Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (11 page)

I knew that, and I understood at that time that Oswald acted on his own. It was not a Soviet move, not at all. He was just a psychiatric case, someone who reminds me of the Boston tragedy with the Tsarnaev brothers from Dagestan. The Soviets would do their best to dissociate themselves from Oswald and just call him what they thought he was. When he was killed, I think the Soviets even felt relieved that they didn’t have to now prove anything
because the guy was no longer in this world. That was a solution, sort of.

The Soviets were somewhat concerned, because Kennedy was known to be a reasonable guy, an intelligent guy. But Johnson was an unknown, and the Russians were somewhat fearful. Who knew what would come next? Maybe there would be another attempt, another Bay of Pigs, only more successful.

Any new president in the United States was viewed with fear, suspicion, and distrust in old Soviet Russia. Thank God, things changed since then. The Cold War is over, and the current Russian regime looks at what has been going on in the United States in a more realistic way, not tainted by ideology. It’s Russian national pride, Russian national interest, economics; that’s okay. But that mentality of spreading Communism around the world is no more. It’s all over.

Darwin Payne

A newspaper reporter for the
Fort Worth Press
and the
Dallas Times Herald,
Darwin Payne, then age twenty-six, also reported and did commentary for
Newsroom,
the groundbreaking public television news show on KERA-TV. He taught journalism at Southern Methodist University for thirty years and is recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Dallas history. Payne was at the
Fort Worth Press
city desk rewriting a story on Jackie Kennedy when word of the shots came.

T
he political climate in Dallas was very toxic; it was very tense. The extreme right-wing elements had been very active before, and there was a lot of work on preparing for the Kennedy visit because most people thought something might happen. They were very concerned about that. There was a terrific publicity campaign to ensure that he had a good visit and that the people received him with cordiality and support.

No one anticipated someone taking a shot at Kennedy, but they did anticipate a disturbance of some kind. In fact, the City Council the week before had passed an ordinance making it illegal to disturb a public meeting, because that had been done during the Adlai Stevenson visit just a month before. A terrific struggle had taken place between the right-wing elements and the supporters of Stevenson and the United Nations. It happened when LBJ came in 1960 campaigning as vice president under Kennedy. He was mobbed at the Adolphus Hotel, and we were really concerned about what might happen.

Fort Worth didn’t have the toxic climate Dallas had at the time, and we
knew that Kennedy’s reception in Fort Worth was just a very brief appearance after spending the night at the Texas Hotel. The main visit was in Dallas. There were rifts in the Texas Democratic Party at that time. Senator Yarborough was a liberal Democrat; Lyndon Johnson was identified as a conservative Democrat, and Yarborough was very angry with Johnson. Yarborough refused to ride in the car with Johnson, and Kennedy ordered him to take part in the parade motorcade.

My assignment that day was to be on the rewrite desk. I was to take story notes from a reporter on the scene at Love Field and a reporter at the Trade Mart. They were going to talk about Jackie Kennedy and how she looked, the crowd’s reaction, all of her reactions as well. I was to piece together that story for our afternoon paper, and we were past deadline. Deadline for an afternoon paper was 11:30—and he arrived of course at about 12:30—so we were holding up the paper, and there was a lot of pressure to get a lot of material in that late edition story.

I was at a typewriter in the city room in the
Times Herald
office, which was about five blocks from the School Book Depository. We had a police reporter who was monitoring the police radio, and that was being relayed to our city editor. We were all sitting around our desks, doing whatever we were supposed to do at the time, and the city editor suddenly said, “He’s been hit! They’re sending code three—homicide detectives to School Book Depository.”

“He’s been hit with what?” I asked. I was thinking he might have been hit with a sign, as Adlai Stevenson had been hit with a sign the month before, but they didn’t know for sure. The city editor asked me and another reporter to run down to the School Book Depository to see
what was happening there, so the other reporter, Pyle Rosenfield, and I took off. I saw bedlam there. There were police officers with rifles, a fire truck, spectators who were in shock. I started interviewing people, trying to determine what had happened and trying to find eyewitnesses to it.

I was operating on one track, as a journalist. Luckily I was a journalist—because if I hadn’t been, I would have been totally devastated. I would have been unable to do anything. But I sincerely felt a duty to get to the truth of the story, so I worked very hard. I was thinking of it, as everyone was, as a historic moment, that we really had to do a good job on getting information.

I thought the right-wing elements that had been so dominant in the city for so long had been guilty of the assassination. I anticipated that they were holed up in the School Book Depository and that I and the rest of us would ultimately see a shootout or something like that. I thought they would be up on that sixth floor and soon surrounded by police. That of course didn’t happen.

None of the eyewitnesses had seen the assassin, Oswald, and they generally had the same description: Most of them thought the shots came from the School Book Depository. Some were uncertain. They weren’t positive about how many shots were fired, but a number of them said three, and I thought their stories were quite reasonable. They didn’t mention an individual firing shots from the “grassy knoll,” but there were some who thought that the shots might have come from that area.

I found out about Zapruder by interviewing eyewitnesses. He was a garment manufacturer who had the building next door to the School Book Depository, and they said, “Our boss has pictures of it. He was taking moving pictures.” In his office, Zapruder had the television going. It was giving all the news accounts about the shots being fired at the president. It was being said that Kennedy was wounded, perhaps fatally. He was very much upset over what he had seen. He was in tears much of the time, very distraught. Zapruder said, “No, no, he’s dead. I know. I was watching through my viewfinder, and I saw his head explode like a firecracker.” So
I assumed that Kennedy was dead at that moment. Shortly thereafter, the news came that he was dead.

Zapruder’s film was on top of a filing cabinet in his office, and I saw the camera there. I was trying to get him to take the film and the camera to the
Times Herald,
assuring him that we would have it developed to see if it was as good as he thought it was. The random thought occurred of course that,
Heck, I could grab that camera and take off.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that, but I did call the publisher of the
Times Herald
—I’d never met him—and told him what I had and suggested that he send a car down to the School Book Depository with the words
Dallas
Times Herald
on the side to assure Zapruder that we would take care of him and the film. But Zapruder didn’t want to do that. He wanted to turn it over to the FBI and/or Secret Service, which ultimately he did.

While I was there, they came in. They had with them Harry McCormick, the legendary police reporter for the
Dallas Morning News,
and they all went into an office with Zapruder. I started following them in because I wanted to be there myself, and they said, “No, no, who are you?” I told them. They said, “You can’t be here,” and I said, “Here is Harry McCormick of the opposition. If he’s there, I have to be there.” So they kicked McCormick out and then took off with the film to have it developed.

I saved the notebook that I had when I went to the School Book Depository on November 22 and used to take notes while interviewing eyewitnesses and Abraham Zapruder. I’ve treasured it since that time. It’s the only notebook I saved from all my reporting days. It’s in pencil. These are notes I took when I went up to Zapruder’s office afterward. They were quite sketchy. I’m not terribly proud of them, but they’re original.

“I got film,” he said. “I saw it hit him in the head. They were going so fast. He slumped over with the first shot. With the first shot, he bent
over and grabbed his neck as he sort of did. The second burst hit him in the head. It opened up. Couldn’t be alive.

“Jackie was beside him. After the last shot, she crawled over the back of the car.”

Then I got his name, “Zapruder, Abraham, president.”

This is from another eyewitness.

“We saw the president making it under the triple underpass. We heard something that sounded like a truck backfired or a firecracker. Saw the president slump forward. And we thought he was ducking. A lot of people hit the dirt. The president’s car hesitated for a moment, then lurched forward. A lot of people hit the ground. Then, a lot of confusion. I didn’t know what happened. Couldn’t pick up anything on the radio. When we heard the president was hit on the radio, the police arrived.”

I went back after that to the School Book Depository. I was able to go up on the sixth floor and look out the window, see the sniper’s lair where the boxes were arranged. Then I went back to the office. It was getting late in the afternoon, and the city editor told me, “Here’s an address, 1025 North Beckley. This is where Oswald lived. Go there, and see what you can find.” It wasn’t far away, just over the viaduct in Oak Cliff.

I didn’t hear Oswald’s name at the School Book Depository; I heard it when I got to the office. It had been revealed that he had shot the police officer, Tippit, and that he’d been a defector to the Soviet Union before. So we knew quite a bit about him by the middle of the afternoon. When the officer was shot, there were other reporters there from the
Times Herald
. We had a little confab because an officer had been shot over in Oak Cliff. Maybe some of us should go. I didn’t want to go over to Oak Cliff because I thought the assassin or assassins were still in the School Book Depository building. I wanted to stay and see what happened there. Others thought the shooting had a connection to the assassination. They took off for the Texas Theatre and saw Oswald captured, but I missed that opportunity because I was intent on seeing what happened at the School Book Depository.

Saturday night I was at the police station on my normal beat as the Saturday night police reporter; I stayed up very late there. Sunday morning I slept late but got up in time to see Ruby shoot Oswald. I went to the newspaper again, did some work there, and then went to Ruby’s apartment in Oak Cliff and interviewed people there. I’d never heard Ruby’s name, but many other reporters did know of him. The other reporters thought that Jack Ruby was sort of a tough character, owning those night clubs. He was a police buff. The things we generally now know about him, they confirmed right at that moment. They understood him for what he was: somebody who liked to hang around the police department, give passes to his Carousel Club, and try to ingratiate himself with the police.