When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963

Book TV Reruns "When the News Went Live" Texas Book Festival’s Author Panel with Dan Rather from Texas House Chamber

Program Also Available on DVD

C-SPAN-2's Book TV will rebroadcast When the News Went Live's Texas Book Festival author panel, moderated in October 2005 by Dan Rather in the Chamber of the Texas House of Representatives.

This second Book TV appearance of Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix and Wes Wise is also sold on DVD through C-SPAN. Their vivid and compelling book is approaching its third printing since it was released in autumn 2004.

Reviewers unanimously praise the book for its authority and readability.

CSPAN will announce broadcast rerun times for this program at
http://www.booktv.org/

The program is available on DVD here.

The authors' BookPeople Book TV program is also available here.

 

Money, Votes, and Disaster

By Bob Huffaker

Louisiana's 9 electoral votes, Mississippi's 6, and Alabama's 9 total
three less than Florida's 27. Follow the money, which follows the
electoral votes. And note that Louisiana's Kathleen Blanco, the only
Democratic governor in these states, is the only one being blamed by
advance spin. (See "Bush tries to regain lost ground as political blame game begins.")

The White House approved only $40 million of the $105 million the Corps
of Engineers requested last year for New Orleans flood and hurricane
programs. But President Bush approved Congress's $286.4 BILLION pork
pie that funds 6,000 pet projects--including a $231 million bridge to a
little Alaskan island where nobody lives.

Bush's FEMA head Michael Brown, who first said that he did not know
until Thursday that 15,000 desperate refugees were without food or
water in the New Orleans Convention Center, falsely claimed the next
day that his hapless bureaucracy had been feeding them every day.
Brown, whose main job qualification was having been fired for inability to supervise horse shows, met Bush in Mobile, Alabama,
while those abandoned refugees were still suffering and dying without
aid, and he must have felt great when the president assured him,
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

As the storm was killing Americans by the thousands, the vacationing
Bush was delivering speeches and posing with a guitar on the West
Coast. Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming. Condi Rice was shopping
for shoes on Fifth Avenue and attending "Spamalot." Chief of Staff Andy
Card was away in Maine.

When evacuation finally began in New Orleans, after five days of
inaction by the White House, the poor and mostly black victims stood in
misery while busses took away 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt
Hotel first.  (Check out this absurd Flickr foto, originally from the AP, of the National Guard delivering supplies to the New Orleans Convention Center AFTER all the hurricane victims had been evacuated on Sat, Sept. 3.)

But not to worry. The Navy has hired Halliburton to reactivate three
Mississippi naval facilities and assess damage at New Orleans Navy
installations, once it is safe there. Halliburton is not helping the
Army Corps of Engineers' belated efforts to repair New Orleans'
breached levees.

Good Review of 'When the News Went Live'

Compelling book reveals 'When News Went Live'

Originally published in The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

August 7, 2005

By William Kerns

I remember when my older sister, Sandy, arrived home early from school
on Nov. 22, 1963, her sobs continuous.

As I tuned my transistor radio to the news and watched television
reports with my family, a nation expressed shock at the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy and events that followed, including the
murder of an accused assassin on live television.

Not until I consumed a fascinating new book called "When the News Went
Live (Dallas 1963)" did I fully appreciate efforts made almost around
the clock by the Dallas newsmen who covered the fates of the president,
Lee Harvey Oswald, Officer J.D. Tippitt and Jack Ruby that week.

The book is a collaborative account by Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer,
George Phenix and Wes Wise, all employed at the time by KRLD Radio (AM
and FM) and Television.

"When the News Went Live" is more than just a compelling read. It is an
account of incredible from-the-streets reporting of history.

This was, after all, an era when reporters carried 16 mm cameras and
lugged heavy sound equipment. Phenix - a Lubbock native who had been a
reporter less than six weeks - recalls telling a Secret Serviceman at
Love Field, "This is not a gun," referring to his long-barreled mike.

Forget about CNN, the immediacy of videotape or use of satellites.
Newsmen used low-tech equipment and were dependent on instincts,
shoeleather and sources. The book's first-person accounts explain
police decisions while recalling out-of-town reporters who arrived
smelling blood.

Phenix's sixth sense kicked in at the Dallas Trade Mart when he heard
an Air Force officer say he was headed to Parkland Hospital. "Me, too,"
said Phenix, as he jumped into the back seat with the officer.

Mercer recalls why news director Eddie Barker temporarily evicted Dan
Rather and his crew that were using KRLD as headquarters. He also
mentions the difficulty inherent in black-and-white film, saying, "I
had to describe the colors, the messages (covering the assassination
site), the sadness, the tears and choke back my own emotion."

Providing massive visual impact throughout are photographs loaned to
the authors by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, many of which
were published in the Dallas Times Herald.

Each author has a chance to share individual memories, and readers will
appreciate the opportunity to read transcripts of live reports, such as
Huffaker confirming the assassination by saying, "This is one of the
quietest crowds that will ever assemble - the crowd with pity, sorrow,
horror and shame in its heart."

No less moving is Huffaker explaining to us 42 years later, "I hated
having to speak when I felt like weeping."

William Kerns' entertainment reviews and commentary can be heard at
8:15 a.m. Monday through Friday on KLLL (96.3 FM).

Sixty Years Ago

By Bob Huffaker

The president was on the radio, and these were times when even we eight-year-olds listened to the president. We stopped our game of "May I?" And Donnie and Kay and Ursula Marie and Joseph and I froze into a tableau as the mothers in our block turned up the volume and waited silent over stoves, sinks and ironing to hear every word Harry S. Truman told us. Through open windows in the heat of early August those radios echoed along Evergreen Drive like loud speakers. I stared at the sidewalk and strained to understand the most bizarre message I had ever heard.

This new president was strange to us kids. We had clung to the reassuring presence of FDR, and we had wept and worried over his suddenly dying as the war went on. We hadn't known what a brain hemorrhage was. Roosevelt had been the only president we had known, and this Missouri haberdasher seemed a bit roosterish. Mama Thompson, my grandmother, had smiled up from her sewing to say, "He wears some awful loud shirts, but he's a Baptist." Now this good Baptist was telling us something that would change our world forever.

In Port Arthur we kids knew the air raid drills, but we didn't talk much about our city as a prime bombing target -- the refining center of the Texas Gulf Coast. "We Oil the World" was Port Arthur's manifesto, and in those days our world had urgently needed oiling. Joseph and Ursula Marie's mechanic father kept the tugboats pushing tankers and towing oil barges. Donnie and Kay's father, like most men on Evergreen Drive, was a refinery worker. Barbara and Bonnie, our playmates down the block, seldom saw their father, who captained a tanker whose cargo could explode into hellfire at the hit of a silent torpedo.

Captain Barney Bobbitt, a giant, smiling, literate southern gentleman, had guided his big ship in a convoy as he saw three sister ships blown to flaming shards. First to go was the tanker on his port side, then the ship to starboard, then the one dead ahead. Captain Bobbitt wasn't a man to talk about religion, but he had confided to his family that when he had survived a deadly childhood fever, his mother had told him, "God will not take you if there is still something He wants you to do." Bringing his tanker through those torpedoes against the odds, he had concluded that God had more work for him. Throughout the war he sailed under sealed orders, never knowing his course and destination until he had cleared port, dropped off the pilot, and opened the envelope. At home on Evergreen Drive, Hazel Bobbitt often didn't know whether she was a wife or widow, but she ran a tight ship and never showed her fear to us kids. There was rejoicing in that house when the Captain was in port and safe at home.

"Loose Lips Sink Ships," read signs around Port Arthur. Our cars had slitted headlights for blackout conditions, and we doused our lights at the wail of the air raid siren on the water tower a block away. In the darkness I felt some comfort when one of the neighborhood fathers -- raincoated, helmeted and wielding a slitted flashlight -- would stop by as Air Raid Warden just to keep us all in touch.

But in this sleepy summer on Evergreen Drive, we children knew that the awful war was partly over. We had seen pictures of Mussolini's corpse hung upside down and spat upon by multitudes. We had seen highway signs that read, "LET'S MAKE HITLER -- AND HIROHITO -- LOOK AS SICK -- AS OLD BENITO -- BURMA SHAVE."

Now Hitler was dead. I had told Mama once that I hated Hitler, and she had said, "Now Bobby, you don't hate Hitler: you hate what he has done." That was one of the few times she was wrong. That evil was personal. I hated Hitler. I still do.

That day as we took baby steps and giant steps forward in our May-I game, we knew that Hirohito was still killing our neighborhood's older brothers. On the next street, one of the two red crosses hanging in the window of the Gager family's house had been replaced by a white cross edged in gold braid. That was for M.D., their oldest, whose fighter plane had plummeted in flames. The red one was for Douglas, who had been listed as missing in action while the Gagers prayed for their last son's life.

In the Strand Theater downtown we had stood with our parents, hands on our hearts, and sung our anthem of bombs and rockets while the Stars and Stripes fluttered on the screen. My father's eyes would fill with tears, and I watched him in secret as we sang as loud as we could.

Over station KPAC's Mutual Network that day, President Truman sounded a little tinny, but to us kids he boomed like the voice of a prophet as he pronounced the terribly mixed blessing that changed everything. What we on the sidewalk heard the president say was this: suddenly our country possessed a mysterious bomb more monstrous and devastating than our wildest imaginations. One of our airplanes had dropped one of these bombs on a Japanese city:

"It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East."

We had beaten Hitler to the bomb, or else it would have been dropped upon us. We understood that our escape from that doom had been a narrow one.

". . . the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence . . . ."

Now with the dread bomb that would have destroyed us, we were threatening to obliterate the Japanese.

"We shall destroy their docks, their factories and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war."

President Truman mentioned atomic power as a force to maintain world peace and to furnish, perhaps, a useful source of power, but those hopes were lost on me that day. I imagined the lone bomber, the single bomb, the infernal blast that might have struck us instead. Details of this bomb were still veiled, uncertain, secret.

". . . pending further examination of possible methods of protecting us and the rest of the world from the danger of sudden destruction."

It wasn't over yet -- for us or our last remaining enemy. At the post office we had seen posters of grotesque, marauding, deep yellow, slavering, rat-toothed Japanese soldiers, but Mama Thompson and my mother had told me that the Japanese were good people like us whose warlike leaders were to blame.

"If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

After the president was through, our little group drifted apart. I was no longer interested in taking giant steps. The cicadas had started to sing again. I walked down Evergreen Drive between bright green ash trees, up my own back steps past our hand-pumped fire extinguisher. My mother and grandmother were waiting for me.

From the Heart: Dealing Drugs on TV

By Bob Huffaker

I am intimate with daily handfuls of various drugs--all prescribed by
my cardiologist without any suggestion from me. So my blood runs a
little chilly when TV commercials implore me to ask my doctor about
some designer pill the corporate drug dealers are hawking.

But seeing jibjab.com take a poke at those commmercals warms my
heart--especially to the tune of the Austin Lounge Lizards.

Old News. (It's a pun.)

By George Phenix

As you might have noticed, the four of us are older than you. And we've learned a helluva lot more.

Since blogs are rumored to be replacing daily newspapers, network television news, live radio news and semaphore flags (look it up), herewith is some wisdom from the ages.

Dumbest publisher in America award goes to the jackasses who print the telephone books around the country. They should fire the genius who came up with the brilliant notion to use small, teeny, tiny type. Most of us can't read the damn numbers with glasses AND a magnifying glass. Don't those idiots read the demographic studies? There are more Baby Boomers than any other population category in the U.S. And every damned one of them uses the telephone.

We waiting to give the smartest auto manufacturer award to the first company who recognizes night vision is a problem for the aging population and installs some good headlights with decent candlepower.

Hopefully, some automobile review will rank the cars by headlight umph.

For you youngsters who may think this is just a cranky guy bitching, I'll give you a line from the old radio show, Life of Riley. My favorite character was/is Digger O'Dell, the undertaker.

Often, Digger would say to the young people: "You may not like flowers, but eventually, they'll grow on you."

You'll hear more from me later, when I am ready.

Heavenly Texas

Plagiarized and shamelessly rewritten by Bob Huffaker

The Archangel Michael found God resting on the seventh day and asked, "Where have you been?"

"Michael, I've made a planet that I'll call Earth, and it will be a place of balance."

"Balance?"

"Northern Europe will have opportunity and wealth but harsh weather, and southern Europe will be poor but sunny and pleasant. Some lands will have plenty of water, and others will be dry. Parched deserts will be hot, but the poles will be covered in ice."

"What's that down there?"

"Ah, that's TEXAS--Earth's most glorious place, with beaches, streams, hills, and forests. TEXANS will be handsome, funny,  intelligent, sociable, hardworking and high-achieving. And they will be diplomats and carriers of peace."

"What about balance, God? You said there would be balance!"

"Wait until you see the idiots I'm going to put in Austin."

The "Mainstream Media", the "liberal" media and now further attacks on National Public Radio and PBS

By Bill Mercer

A House committee has recommended cutting the federal monies for these two outstanding radio and television operations by half. Why? Not for a desire to reduce the effective "fair and balanced" news coverage but just a domestic budget cut?

Recently in this column I reported that Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an appointee of the Bush administration, suggested an overseer of NPR News questioning their fairness in covering the Israeli-Palestinian continuing conflict. He also suggested a Republican fundraiser to the board who had been active in the Gingrich group. A board member suggested more music programming based on an interview with a cab driver.

As far as I am concerned, this is just another blatant form of censorship or press control that this administration , like others have done in our history, feels necessary to pursue.

We now know that W. Mark Felt, a former FBI official, was the dark secret that Woodward and  Bernstein had helping them unravel the mysteries of the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post in the 70's. But as Frank Rich, NY Times columnist, reports, most people interviewed today, who did not live through that 70's era, understand Watergate as just that "third-rate" burglary of Democratic campaign offices.  However, it was vastly more important and dangerous.

Vanity Fair, in breaking the story that Mr. Felt was the so-called Deep Throat, noted that Watergate was a web of crime yielding convictions of more than thirty Nixon White House and campaign officials. Of those 30, two have now ridiculed Felt for revealing to the Post reporters what he knew: G. Gordon Liddy and Charles W. Colson, who each served a prison term.

Colson said on the NBC "Today" show that Mr. Felt dishonored "the confidence of the president of the United States." But all Colson did back then for Nixon was a ruthless program of intimidation that included, according to Rich, "threatening anti-trust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories."  Further, "he exulted, as heard on the tapes in the White House, in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. It was Colson's office that compiled a White House enemies list which included journalists."

Colson proposed bombing the Brookings Institute and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal psychiatric records of Daniel Elsberg, who aided the Times in Vietnam coverage. That was just the tip of a nasty iceberg of crime and deceit.

The sinister pressure put on news organizations was so dangerous that the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, was not allowed to go out unaccompanied. Ben Bradlee, the Post's editor, said that the paper was trying for "the best obtainable version of the truth." And the final chapter of that affair was Nixon's resignation to avoid impeachment.

That period of constant drumbeat of attacks on the mainstream media and the liberal press has never ceased in administration after administration.

This administration has topped all in its zeal and success in damping down media attention and investigation into their actions. The press, the NY Times heading the list, failed to puncture, even to dent, the administration's pre-war WMD hype. And it continues today.

Rich reminds us that Nixon hoped to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding. Newt Gingrich tried the same tactic, saying it should all be privatized. But neither succeeded in putting a political hack like Tomlinson in change of of the CPB. Nixon didn't try putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll. Nor did he hire a PR firm to codify journalists and news organizations based on how well they ran stories supporting the administration. This administration has, hiring Ketchum to do its work. It has even deflated the President's Records Act of 1978.

Even as the chaos in Iraq continues, a story that may or may not have legs has been almost ignored in the U.S. press, although the London Times published it more than a month ago. That July 2002 "Downing Street memo" purports to contain minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix the intelligence and facts to justify its war in Iraq.

According to Frank Rich, after the story ran in England "in 19 daily briefings by Scott McClellan, the press secretary, the memo was the subject of  only two out of 940 questions asked by the White House press corps." Eric Boehlert of Salon kept score.

Today Walter Pincus of the Washington Post writes that the eight-page memo "saw the Bush Administration decision to go to war as inevitable and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq." The memo shows, "little thought" had been given to "the aftermath and how to shape it."

Bob Woodward has hinted in a recent interview that there will be more of this story yet to come.

Two reporters are facing prison for not revealing their sources in the recent outing of a CIA agent. Revealing the identity of a CIA operative is a federal crime. While those two reporters did not write the stories revealing the woman's name, they have refused to reveal the sources who told them her identity. Meanwhile, Robert Novak, who actually did write the story exposing her, has not been brought before a grand jury or a judge. Novak had administration sources.

Just last week the administration reported "sources in Lebanon" had claimed the Syrians were infiltrating their country to cause problems for a new government. Governments and news outlets must have sources--anonymous or otherwise.

After all that: WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR AND DEMAND A HANDS-OFF POLICY ON  NPR AND PBS--AND FULL FUNDING.  And impartial journalist-administrators instead of partisan political appointees for CPB.

Downing Street Isn't Gated

By Bob Huffaker

While the U.S. media are still rehashing the Watergate scandal of three decades ago, they are paying scant attention to today's biggest potential scandal. U.S. media have barely mentioned the shadowy Downing Street Memo, let alone called it a somethinggate, and a month has passed since the House Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. John Conyers, and 88 other Congressmen sent President Bush their demand that he answer questions raised by the leaked secret memo and its "serious ramifications for the integrity of the United States Government."

The Downing Street Memo, first reported May 1 in the London Times, is dated 23 July 2002, eight months before the Iraq invasion. Neither the British nor the U.S. government has denied that it details minutes of that day's secret meeting at 10 Downing Street between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his intelligence advisers. Blair's top security chief, Richard Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington, reported that the Bush administration, already determined to go to war, would justify military action based upon WMD and terrorism, but that it was fixing facts and intelligence to support its plan to invade Iraq.

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

The memo sparked harsh criticism of Bush in Great Britain and hurt Blair in national elections, but U.S. media have almost ignored it. Sunday's Dallas Morning News buries it on page 25a in an AP story linking the memo to menacing tactics of U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton and his role in keeping chemical weapons inspectors out of Iraq while the U.S. pressed for war. Massachusetts's newspapers report today that Senator John Kerry plans to raise the issue Monday in Washington:

"I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."

On May 31, The Boston Globe published an article by Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese calling for impeachment of both Bush and Cheney based upon the Downing Street Memo and other manipulations of truth in their rush to war.

"US intelligence used to justify the war demonstrates repeatedly the truth of the meeting minutes--evidence was thin and needed fixing.

"President Clinton was impeached for perjury about his sexual relationships. Comparing Clinton's misbehavior to a destructive and costly war occupation launched in March 2003 under false pretenses in violation of domestic and international law certainly merits introduction of an impeachment resolution."

Despite the rising outcry over the secret memo, U.S. journalism is too sleepy even to come up with an appropriate GATE for it. Hell, even Monica rated that suffix.

More Comments: Where were you when Kennedy was killed?

More comments, more memories.  These are all accessible in the comments section on the right-hand side.   However, we felt these shared histories should really be shared by bringing them to the forefront, the mainpage of our blog, instead of tucking them away in the comments section.

Please take a look at all these comments from our readers.   And please keep them coming.

Here's some of the latest postings:

I was 6 years old & in Catholic School. I heard it in school that the President had been shot. I heard when I arrived home that the President had died. My parents and grandparents were "grey" for a couple of weeks. I remember that there were no cartoons on TV for quite a while. Only funerals and memorials... That was just the start, Bobby Kennedy and MLK were soon to follow... In my hometown there were race riots that forced me and a friend to serve every mass at church for two weeks... When I look back, it all started with JFK being murdered... For me, everthing goes back to that time... The bad concept of everything is only an opinion, and right and wrong are not finite, stems from that time... The moral "death spiral" began in 1963...

Posted by: Tom Nieman

I was 13 and in junior high school. For some reason, I was walking in the halls instead of being in class, and the nurse came running out into the hall crying that the president had been killed. Just a few years earlier, I had taken our portable black and white TV to school so we could watch the Kennedy inauguration in class. A few years later I would graduate from high school in the year of Martin Luther KIng, Jr.'s and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, 1968.

Watching the president's funeral was personal, because the image of the two small children was like a proxy for the funeral my father never had after dying in Korea. The Kennedy children at the time seemed to be standing for me and my brother.

Early in 1964, I would see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and it was as if things were coming together to make me feel that the world was changing and that it affected me.

Posted by: kulturkritik