New Book Reveals Press Secrets About JFK's Death

By: Joe Strupp A new book from The Freedom Forum chronicling how the press covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy offers some interesting tales that may not be well-known.

Similar to its 2002 publication, Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11, the new Freedom Forum book, titled President Kennedy Has Been Shot, includes first-person accounts from more than 40 journalists who covered that historical tragedy on Nov. 22, 1963. The book is slated for November publication to coincide with the 40th anniversary of that tragic day in Dallas.

Among the revelations and anecdotes in the book:

* Because so few people showed up at Lee Harvey Oswald's funeral, seven reporters assigned to cover the event had to serve as pallbearers. "I refused," Associated Press correspondent Mike Cochran recalls in the book. "Then Preston McGraw of UPI stepped up. So then, there's one thing I knew, stupid as I may be, inexperienced as I may have been, if UPI was going to be a pallbearer, I was damn sure going to be a pallbearer."

* When Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post who was Newsweek's Washington bureau chief at the time and a good friend of the Kennedys, talked to the first lady just hours after the assassination, her first comments were a bit startling. "Do you want to hear what happened?" Jackie Kennedy asked Bradlee. "Of course, you know, this is all off the record."

* Reporters aboard Air Force One for the flight from Dallas to Washington, which carried Kennedy's body and newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson, were so busy keeping up with the details of the day that they practically had to kick Johnson out of their compartment several times because he kept bothering them while they worked. "This was the only time in my life that I ever felt like saying to the President of the United States, 'I've got a lot of work to do,'" Newsweek's Charles Roberts recalls in the book.

* Aboard a State Department plane carrying six members of Kennedy's cabinet and several staffers to Tokyo for trade talks at the time of the assassination, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger helped the nervous occupants pass the time as the plane headed back to Washington by organizing a poker game, in which he won $800. "I shouldn't have won," he remembers. "I should have lost. I was apalled."

* CBS broadcaster Bob Schieffer, then a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, took a call in the newsroom about two hours after the shooting from Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, who lived in Fort Worth and wanted a ride into Dallas. Schieffer and the paper's auto editor ended up driving her there in a Cadillac that a local dealer had allowed the newspaper to use in exchange for a review of the vehicle. "One of the oddest things about this," Schieffer recounts for the book, "is that she had actually worked as the governess for the publisher of the Star-Telegram shortly before the assassination took place."

* Sympathetic readers of the Dallas Times Herald sent the paper more than $200,000 in unsolicited donations for Marina Oswald, wife of Lee Harvey Oswald, which the paper forwarded to her.

* After convincing Oswald's wife to be interviewed, Life magazine wanted to keep other journalists from speaking with her so the magazine paid for her and her child to stay in a suite at Dallas's Adolphus Hotel. "We told them to order anything they wanted from room service," recalls Life's Richard Stolley. "But for God's sake, don't leave."

Co-author Susan Bennett said such stories and behind-the-scenes factoids are key to the book's appeal. "So many people have a 'where were you when' story to tell in relation to the assassination of JFK," she said. "We realized that reporters who don't normally like to talk about themselves have great stories to tell."

The book, due for release Nov. 12, also includes a CD narration of events by CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, who was among those in Dallas on the day of Kennedy's killing.