidential party.