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GEORGE CLOONEY: If you're an American of a certain age, television anchorman Walter Cronkite was your hero.
He covered the Second World War, reported from Vietnam, explained the space race.
To us, he was Uncle Walter, but he was also the preemminent newsman of the 20th century, and no story was bigger than the one that broke at 1 PM, Friday, November 22, 1963.
From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 P.M. Central Standard Time.
CLOONEY: November 21, 1963, President Kennedy is leaving for a 3-day swing through Texas.
He and Mrs. Kennedy will visit Austin, the state capital; San Antonio; Houston; Fort Worth; and Dallas... Dallas, the oilman's city, where Kennedy and his running mate Lyndon Johnson had narrowly been elected in 1960, the city where some of the most conservative organizations in the country were based, controlled by men and women who thought that, in seeking to negotiate an end to the Cold War, the president was selling out to the Soviets.
Dallas was more of a class society than most of the rest of Texas, which is important to understand the context in which the Kennedy assassination happened.
It had a reputation of being tough on Democratic candidates for national office that came.
Adlai Stevenson, Democratic candidate for president had been there.
He and his party had been roughed up a bit, but the point is that this came together in Dallas in a way that didn't anyplace else in the state.
Being a native of Dallas, it was a Dallas that I hardly knew, but for the rest of the world, Dallas was really recognized as this center of hatred and intolerance, and I only really came to understand that after the events on November 22.
ANNOUNCER: President Kennedy and the first lady venture from the White House to attend a round of... CLOONEY: The storm of history was about to strike Dallas, America, and the world.
At its center would be a young president who'd offered a vision of hope and whose life of promise was to be cut short.
ANNOUNCER: ...the 2 1/2 days of celebration.
CLOONEY: The manner of his passing means the name John Fitzgerald Kennedy will never be forgotten, and nor will that of Walter Cronkite, who will be forever linked with that dreadful day in Dallas.
By 1963, Walter Cronkite was not only a big name at CBS.
He was also a big name in America.
Exactly 8 weeks before the assassination of John Kennedy, 'Newsweek' chose him for their cover story.
He was 46, the same age as the president.
CRONKITE: I leave for work every morning with a briefcase full of papers, but they might as well be sandwiches.
Nothing you can carry in a briefcase is going to tell you how the day's news will break.
You just have to ride with it and put it all together as it happens.
CLOONEY: Cronkite had been a reporter for 30 years, first as a radio announcer in Kansas City, then as a distinguished wire service correspondent for United Press.
His byline appeared in every newspaper in the United States... but it was television that made him.
BOB SCHIEFFER: I'm not sure that if Walter Cronkite walked into a television station today, he could get hired.
They would say, 'Well, he doesn't look like an anchor.'
He didn't. He looked like a regular guy.
HAMPTON: Cronkite was the old school of journalism.
He was the one to which almost every journalist I've ever known looked up to as being the model to which we should aspire.
SCHIEFFER: He was like the people he was reporting for.
he had been there. He was an old wire service guy.
Ed Murrow never liked him very much because he thought he wasn't really that much of an intellectual.
Walter was an intellectual, but in a very different kind of way because he had this curiosity that never stopped.
What scripts have we got in so far?
CLOONEY: To Walter Cronkite would fall the task of telling America and the world that Kennedy had been assassinated.
It was a moment in which he would have to summon the experience of a lifetime.
NARRATOR: Cronkite reads copy against the stopwatch.
BILL CLINTON: He was both a good reporter and a powerful television presence.
You have to be hungry for the story, but not hungry for the glory.
It was a remarkable combination of being ambitious in a healthy way to be the dominant television journalist of his time, for example, but he'd lived this long, rich, varied life, and it kept him from doing things that he knew he shouldn't do.
CLOONEY: Kennedy and Cronkite were Second World War veterans.
Kennedy had commanded a torpedo patrol boat in the Pacific and distinguished himself by saving his colleagues when the boat was sunk.
Cronkite had been a war correspondent, first in London, then, after D-Day, in Europe, landing in a glider with Allied troops.
So, to use an expression which would later appear in Kennedy's inauguration address, they had both been 'tempered by war.'
MAN: Cronkite said during the war that he woke up every morning trying to beat the hell out of the Associated Press and the International News Service, the other great wire service of the day, and he took that competitive spirit with him to CBS.
CLOONEY: Walter Cronkite was really a newspaper man, and newspaper men don't always adapt to television, but Cronkite was a natural.
Through the 1950s, he hosted the political conventions that selected presidential candidates and the elections themselves.
The term 'anchorman' was coined for him.
He quickly came to understand what television was capable of and how it would change the face of American politics, and when, in 1962, he was offered the anchor chair of the 'CBS Evening News,' he accepted with one condition.
He wanted to be the managing editor.
Nobody in television knew what a managing editor was, so there was no problem.
'You want to be managing editor? You're the managing editor,' but Walter knew.
A managing editor-- he felt, and they agreed-- gave him the ultimate power of what stories would be on the air and how they would be handled.
BONN: He wanted the place to look as much as possible like a real, working newsroom, and that's why he insisted on that horseshoe where he's the copy editor and we, the writers, are sitting around it and we're writing his stuff so that the audience doesn't get the impression of a television studio.
They're in the newsroom.
There's a sense of intimacy, and that had not been done before.
NARRATOR: ...and camera lines that carry the pictures to the monitors.
CLOONEY: By 1963, the war correspondent turned television reporter turned anchorman was riding high.
Millions of viewers tuned in every night to watch him, and the executives at CBS were persuaded that news needed more than 15 minutes every night.
To launch the extended 'CBS Evening News,' Walter Cronkite interviewed the president.
It was September 1963.
8 weeks later, their lives would collide with history in the most dramatic way, but here on Cape Cod, they sat down to discuss Kennedy's policies, including the latest on Vietnam.
Walter took his wife Betsy.
The president obligingly posed for photographs, and Walter and Betsy may have fallen for the charm of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States.
The oldest president to hold office, Dwight Eisenhower, had been succeeded by the youngest, and the newsmen were gonna make the most of it.
He was so young and so dynamic and so different than his predecessors.
Television was a new medium, and Kennedy had mastered that medium and mastered it in a way that helped Walter Cronkite and CBS and all the other networks really grab the imagination of the American people.
I think he touched an emotional chord that had never really been touched before because of that genius on television.
NARRATOR: All through September and October and the first week of November, the candidates carry their message to the people.
CLOONEY: Before 1960, presidential campaigns had been fought, won, or lost in black and white on the pages of people's newspapers.
When Jack Kennedy seized the nomination of the Democratic Party in the summer of 1960 and the presidency in November, it was still in black and white, but it was on television.
The Kennedys had money and they spent it on airtime.
They knew they had to appeal to a new generation.
NARRATOR: So John F. Kennedy, the 43-year-old senator from Massachusetts becomes president-elect of the United States.
CLOONEY: When JFK, as he came to be known, was elected, his inauguration speech electrified the nation, who watched it on television.
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
[Cheering and applause] He was one of us.
He was of the same age as we were.
Usually, the president is a little older.
He was a World War II veteran, which millions of people in this country were.
He was well-educated, well-spoken.
Once he got into the White House, we had these pictures of John-John and his sister Caroline running around the Oval Office.
The whole package was wonderful.
He was an exceedingly good-looking guy, and his wife was very good-looking.
The children were charming.
They exploited that to the hilt.
They sold the family, and they made access for photographers and film crews, and they realized they had an extraordinary political commodity just in the beauty of the family.
I was finding what all the other reporters who'd covered him through the campaign had learned years ago, the extraordinary charisma and charm of this man who seemed to move always in his own high pressure.
He created weather around him as some film stars and people do.
The things they did in their spare time were extraordinarily attractive, I mean, sailing off Hyannis.
They had fabulous raw material to work with, and they realized it.
Kennedy was smart, and he was bright, and he was handsome, and he was witty.
He was very funny. He was suave.
He was cool, and he was the new world.
This was what was going to be, and he was promising great things.
He said we could fly to the moon, and we all believed him.
CLOONEY: In that November week in 1963, President Kennedy went to Texas at the invitation of State Governor John Connally.
He intended to deal with divisions among Southern Democrats, but he also had an eye to re-election.
So the trip had an odd feeling, party business but also all the hallmarks of a campaign-- the open limo, the crowds, a few supporters with placards for 1964.
RATHER: This was a political trip one year away from the 1964 re-election campaign he expected to be a tough campaign.
He thought he possibly could lose, given the fact that he won by such a narrow margin in 1960, and this trip was a political trip top to bottom.
Both Lyndon Johnson and Governor John Connally had said to the president, 'Listen.
'The Republicans are gonna raise a lot of money 'for the 1964 election, and you better get down here early 'and settle some of the money that we got the last time for 1964.'
CLOONEY: If the Kennedys had any doubts about their popularity in Texas, they must have been reassured by the crowds in San Antonio and Houston, where they honored Albert Thomas, the congressman who had secured the space center for Houston.
[Applause] A few hours later, they flew on to Fort Worth, and the following morning, the day the president would go to Dallas, the crowds at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth treated him like a rock star.
SCHIEFFER: The president, the vice president, all of them were gathered at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth that morning.
10,000 people had turned out the night before when Air Force One landed at Carswell Air Force Base.
He got an overwhelming reception.
MACNEIL: In the morning at Fort Worth when Kennedy came out to talk and then walked around the perimeter shaking hands with everybody and the crowd was delirious, absolutely delirious, I was inside the Secret Service, just near them, beside them, right beside Kennedy a few times.
I walked beside him with Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House at the time, and Kennedy had shaken all these hands, and he pulled a clean, white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands on it, and it made the handkerchief very dirty, and he said, 'Well, that was all right,' and he was very cool about it, about this explosion of rapture in all these faces.
CLOONEY: Air Force One made the short flight from Fort Worth to Dallas.
At Love Field, the crowds were just as large.
If this was the hate capital of the world, there was little evidence of it.
It had been raining in Fort Worth, but in Dallas, the sun was shining, It had been raining for the 10-mile motorcade through the city to the Trade Mart.
RATHER: The president, first lady, everybody connected with the Kennedy Administration had to be breathing a great sigh of relief and smiling a bit and maybe punching each other in the ribs saying, 'You know what?
'We can carry Texas again in this next election.
Look at these crowds,' and based in the warmth and the size of these crowds, they had good reason to think that.
CLOONEY: We cannot understand the tragedy of Dallas and the grief it caused without understanding what went before.
When the president stepped into his limousine for the drive into Dallas, he'd been in office for little over 1,000 days.
Some Americans reviled him and his liberal views, but many, especially the young, felt they'd been on a journey with him through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Kennedy's restraint had helped avoid nuclear war, into West Berlin to face down the Russians, and on to the troubled cities of the American South, where Kennedy forced schools and universities to admit black students.
CLINTON: We were at the end of an era and the beginning of the new one, and President Kennedy, I think, seemed to embody that.
So he seemed to be very well-respected around the world.
He had really hit his stride in foreign policy in the last year of his presidency, and it seemed to just be bursting with promise just as America seemed to be bursting with promise.
He represented a young, a vibrant, a dynamic America on the move once again.
He opened global vistas to the idea that we could somehow contain the spread of nuclear weapons.
That was a huge, historic moment.
CLOONEY: That summer, too, Kennedy spent 10 days in Europe expanding on the principles of freedom.
He went to Berlin, where the Russians had been building a wall to divide the city, and a million Berliners turned out to greet him.
KENNEDY: As a free man, I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'
[Crowd cheering] CLOONEY: In September, 8 weeks before the trip to Texas, he set off on a tour of America, stopping in 11 states.
It was a triumphal progress, and now in November, it was Dallas.
We'd been expecting something to happen, but that seemed totally blown away by the rapture of the Dallas crowds once we got into the main part of town.
RATHER: Until the turn was made in front of the School Book Depository, it had been a great day for the president and for the first lady and for their hopes of changing their image in Texas.
MACNEIL: We had turned into Dealey Plaza, and there was a bang, and we all said, 'What was that? Was that a shot?'
and then there were two more bangs close together, like bang, bang.
I said, 'Those are shots. Stop the bus.'
[Siren] WOMAN: There was 3 shots, and we didn't know what happened except that the presidential car ahead of us sped up immediately, and then one of the fellows in the bus knew a gunshot when he heard it, and he said, 'Those are gunshots.'
The air was filled with the most incredible screaming.
It was as though every choir in the country was gathered there and they were all signing out of tune, out of key, you know, off key.
It was a most incredible sound.
CLOONEY: When Lee Harvey Oswald shot John Kennedy from a window of the Texas Book Depository, one reporter above all others grabbed the story and knew what to do with it.
Merriman Smith was a correspondent for United Press International.
Smitty knew Walter Cronkite because they shared a common bond--the training of a wire service reporter.
Merriman Smith was the White House UPI reporter, and he was in a car about 4 back from the presidential limousine.
He hadn't seen much, but he did hear 3 shots, and Smitty, unlike some of the other reporters, knew that these were not firecrackers.
These were gunshots-- he was a gun fancier-- and so he picked up the phone, and it was the only phone available.
There were no cell phones.
There was one phone in the press pool car.
He grabs the phone, and he starts dictating to his desk in Dallas.
[Telephone ringing] HAMPTON: The phone rings.
UPI.
HAMPTON: I recognized the voice.
The voice was that of Merriman Smith, who was our UPI White House correspondent.
The voice on the other end was screaming, '3 shots were fired at the motorcade!'
3 shots were fired at the motorcade.
HAMPTON: Well, at this point, I had grabbed some paper and rolled it into a typewriter, and I started writing just what he said-- 'Dallas, UPI. 3 shots,' and I suddenly realized I can't do this.
I can't do it alone, and my boss... Jack, it's Smitty.
HAMPTON: Jack Fallon grabbed the phone out of my hand-- I was handing it to him--and he started talking to Smitty, and he was writing, and the first bulletin moved at that time.
CLOONEY: On the teletype machines, 5 bells meant a bulletin.
It was 5 bells that attracted the attention of the CBS newsroom in New York.
It was 12:34 in Dallas, 1:34 in New York.
UPI says, '3 shots were fired 'at the president's motorcade this afternoon in downtown Dallas.'
WOMAN: I'll call to alert Walter.
CLOONEY: The bulletin didn't say Kennedy had been hit, let alone wounded.
It didn't say exactly where in Dallas the motorcade was.
In fact, it didn't say very much.
Going on the air with the news that shots had been fired in Dallas would beg the question, what happened next, which was a question Walter Cronkite and his team couldn't answer yet.
The wire service maxim was, get it first, but get it right, and Merriman Smith is also struggling with the phone.
The Associated Press reporter was in the back seat saying, 'It's my turn. It's my turn. Give me the phone.'
He's beating on him, and Merriman Smith just continues to dictate, and he didn't know a lot more information, but he knew enough, being the veteran newsman that he was, to not report conjecture or something that he thought might have happened.
He could only report what he had seen.
Cronkite relied on the wires.
He knew Merriman Smith, and he knew that anything that he reported would be accurate.
Make it a bulletin, [indistinct]. Where did that happen?
CLOONEY: In New York, they waited 5 minutes.
Cronkite wanted to be first to break the story, but what was the story?
In those 5 minutes, ABC Radio News was first to report the shooting at 12:36, two minutes after the wire report, but still CBS held off 5 minutes in Dallas for the picture to become clearer.
The big question was, of course, whether the president had been hit.
Suddenly, I knew exactly who would know what was going on... and I dialed the Dallas Police Office.
Bill Hampton, UPI. Give me dispatch.
It suddenly occurred to me that the one person who would know what was going on would be the police dispatcher.
Yes. What can you tell me about the shots fired at the president's motorcade?
HAMPTON: He said, 'Well, the president has been hit.
'I just got off the phone with a motorcycle escort.
'There's blood in the back of the car.
They're taking him to Parkland Hospital.'
We proceeded to the Trade Mart, where we were going to hear the president speak, and he wasn't there, and we called our New York offices, and the New York office was saying, 'Merriman Smith is saying the president has been shot.
He's in Parkland Hospital.'
So I screamed, 'Parkland Hospital!'
to all my colleagues, and we dumped everything, the phones and everything, and ran and scrambled.
It was chaos.
CLOONEY: Now reporters knew that the president had been hit, and Merriman Smith, the UPI man on the spot, was able to see it with his own eyes.
When he arrived at Parkland Hospital, there was no proper crime scene, and the president was still lying in the open limousine.
HAMPTON: Merriman Smith had talked to Clint Hill, who was one of the Secret Service agents that day, and the press car arrived even before they took the president inside, and Clint Hill was there trying to get a gurney out to get the president inside to emergency room, and Smitty asked him, 'How is he?'
and Clint Hill said, 'He's dead.'
CLOONEY: Smith spoke to a member of the hospital staff who confirmed what the Secret Service had told him.
He gave UPI an update to put out.
It was 12:39.
All right. Hold the line.
You got to find Rather for me.
CLOONEY: 10 bells this time on the teletype machine in the CBS newsroom, the signal for a flash, and what Walter Cronkite read was, 'Kennedy seriously wounded-- perhaps seriously, perhaps fatally-- by assassin's bullet.'
'Kennedy seriously wounded-- perhaps seriously, perhaps fatally-- by assassin's bullet.'
CLOONEY: For the first time, the word 'assassin' had appeared.
BENNETT: He knew when those bells started ringing in the newsroom that this was an incredible story.
I mean, for anything to be slugged a flash, it had to be monumental news.
Are we gonna go to air?
BONN: We're getting it all from, at that point, Smith, and Walter-- well, everybody--hollers, 'We got to get on the air.'
Yes. We'll go to air. I want this confirmed.
No. Rather is not in New Orleans.
He's in Dallas because we sent him there.
CLOONEY: Walter Cronkite knew CBS had to get on air and fast, but there was a problem.
Camera. Where's the camera?
There's no camera.
We can't go to air without a camera.
They were screaming, 'We've got to get on the air.
Let's get on the air,' and they couldn't do that because there was no camera, unbelievably, in the CBS newsroom.
The tech guys have it.
BENNETT: There was a frenzy-- what do you do with this story?-- and, of course, at CBS, as some of the other studios, they did not have the ability to break into television.
They had the story of a lifetime, and they didn't know what to do with it.
They don't know where anybody is.
They don't know what's happening.
BONN: Once you turn it on, it used to take 20 minutes to align that camera to where you could put it on television, 20 minutes of back and forth between the cameraman and the control room.
This thing has vacuum tubes in it.
It has dozens of buttons on the back, and they're working to get it lined up.
CLOONEY: ABC Radio had already alerted the nation to the shooting in Dallas.
Right now across the city in New York, ABC Television and NBC must be within seconds of breaking the story.
Walter Cronkite desperately wanted to beat them, but the technology wouldn't allow it.
They were making contingent plans, and they decided, 'We've got to get on the air.
'What we can do is, Walter Cronkite can go into the radio booth and do an audio bulletin,' and that's what they did.
Keep me updated with any information on the wire.
Of course.
MAN: Hmm, it was real nice of the boy.
Hmm, and I thought about it, and I gave it a great deal of thought, Grandpa-- CRONKITE: Here is a bulletin from CBS News.
In Dallas, Texas, 3 shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.
The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
CLOONEY: This was really a radio broadcast on television, but it didn't matter.
CBS beat NBC by a minute. It was 12:40.
CRONKITE: More details just arrived, these details about the same as previously-- President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas.
CLOONEY: 175 million Americans had tuned in to the 3 networks, the biggest television audience to date, 175 million Americans who were traumatized by the news and wanted more.
12:55, and then came a key moment which seemed to suggest that Walter Cronkite had been right to hold off announcing the president's death.
'UPI. Albert Thomas now says Governor Connally and President Kennedy are both still alive.'
Can we trust what Thomas says?
He's a representative from Houston.
He's on the inside. He should know.
Ellen, take this to Walter.
All right. You stay with the service.
I'm gonna call... Get back on that last one.
Got it.
Yeah. Right. OK.
CRONKITE: Representative Albert Thomas, the Democrat from Houston, Texas, says that he has been informed that President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas are still alive.
CLOONEY: That was the thought that Cronkite took with him into the television newsroom when CBS was finally ready to go on air at 1:00.
Now every local CBS station in the country was taking the feed from New York.
MAN: We're going live.
CLOONEY: Walter Cronkite the television anchorman was broadcasting to the nation.
This is Walter Cronkite in our newsroom in New York.
There has been an attempt, as perhaps you know now, on the life of President Kennedy.
He was wounded in an automobile driving from Dallas Airport into downtown Dallas along with Governor Connally of Texas.
They've been taken to Parkland Hospital there, where their condition is, as yet, unknown.
BRIAN WILLIAMS: He is in the beating heart of the CBS newsroom in New York.
We can all thank heavens that he was at work that day.
He was calm.
He was measured, and he was writing the first draft.
Word just in from Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth, says that he understands that both President Kennedy and Governor Connally, while seriously wounded, are still alive.
BONN: Now you have all of these professional people swinging into action.
Everybody is going to be all over this story because it's the biggest story of the 20th century.
CLOONEY: Cronkite was the voice and then the face of the news that day, but he was the first to admit that it was a team effort-- the reporters in the newsroom, the technicians, and the reporters in Dallas: CBS White House correspondent Robert Pierpoint, Eddie Barker, and Dan Rather.
Cronkite would come to rely on these men as the story developed.
Eddie Barker was news director at the local CBS station KRLD and had good local contacts.
He chose to cover the lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart, where the president was due to speak.
That was the location of the fixed camera, and that was where he had to stay to feed bulletins to New York... BARKER: ...and who was to have given the invocation here... CLOONEY: but Barker had a good contact at Parkland Hospital.
BARKER: As you can imagine, there are many stories that are coming in now as to the actual condition of the president.
One is that he is dead.
Eddie Barker, who was with the CBS affiliate in Dallas, was reporting that a doctor who was at the luncheon had called the hospital and been told that President Kennedy had been shot.
Now, Walter Cronkite reported that as an unconfirmed report from Eddie Barker.
Let us recall for you now what has transpired in this-- MAN: KRLD is reporting they've been told by somebody in the hospital that the president is dead, only a rumor, but they're been told that, KRLD are saying.
Well, that's a repeat of something that you heard reported to you directly a moment ago from KRLD television in Dallas, and that is the rumor that has reached them at the hotel that the president is dead, totally unconfirmed, apparently, as yet.
However, let's go back to... CLOONEY: Dan Rather was near the motorcade when Oswald's shots rang out.
He ran back to the newsroom at KRLD and called Parkland Hospital 11 minutes past 1:00.
I got through to Parkland Hospital.
Switchboard operator, harried, said, 'Listen.
You know, I can't really deal with this,' and I said, 'Well, is there a doctor around?'
She said, 'Well, all the doctors are busy.'
Eventually, the doctor came on the phone, and the doctor said, just matter of factly, that he believed that the president was dead.
So I, naturally, want to get his name, and he said, 'Well, I'm not authorized to talk.'
Click. Went off.
So lost the line at the hospital, but I redialed the hospital almost immediately, and the second call got through.
That's when this switchboard operator, who was very open to me, said, 'Listen.
'There's two Catholic priests here.
Maybe they can help you.'
When the priest got on the line, he just said--matter of fact, he was obviously torn up about it, shaken about it-- said he was dead, and I asked him to repeat it, and he did repeat it, and so now we have a doctor and a priest at the hospital, and we have Eddie Barker's hospital official at the Trade Mart.
When Father Huber came to administer the last rites, we went out and talked to him and said over again, 'Was he still alive when you administered the last rites?'
and he was kind of sort of rather evasive about it.
He wouldn't actually say yes.
Two priests came out, and Hugh Sidey and I ran over to the two priests and said, 'Did you give him the last rites?'
and the priests nodded yes.
CLOONEY: In the midst of the confusion, Dan Rather and Eddie Barker spoke on the phone.
They wanted to compare notes, to take stock.
It was 19 minutes after 1:00.
What happened next was a game changer.
Eddie and I were on the phone. I knew he was at the Trade Mart.
I had an open phone line to New York, but I didn't realize how many people were on that phone line.
Turned out at least 3 people from radio were on, and in New York, the radio operation and the television operation are close to each other but are separated.
So on the phone line when I thought I was talking to Eddie Barker, somebody in New York said, 'You say the president was dead?'
I said, 'Yes.'
Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States is dead.
John F. Kennedy has died of the wounds he received in the assassination in Dallas less than an hour ago.
It all happened very quickly, and the next thing I knew, they were playing 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'
We repeat, it has just been announced that President Kennedy is dead.
CLOONEY: 1:22, CBS Radio had formally announced the death of the president based on information obtained by two reporters in Dallas... OK. All right.
Listen up. Hold on. Hold.
Radio has announced he's dead.
Who says?
They must be going with Dan's report out of Dallas.
CLOONEY: but it was not enough for Walter Cronkite.
The temptation had to have been great to say flat out, 'President Kennedy has died,' but they didn't do that because it was such a momentous thing to declare to the nation that they wanted to wait until it had been officially confirmed.
Walter was very deliberate because he had time to think and it was in his own instinct, I think, that you don't say he's dead until they're sure.
On the other hand, you want to be first.
Pints of blood have been rushed into the room for transfusion purposes, and two priests were called to the room.
Most of the other reporters who were on the scene did indeed think he was dead, but nobody had officially said it.
There is the report in Dallas you heard from our affiliate there Eddie Barker that the president is dead, but that has not been confirmed by any other source.
BENNETT: Walter Cronkite-- because of his background, because of his wire service training, because of his responsibilities as an anchor on a national network-- knew that he didn't want to report what somebody was thinking or what somebody had been told by a second source.
He wanted to wait until there was official confirmation from the White House.
BONN: Nowadays, you hear it, you stick it on the air.
You hear it, you put it on the Web whether its true or not.
Nobody seems to care.
In those days, everything was edited.
Nothing went directly on the air without going through at least one other mind that's going to say, 'Wait a minute. What do we really know here?'
SCHIEFFER: Everybody was trying to get this story and to get it right, and they were kind of working independent from one another, but the difference was, Walter Cronkite was the guy who was making the call on television, and it didn't satisfy his set of standards, and that's why they didn't go with it.
We just have a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas that he has confirmed that President Kennedy is dead.
There's still no official confirmation of this, however.
It's a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas.
CLOONEY: So Cronkite announced that Dan Rather had announced the death of the president, but it wasn't the same as an official White House statement.
At Parkland Hospital, the Secret Service wanted to get the new president Lyndon Johnson to the safety of Air Force One at Love Field, and President Kennedy's people were preparing to confirm the one fact no one wanted to hear.
MACNEIL: When Johnson and party swept out, Pierpoint and I were there, but Mac Kilduff, who was the deputy press secretary, said, 'Hey, you guys, come on.
There's gonna be a press conference.'
We couldn't go through the hospital complex.
We had to go outside the whole perimeter, all the time Pierpoint and I saying to him-- He's CBS; I'm NBC-- 'For God's sake, Mac, tell us.
Is he dead? Is he dead, Mac? Come on.
Are you going to tell us? Are you gonna tell us he's dead?'
all the way until we got to the front of the hospital, went in, and there was like a schoolroom there where, I think, they taught nurses.
Kilduff took his place behind a desk like a teacher's desk.
He was crying, and he put his hands on the desk like this with his fingers spread trying to steady himself, and then he said, 'President John F. Kennedy died tod--' and somebody said, 'Just a moment. What time is it?'
and he said to everybody, 'It's 1:00,' and then I said, 'Great. OK. It'll be 1:00.'
I took off running as fast as I could.
It's 50 years on, and I can almost remember that little sprint I made, and there's a woman in a nurses station who saw me running and sort of put her hand to her mouth, and there's a guy on a gurney who sort of sat up and looked at me and-- Anyway, I went in, grabbed the phone... Don? My God, he's dead. He's dead. He's really dead.
HAMPTON: and Don Smith said, 'Who, Bill?'
The White House man, Malcolm Kilduff.
HAMPTON: and I heard Don shout down to Jack, 'It's official. White House.'
I could even heard hear following the shout across the newsroom on my end of the phone, 'Flash--President Kennedy dead.'
[Teletype clacking] BONN: Pete Bliss got the copy and handed it to Walter.
Everybody in the world has seen what happened then with Walter looking at the copy, and you can see him deciding, and he decides it is now time to tell the people the president is dead.
From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 P.M. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has proceeded.
MAN: Walter handled himself very, very professionally, very well, wiping his eyes a little bit, taking his glasses off, but who wouldn't have done that, to be moved by that news?
Presumably, he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the 36th president of the United States.
GAY: He was able to maintain that composure.
It was something that he learned during the war.
President Kennedy at Dallas Airport this morning was cheerful and waving.
It'd been quite a triumphal tour of Texas over the last... GAY: The murder of a president is a horrendous thing, but Cronkite had seen worse during the war.
WILLIAMS: World War II made young men look much older, and when those young men came home to be anchors on television, they all looked like our dads and, in some cases, our granddads, and on that day, he was our dad.
CLINTON: With the benefit of all these years and the fact that I later got to know him, I think it was like, 'OK. I felt just like you did.
'I wanted to bawl and scream and yell and be mad 'and everything else, but I couldn't do my job for you.
I owe you a calm account of what is happening.'
He was the rock, the man that knew what was going on, and you could count on him to tell the story.
Let me recount for you this day's tragic developments so far.
President Kennedy has been assassinated.
This is the combination of skills that you have accumulated throughout your lifetime to pour it all into that one little lens.
From Dallas, Texas, the flash... CLOONEY: Of all the images of that weekend, and there were many, Walter Cronkite almost letting his emotions get the better of him is perhaps the one that has stayed in most people's minds.
...some 38 minutes ago.
CLOONEY: There were stronger images to come, but that instant when this all-American anchorman was so visibly touched by the awfulness of that official announcement, that was when television came of age.
NBC was just as much on the story, but now the world thinks that Cronkite announced Kennedy's death.
Here we are, 50 years later, and memories are all of Walter Cronkite on the coverage, of almost nothing else.
ANNOUNCER: Across the country, around the world... CLOONEY: Everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy was dead, but those covering the story in Dallas and New York could not allow themselves to let go.
BONN: This is devastating.
The destruction is devastating, and we are Americans like everybody in our audience, and we're all feeling it, and we have to just put that aside.
You cannot weep. You cannot grieve.
You have to think about 5 minutes from now on television.
Later on, you'll weep, and later on, you'll grieve, but not now.
RATHER: I remember being shaken, and I mean literally shaken, right down to the soles of my feet when I realized that the president was dead, but in that moment, one of two things happens.
Either your emotions consume you and you begin to weep... perhaps literally, or professionalism takes hold and you say, in a sense, 'I can't do that.
I can't let that happen now. The story is what counts.'
KENNEDY: ...to this nation's place in history, to the fact that we do stand on the edge of a great, new era filled with both crisis and opportunity.
RATHER: This is why you got into journalism.
You wanted to do something that was bigger than yourself.
You wanted to be part of something that counts, that's important, that matters.
Well, a president has been assassinated.
Oh, this matters.
HAMPTON: 5:00 that afternoon, I was told to go to the Dallas Police Headquarters.
This was the first time I heard that they had captured the suspect, and it's sort of the first time I thought, 'Oh, yes.
Of course. Somebody had to have done this.'
ANNOUNCER: There's an ominous symbol in Lee Harvey Oswald's murder weapon.
HAMPTON: I started jogging across the lawn at Parkland, and at that time, there was a great, huge, live oak tree sort of in the middle of the lawn.
I reached it, and it suddenly hit me... my God, that President Kennedy is dead, and I stopped, and I put my hand against the tree, and I just started to cry, and I didn't know he had represented so much, especially to us who were just coming into adulthood at that time, and I sat there for maybe half a minute and then realized I had to get to the police station, and so I jogged on and got in the car and drove down to the Dallas police station.
It was hard to take in.
It's even hard to take in now.
[Bell tolling] SCHIEFFER: They ask reporters, 'How is it you're able to do your job in the midst of tragedy?'
Well, the way you do it is, you just focus on what's before you as a doctor would.
You get your job done, and then, if there's an emotion, you feel that later.
I realized I had no emotion after that, and it took a long time for it to come back.
I never felt that way again until 9/11.
KENNEDY: ...but a new world of law where the strong are just and the weak secure... HAMPTON: He was a model.
and the peace preserved.
HAMPTON: He was a model to which we hoped the new world would aspire and follow and be like, and... [Snap] bam, just like that, he's gone.
CLOONEY: The slain president would lie in state, first at the White House, then at the Capitol.
A million Americans would come to say good-bye.
This story was moving so fast, newspapers couldn't keep up.
Television easily replaced print as the main source by which Americans received their news.
There are Americans who didn't turn off their television set for 3 days.
They walked with Mrs. Kennedy.
The entire nation was able to mourn with the family, and, thanks to television, we were all able to take part in it.
Walter Cronkite was... was the master of the moment.
No one did it as well as he.
This was a moment when television was the fireplace around which the American people gathered.
Walter was the face of television.
Maybe there were other people who could've done it as well, but I don't know anyone.
I think people rallied around the television set to listen to Walter tell them how they should feel.
[Drums playing cadence] CLOONEY: Walter Cronkite held the nation together and seamlessly melded the strands of the assassination, the lying in state, the procession to the Capitol, the funeral, and the burial at Arlington.
CRONKITE: Only history can write the importance of this day.
Were these dark days the harbingers of even blacker ones to come, or, like the black before the dawn, shall they lead to some still as yet undiscernible sunrise of understanding among men?
WILLIAMS: It was just everything all together.
It was a dignified, modest man who reflected back the best of us.
That young president was everything we dreamed we could be.
CLINTON: It was a moment of incredible grief and lost promise for the country.
The Israeli ambassador to the UN Abba Eben said, in referring to President Kennedy's assassination, that tragedy is the difference between what is and what might have been.
Every sentence Walter Cronkite uttered made that point without saying it.
CRONKITE: Violent words, no matter what their origin or motivation, can lead only to violent deeds.
This is the larger question... WILLIAMS: Walter turned in his best day and one of the best days the business of news has ever had, and he happened to do it on what was the worst day in modern times.
CLOONEY: In those darkest moments, Walter Cronkite was father, son, uncle.
[Cannon fires] [Chorus singing] CLOONEY: For many, including reporters hardened by the experience of war, this was the saddest weekend of their lives.
For those who thought Jack Kennedy was the future, it was the end of a dream.
CRONKITE: ...must be put to rest.
Tonight there will be few Americans who go to bed without carrying with them a sense that somehow they have failed.
If, in a search of our conscience, we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brook no political, sectional, religious, or racial divisions, then maybe it may yet be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain.
That's the way it is Monday, November 25, 1963.
CHORUS:♪ Amen♪ CLOONEY: 6 months after the assassination of President Kennedy, CBS made a documentary about a day in the life of Walter Cronkite.
Nothing had changed.
The newsroom on West 57th Street was the same.
The teletypes chattered. The reporters were still there.
The Cronkite team still gathered around his desk... MAN: Clear that shot. Get Sokolow out.
CLOONEY: but, like their colleagues in newsrooms around the country, they felt that nothing would be quite the same again.
Adlai Stevenson tells the UN what we're doing in Southeast Asia.
Pierre Salinger challenges the... Get ready, two. Ready two.
CRONKITE: This is Walter Cronkite.
Good night.
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