Professor\u2019s Account of Covering the JFK Assassination<\/p>\n
Ron Hollander<\/p>\n
The cop had a sheepish expression.\u00a0\u00a0 Embarrassed.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a look I usually saw on a cop, especially not in 1963 before things like sensitivity training were introduced.<\/p>\n
His Virginia Beach PD cruiser slid up beside our stopped press car with \u201cVirginian-Pilot\u201d on the door.\u00a0 We had a remote phone, front-line technology in that day.<\/p>\n
He rolled down his window and leaned out toward me.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t say hello.\u00a0 He hesitated, not wanting to sound the fool.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou hear anything about the President being shot?\u201d
\nPerry Breon, the photographer at the wheel, and I looked at each other.\u00a0 He reached the mic first and keyed the city desk.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just heard that the President\u2019s been shot.\u00a0 Is that true?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s correct.\u201d\u00a0 It was Chuck Marshall, city editor, whose early baldness made him feel avuncular to me.\u00a0 \u201cWe want you to get some color, then come in.\u00a0 We want Hollander to write the local lead.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was 22, the youngest on the staff, and it was my proudest moment in journalism.\u00a0 If Hemingway thought the place to be as a young man was Paris in the Twenties, I knew even then that the moveable feast just given me was to be a cub reporter on the day JFK was shot.<\/p>\n
Fifty years later I still know that.<\/p>\n
We left the cop and stopped at the first house with a car in the driveway.\u00a0 I knocked, said we were with the Pilot and could we watch the TV?<\/p>\n
The lady was wearing an apron.\u00a0 She nodded, and let us in without a word.\u00a0 The black and white, console TV was on as they would be across America for the next four days.\u00a0 What we saw was a blur:\u00a0 Parkland Hospital, Dealey Plaza, the Trade Mart, Air Force One, maybe Walter Cronkite.\u00a0 I think she was too shocked even to ask us to sit or to have coffee.<\/p>\n
After a few minutes we thanked her and left.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure she moved from the TV.<\/p>\n
Perry turned the car to Frank W. Cox High School.\u00a0 A blonde girl born the year FDR died, sobbed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d she sniffled.\u00a0 \u201cMaybe it will bring the country closer together.\u201d
\nA civics display case had a magazine cover:\u00a0 \u201cKennedy\u2019s Worry:\u00a0 Solid South Lost for \u201964?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 I scribbled it in my reporter\u2019s notebook, and used it later in my story.<\/p>\n
So the next morning, 122,000 readers at breakfast saw it spread over eight columns.\u00a0\u00a0 And 50 years later that social studies teacher\u2019s display must endure still in yellow, brittle-edged papers in dried cartons under attic rafters across Norfolk.<\/p>\n
The newsroom didn\u2019t seem any different than usual.\u00a0 The wire machines clattered.\u00a0 Whether the stories were the death of a president or a cat stuck up a tree, the robo-typing sounded the same.\u00a0 The bells that rang when a bulletin was being sent had long since stopped.<\/p>\n
I sat at my desk and waited for reporters twice my age to feed me anecdotes from their beats.\u00a0 Suddenly I felt alone.\u00a0 JFK had been my president, elected in my sophomore year at Brandeis.\u00a0 After eight years of Eisenhower who looked like my father\u2019s father, here was a movie star intellectual, and I bought into it all gratefully.\u00a0 Fifteen years later I woke crying in the middle of the night, and a girlfriend comforted me:\u00a0 \u201cYou must have loved him very much.\u201d<\/p>\n
The anecdotes were passed to me on scraps of cheap copy paper:\u00a0 A tug on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River cut her engines and lowered her flag; a woman called the Norfolk police hysterical:\u00a0 \u201cWhy did you let them do it?\u201d; a Hampton man heard the news and died of a heart attack;\u00a0 \u201cWho\u2019s going to be President now,\u201d a little boy wailed to his father on Brambleton Avenue.\u00a0 \u201cJackie?\u201d<\/p>\n
I started to type on my manual, upright Royal with carbons between the sheets:\u00a0 \u201cIn a red-eyed city echoing with the cry of `Extra, extra\u2019 they mourned and mourn still their President.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeneath the half-masted flags\u2026they gathered in small, quiet groups around TVs and radios, listening and shifting from foot to foot, like children trying to understand where they\u2019ll be when they die.\u201d<\/p>\n
The story ran Saturday across the top of the local section:\u00a0 \u201cOn a Sunny Afternoon, Death Turned City\u2019s Face Sad.\u201d\u00a0 I walked along Granby Street already decorated for Christmas.\u00a0 A bookstore had a black-bordered portrait in the window.\u00a0 A TV in another showed mourners in Washington, but pasted on the screen was \u201cNo Money Down.\u201d<\/p>\n
I would report from many places in the years to come:\u00a0 Africa, China, the Amazon, and cover presidential campaigns.\u00a0 But still today I am that boy reporter telling Tidewater that its President was dead.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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