Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (2 page)

Dan Rather

In November 1963 Dan Rather—now a preeminent TV newsman and winner of numerous Peabody and Emmy awards—was the thirty-two-year-old CBS bureau chief in New Orleans. The network had sent the native Texan to Dallas to coordinate its coverage of JFK’s campaign fundraising swing through the state. As fate had it, Rather found himself at a film drop-off site just steps from the infamous grassy knoll when the shots rang out.

I
was just past the railroad overpass. You have the School Book Depository here, and the street runs under a railroad overpass, and I was just past that overpass. I was there to take a film drop. Remember: It wasn’t videotape at the time. We were shooting—everybody was shooting—in film by and large. It was to be a place where the White House film crew was to throw off some film, and we had these positions all along the motorcade route. It was the last place. The official motorcade through the city was to end when it went under the underpass. Then they were going out to Trade Mart, where the president was going to speak. So I had positioned myself there to take the last throw of film off the photo truck, which was part of the motorcade, and take it back and have it processed and feed it to New York. I didn’t hear a shot. I had no idea that a shot or shots had been fired. I was frankly sort of relaxed because it was a routine day. When I thought I saw the motorcade flash by, I wasn’t even sure. I could hear the crowd, but I said to myself,
Was that the president’s limousine? Was that the first lady I saw in that car or not?
My first impression—we talk about nanoseconds here—was
Maybe not,
because the rest of the motorcade didn’t come behind it. But then very quickly after that, when the rest of the motorcade didn’t come, I said, “Well, something must have
happened, because the rest of the motorcade isn’t coming through here, and was that the president’s limousine or not? Was that the first lady?”

I thought they were going to the Trade Mart. They seemed to me to take another turn. Now I was supposed to be in charge of our coverage—the whole coverage. I wasn’t the lead correspondent. Our White House correspondent, and a great one, the late Bob Pierpoint, was to beat his piece that day. I was there to facilitate the coverage, so I was out of position. I said to myself,
Wow, if anything has happened, I’ve got to get back to KRLD,
which was our local station that we were using as a feed point; it was only about four blocks away. I’m out of position here, so I took off. There’s a rise—what is now the infamous grassy knoll. As soon as I topped that, a scene of almost unbelievable chaos, even panic: There were men falling on top of their children and wives, people screaming. At that second I said, “Not only has something happened, but something really big has happened.” What was in my head was,
I’m way out of position here. I shouldn’t have been over there.
So I took off, just hightailed it. Yes, you can make a case that I should have stopped and got my notebook out.
I should have stayed there. But my job, remember, was to facilitate our coverage and be the key person in getting the material to New York.

I ran back to the station. I had no idea that shots had been fired. I had no idea that the president was hurt in any way at that time. All I knew was something had happened, something really big and important, and, well, if not important, certainly the crowd thought there was.

So I got back and practically blew the hinges off the door getting into the station. This is KRLD, where we were doing our feed point. I just said, “Get the police radios up. Something has happened.” Tumultuous things happened immediately, and Merriman Smith, the late UPI reporter, had the now-famous bulletin from Dallas.

I knew Parkland Hospital, where they took him, and so I immediately got on the telephone, knowing that if he had been taken there, it wouldn’t be long until all the lines would be busy. I got through to Parkland Hospital, and a switchboard operator—which tells you how long ago this was—put me through first to a doctor, then to a priest. I said, “Has the president been shot?” They said, “Yes, the president’s shot, and the president’s dead.”

“The president’s dead”—what a hammer to the heart and the psyche.

All that was known, and it wasn’t widely known immediately, was that shots had been fired at the president and he had been taken to Parkland Hospital. CBS News had a team operation. We concluded he was dead before the official announcement. On radio we made the announcement that the president was dead. The decision was made by the television part of the CBS News operation, “We’re just going to wait for the official announcement.” The official announcement came shortly after 1:00 p.m.

The CBS people there, including me, with Eddie Barker’s operation, found the Zapruder film by making a lot of telephone calls. When something happens—never mind something this big—the first thing you look for are pictures. Remember, this is not a time when everybody has a camera,
phone or otherwise. Phone cameras didn’t even exist then. Not everybody has a motion picture camera. But what we wanted to do, as every other journalist enterprise wanted to do, was find the pictures. The president’s been shot. The president of the United States is dead in front of thousands of people. There have to be pictures. Motion pictures—what we called in the film days pictures that wiggle, motion-picture pictures—would be preferable, but any kind of photographs. So we started making phone calls.

When I say we, probably twelve or fifteen people started asking questions, making phone calls. Within hours, maybe less than that, a policeman told somebody on the KRLD staff, “There was a guy with a movie camera.”

“Was he an official? Was he government?”

“No, no. I think he was just a citizen.”

Keep in mind there weren’t that many movie cameras around. Who might he be? Somebody thought he might recognize him, and we tracked down phone numbers. Finally, almost miraculously, we got Mr. Zapruder on the phone. He confirmed that, yes, he had filmed the whole thing. Of course the film needed to be developed. We helped make the contact with Kodak to process it overnight. In those days, if you had a home movie camera, it’d take three days, maybe a week, to get it processed. But under these circumstances, you got it processed overnight.

By the next morning, Mr. Zapruder quite wisely had a lawyer. He realized what he had was going to be quite valuable. We had told him, “We’d like to get the film.” He said, “I don’t quite know how that works.”

We wound up in Mr. Zapruder’s lawyer’s office. I thought that CBS News had the only access to Mr. Zapruder, but when I got to the lawyer’s office, which was in downtown Dallas, my heart sank because Dick Stolley—a great reporter at
Life
magazine at that time and later the creator of
People
magazine—was there. Stolley, whom I knew, and knew to be a tough reporter, was working for an outfit with deep pockets—I
hated to see him there. But the lawyer said, “Here’s the situation: We’re going to show you this film. We’re going to show you it one time. Then, in effect, we’ll put it up for bids.”

It wasn’t a screening room. They just put it up on the wall. They showed it one time. I’ll never forget being in that room. My head was back, my eyes were wide, my mouth was agape because, as everyone now knows, it was all laid out there.

The only thing in my mind was:
This is news.
Even I, dumb as a fencepost about a lot of things, knew this was news. I went out of the room—well, flew out of the room. I said to the lawyer: “I’m going to report this on television, what I’ve seen. I’ll be back. Do I have your promise that nothing will happen before I get back?” Now he has another version of this, I think, but I thought I had a promise. Our studio was a short distance away. I ran all the way over, sat down and, from memory, with no notes, recounted what I had seen. They asked me to redo it once because, frankly, they hadn’t liked how I described what I’d seen of Mrs. Kennedy trying to get out of the car—and rightly so. They knew this was a very sensitive point, so they asked me to redo it.

Then I went running back over to the lawyer’s office. When I got there, they asked, “What do you think it’s worth?” I said, “This is way beyond my pay grade. I have no idea.” So I went back to CBS. They said, “Start with ten thousand dollars, and we’ll give you maybe thirty-five thousand/fifty thousand dollars top.” It was a quick conversation with news people, not with the business people. I went back to the lawyer’s office, and Dick Stolley was smiling like a deacon with four aces.

I said to the lawyer, “I want to talk about maybe making—”

“It’s been sold,” he said. “
Life
magazine has bought it.” Naturally I wasn’t happy about that and said, “How could you do this? That was supposed to be—”

“They made a preemptive bid,” he said.

Life
magazine didn’t allow the film to be seen by the public. The public didn’t see the film for, I think, something like twelve years. But even during that period, when I’d seen it only the one time, it played—and still plays to a degree, like a looped videotape—in the back of my head. Sometimes in off moments, when I’m thinking about something else, it’ll
just play. Fair to say, as I get older and my steps grow slower, I think of it less in recent years. But when we have a year like the anniversary year, that videotape plays from time to time, you bet.

Dallas is seen, for better and for worse, in the state as a whole—this was certainly true in my youth and I think to a degree is true now—as the only place in Texas that looked north and east for approval. Most Texans say, “Frankly I don’t give a damn what you think. I’m a Texan,” and such things as “Listen, if it’s true, it ain’t lyin’, you know.” But the rest of the state’s always said, “We don’t care what people in the North think.” But Dallas, partly because it was a commercial center, a banking center, was the only place in the state that looked northeast for approval. To say that Dallas was psychologically devastated wouldn’t be too strong a word. There were people who said, “Texas killed Kennedy,” or “Dallas killed Kennedy.” The city was in a state of shock like the rest of the country, but their shock was exacerbated by the sense of shame—I wouldn’t say guilt—about what had happened there. It took some years to overcome that. There was some pride that Lyndon Johnson had become president, but the Dallas of 1963 is light years away from the Dallas of today.

Lyndon Johnson was not an overwhelmingly popular person when he was a senator or vice president, but it was a sense of “OK, the country has to go through this period. Good that a Texan’s in charge.” With that was a sense of “We Texans hate the idea that this happened here. We hate the idea that it happened at all.” There were other folds underneath this. Texas was and is a gun culture, and the whole business of “How in the world could a president of the United States be assassinated and then the
assassin be assassinated. . . . What kind of state do you have down there? What kind of city do you have down there?” It took a while, particularly for Dallas, to outgrow that.

It changed me. I think the experience changed every American. But perhaps because I was there, it changed me in several senses. First of all, it made me a more skeptical reporter. You never want to descend into cynicism. But skepticism in a reporter—a fairly strong sense of skepticism—is important. So it developed that in me. It also developed in me a stronger sense of life, every day for what there is, because life is fragile. What you most expect frequently doesn’t happen. What you least expect too often happens. It also gave me a renewed respect for those in public service. You can say, as some people were fond of saying when he was alive, “John Kennedy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father has all the money in the world. He has all the money in the world. He had the benefit of education, one thing, another.” But he gave himself to public service and believed deeply in it, and so many people around him did too—not just White House staff people, the Secret Service people. It gave me a renewed sense of patriotism and a renewed sense of love of country, a new respect for public service, those people who dedicate their lives to public service. It also brought me closer to my family.