Covering the Kennedy Assassination: Mike Mosettig

INTERVIEWER:

What were you doing professionally at the time? Were you writing?

MIKE MOSETTIG:

I was all of 21 years old, a senior at GW [George Washington University], working my way through college, at a small news bureau in the press building called the Carpenter News Bureau, which represented papers in Texas, Arkansas, The Boston Herald, Hawaii, and Variety, the show business paper.

I was a junior reporter in the bureau. I was basically working full time and going to college full time.

Basically, I can give you a chronicle of the events. There were two or three of us in the office. We had just had lunch in the office with a fellow who worked for Congressman Jim Wright named Marshall Lyman, and we had just been having this discussion about Texas politics and all the fights that were going on inside the Texas Democratic Party between (Gov. John) Connally and (Sen. Ralph) Yarborough and (Vice President Lyndon) Johnson, and how important it was for Kennedy to carry Texas in 1964 because he was going to lose a lot of votes in the South because of the white rebellion against the civil rights bills that he had become a reluctant supporter of.

So he was going to have to make up those electoral votes someplace, and he was certainly going to have to keep Texas, which he had barely won in 1960, with Johnson's help. That fellow left [Marshall Lyman], and I guess it was about 1:00. I can't remember the exact time.

We were in one office, and in the next office over there were two wire machines, an AP [Associated Press] machine and a UPI [United Press International] machine. In those days, they had teletypes, and you'd hear clack-clack-clack-clack-clack. And when there was major news, it would go ding-ding-ding.

This time it was like thump, thump, clang, clang, loud enough that we could hear it all the way in the next office. And so we shouted out to this copy boy who was there, his name was Phil, and we said, "Phil, what's going on?"

And he went and looked at the machine and said, "Kennedy's been shot." And we said, "Come on, stop joking around." And then he read us the bulletin. It was from Merriman Smith of UPI, that first bulletin, and I think the words were, "Kennedy shot," — I'm trying to remember the first bulletin — it was, "Kennedy shot seriously, perhaps fatally," but certainly indicated that it was — he had been wounded in this gunfire.

And then, I don't know how much longer it was after that, that the next [news] flash came. That was the first flash I had ever seen, not just a bulletin. It was the first one I had ever seen in my brief career, and then the next one came I think within less than an hour, with Mac Kilduff [assistant White House press secretary] announcing that the president was dead.

INTERVIEWER:

So within an hour of the first bulletin…

MIKE MOSETTIG:

Yes, because the car went immediately to Parkland [hospital in Dallas], and they did what they could, which wasn't much because he had been shot in the head. And then we had to go to work. And there are no journalism books which tell you how to cover a presidential assassination.

There weren't any reporters around who had covered the last one, which was 1901 with [President William] McKinley.

The last death of a president was FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] in 1945, and there were a number of journalists around, including Merriman Smith, who filed the bulletin from Dallas, who covered Roosevelt's death in 1945.

But that was the closest thing. And it really is a case, even as young as I was at the time, your instincts have to take over. And what we did in that kind of bureau was to provide a lot of locally oriented coverage from Washington to these papers, and so obviously we covered the gamut.

We had papers in Texas, which obviously is where the new president [Lyndon Johnson] was from, plus we had The Boston Herald where Kennedy was from, and then a lot of my responsibility was doing stuff for Variety. That was my major job in the Bureau was covering Washington kind of things for Variety.

I remember calling up all the Massachusetts congressional offices to get their statements and their reactions, talking to secretaries.

By the time I was calling, most of these offices had prepared statements and that kind of thing, and I was talking them on the phone, and talking to the secretaries or staffers. They were all in a state of shock, and upsetness. And then just going out and doing other reaction stories, which was pretty much what we did that day.

One of my jobs on a Friday was to call all the movie theaters for Variety, and you would get what we called the movie grosses, which are a big thing for Variety. It's the amount of money each film is getting from the major — what were then the downtown movie houses, and I was about ready to make these calls, which I did sort of late afternoon.

I thought to myself, "Well, I don't think anybody is going to go to the movies this weekend," and so I just sort of put that aside. And so we were in the office, I guess, until 9, 10 o'clock that night.

Some time that evening my boss came back to the office. A fellow named Les Carpenter. It was interesting, he and his wife [Liz Carpenter] started this bureau as a young couple coming from Texas to Washington after the war, and she by that time was already working for Johnson in his vice presidential office, writing speeches and stuff like that for Johnson, and he stayed behind and ran the bureau.

He had been up in Maine giving a speech to a bunch of newspaper editors or something, and so he got into the office quite late. These people had known Johnson most of their adult lives, they were very close to the man who was becoming president of the United States. So he was not just involved in a major, major news story, but also a transforming event in his life.

Obviously, it was a transforming event for everybody. I knew then that it was the biggest story I was ever going to cover, and that everything else to some extent would be anti-climax, which it basically was up until 9/11, which was an equally transforming event.

For our generation it was the Kennedy assassination, for (NewsHour anchor) Jim Lehrer's generation it was Pearl Harbor, and for the next generation it was 9/11. And I have a bunch of nieces and nephews who were born sort of in between, in the '60s, and they had nothing like this, no single transforming event. They just had a bunch of minor events, relatively minor events.

INTERVIEWER:

What was the mood at the time?

MIKE MOSETTING:

Stunned, I guess. It's the last thing in the world you expected. There had been all this talk about the atmosphere in Dallas, the atmosphere in Texas. Adlai Stevenson had been roughed up just a few days before, and actually urged the president not to go because of the very hostile atmosphere down there.

But he [Kennedy] had gotten a very warm and friendly reception all through, he and Jackie, because this was the first political trip that Jackie had been on. She had never done a political trip with him, certainly not since he had been in the White House, and this was purely a political trip.

As I say, he had gotten this good reception and friendly and everything like that, and even with everything that was going on in the country, you just don't ever expect the — maybe by the time (President) Reagan was shot, people were more callous, and it was less of a shock because it had already happened less than 20 years before. So yes, there was the complete shock of it.

But in the press building it was just suddenly people really up against it. We all knew this was the biggest story we would ever work on, and we had to produce and had to deliver. And both in terms of our reporting, and since we're writing newspaper copy, write as well as we can. Rise to write to the occasion basically, which, again, we were all trying to do.

It was interesting, that Friday was a beautiful, warm, Indian summer day, and then we all came to work Saturday, and it started pouring, as if the heavens were opening up, and it rained heavily all day Saturday.

That was the day that Kennedy's casket was lying in state in the East Room in the White House, and various people like (President) Truman and (President) Eisenhower, and senators and congressmen and all were coming by to pay respects. And then the next two days, the Sunday and Monday, the two days of the funeral things, it had turned really cold.

And one of the things that occurred to me as I was thinking about this was we didn't even have a television in the office, and very few of the offices there had a television. You relied on radio to some extent. We had the wires, and then we just went out and covered things. There was a lot less of this sitting around and watching something over TV or C-span and things like that, CNN, none of which existed in those days.

So Sunday I covered the procession that went from the White House to the Capitol where the body lay in state overnight. It was only supposed to be up until like 10:00 or something, but they had so many people lined up, 50 or 100,000 people, whatever it was, so they kept the Capitol open all night.

On the procession from the White House to the Capitol, there were many hundreds of thousands of people lining Pennsylvania Avenue, but it was deadly quiet. And then in the distance you started hearing tap-tap-tap, because the only noise was this drum. The only music that played, was the tap-tap of the drum as the caisson and then the cars went by.

Although that did get interrupted by sort of a buzz in the crowd, because people were carrying portable radios, and it was right about the time, or right before — we were at 13th and Pennsylvania Avenue, that the word came by that (Lee Harvey) Oswald had been shot by (Jack) Ruby, and then there was this feeling of my God, are we just going totally nuts? They can't even protect this guy.

The president killed, now the guy we presume who killed him is killed. Is this just turning into some sort of dark comedy or something like that?

And then Monday was the day of the funeral, and that was this big, elaborate — the procession was this big, elaborate thing. They had the units from the military academies, they had bands, and then, of course, Jackie and the family, and then all these leaders from all around the world walking.

It was obviously a total nightmare for the Secret Service to have all these people out there walking, because they basically walked out of the White House, up 17th Street to Connecticut, up to M to St. Matthews Cathedral. That was the route of the funeral procession.

And I remember thinking in the last few days, seeing this company of West Point cadets go by, and then wondering how many of them ended up in Vietnam getting killed, because in 1962 Kennedy addressed the graduating class of West Point and talked about how they were going to have to fight in all these obscure places, and it was more prescient than even he might have imagined, given what happened to so many of them in Vietnam.

And then the other thing I remember was that one of the bands was playing Onward Christian Soldiers, and now in most mainline Protestant churches, it's very politically incorrect to play Onward Christian Soldiers in your more liberal churches. It's one of the hymns we almost never hear anymore.

But as I said, we were covering all of this, you know, being there, etc., and even though I worked with Variety, the story that was being written in New York by Variety was really the story of how this was the first event that the country, other than a sports event or something like that.

But this is the first event in terms of the world, in which the world was glued together by television simultaneously, because it was only the summer before that they had launched the first communications satellite, the Telstar satellite, which would have made live intercontinental broadcasting possible. That certainly was transforming in terms of the United States. The country was glued together from midday Friday through the following Monday.

This was basically nonstop live coverage on the three commercial networks that went on for four days. Because, for example, the NFL made that infamous decision to go ahead with the games on Sunday, which [NFL commissioner] Pete Roselle later then described as the worst decision of his life, but they didn't televise the games, because the only thing on television, and there were only those networks at that time, plus the independent stations like WTTG, and all they were carrying was the post assassination coverage.

INTERVIEWER:

How do you think it changed the way American journalism is done, and the way the media functions?

MIKE MOSETTIG:

Well, it certainly highlighted what had been developing, because Kennedy was really our first television president. He was elected in large part because of television.

The people who listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates thought Nixon won. The people who watched, particularly the first one, thought that Kennedy won because Nixon looked terrible, and Kennedy looked very vibrant.

And given how tight the margin was in that election, so he was elected in part by television, and he was the first president really to use television as an instrument of governing — the press conferences, his public appearances, his whole demeanor, and then his assassination and funeral and everything becoming national and global. It definitely highlighted the supremacy of television in the news hierarchy, and it would only grow in the future.

You'll probably see — the networks will probably be running reminiscences of that coverage. They did back for the 25th anniversary. The big difference you'll notice is how willing they were to just turn on the camera and let the picture tell the story. I commented to [television journalist] Roger Mudd how restrained he was in his talking, and he said that the fellow who was running the CBS Washington Bureau had put out orders to the correspondents to only talk if there was something they needed to say, otherwise let people watch and listen to what's going on.

If a similar thing happened now, it would just be this endless jabbering. I remember Princess Diana's funeral. I finally had to switch to C-span and watch the BBC because the U.S. networks just couldn't stop this yacking.

INTERVIEWER:

What was the one lesson you learned back then at such a young age that has stayed with you today about covering major events like this?

MIKE MOSETTIG:

I think what guided me through that one is that your instincts have to carry you through, that you really have to trust your instincts. Like anything else, you need good editing.

But you just have to know where the story is, and just do whatever you damn well can to get it, and somehow do it. I guess the tremendous emotional backdrop of whatever you're going through and whatever certainly your country is going through — you don't really put your emotions on hold, but I guess this is part of the instinctive makeup of a journalist is that they go on hold somehow.

You don't command yourself to put your emotions on hold. They're there and they're sort of boiling, endless sorts of combinations –sadness, but combined with a certain amount of anger, particularly as the weekend wore on, and particularly after Oswald was shot. My feeling was the yahoos have just taken over the country, after we had this incredible, incredibly exciting three years of the Kennedy presidency. But you can't let that get in the way of doing your job. You really do have to get out there.

It was interesting when I have compared it with 9/11 here, that there were a couple of fairly prominent journalists in 1963 who just — I think they were mainly older ones, but they just froze and couldn't put their fingers to a typewriter and produce copy. The way this gang (the reporters at the NewsHour) performed the day of 9/11, nobody froze, not around here, and I didn't hear any stories in the business of anybody freezing on 9/11. Whatever the emotions were that you were going through, people just had to go on.

And then about two or three years ago, Sarah Bradford, the British writer, wrote a fabulous biography of Jackie called "America's Queen." And I was sitting there reading it, sitting on the deck at a friend's house down on the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore.

And I finished the chapter on the assassination and funeral, and I just started crying. And thinking, this is one hell of a delayed reaction. It was 30-some years after the event, and for some reason all of this just poured out of me as I was sitting there on the deck reading a book.

INTERVIEWER:

How did this affect your film reporting?

MIKE MOSETTIG:

I just said well, I don't think anybody is going to go to the movies, and it turned out nobody did go to the movies. I think they closed all the movie theaters. And the major piece that I recall, and I haven't been able to find the clips, the major piece I recall writing for Variety was the effect that the Kennedys have on Washington, that they had taken — or at least that was our feeling.

I don't know if it was the reality — but our feeling was they had taken this little southern town where most of the social activity certainly at the time, and to some extent it is still true, but certainly at the time most of the social activity was in people's houses.

There were no decent restaurants here, the nightlife was sporadic, and we started seeing it change into a really interesting, fun place. That was the piece that I was trying to write. It diverted a lot of my attention that weekend, trying to get both the words and tone of that story right.

And the other story I remember from the time — it wasn't my story, but it was one of the rare times during the entire weekend that I was watching television. I was at a friend's house watching TV because we didn't have a TV in our house.

I think ours was broken or something. For a long time in my life we didn't have a television in our house. We didn't have one that weekend, and Hal Walker, he ended up as a network reporter, but at that time he was a reporter for Channel 9. He and Mary McGrory [of the Washington Evening Star] both wrote stories quoting a conversation between Pat Moynihan, who was then in the Labor Department, but he was very close to the Kennedy people.

He was in the White House, and physically at the building, along with someone named Bill Walton, who was doing arts and architectural kind of stuff, for example, working for Jackie in preserving Lafayette Square. And Walton says to Moynihan, "We'll never laugh again," and Moynihan says, "Oh, we'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again." And I thought well, that's a very true and powerful statement, but I'm only 21 years old.

INTERVIEWER:

Any additional observations?

MIKE MOSETTIG:

You know, it was only the fall of that year, the Labor Day weekend of that year, that the networks — at least two of the networks, CBS and NBC — went from the 15-minute newscasts to half-hour newscasts. Kennedy did interviews for both of the programs, and his one with (Walter) Cronkite presaged potential American involvement in overthrowing the government of South Vietnam, which, of course, led to our much more deepening involvement.

At that point our role in Vietnam was important, but peripheral. We had 16,000 advisers at that time in Vietnam, and a half a million troops in a few years. It sort of telegraphed this decade of turmoil that was ahead. The advent of half-hour nightly news, which became such a staple in American life, came in this year of the civil rights revolution, the assassination in Vietnam, and then the Kennedy assassination, and then life was never the same for any American who was alive at the time.