Gary Mack dies at 68; newsman was expert on Kennedy’s assassination

Gary Mack, a former television news producer whose interest in the death of President Kennedy helped launch a museum at the Dallas warehouse where Kennedy’s assassin opened fire, died Wednesday. He was 68.

Mack died after a prolonged illness, according to a statement issued by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The Dallas museum’s statement did not provide additional details about his death.

Mack was an announcer, camera operator and news producer for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth and Dallas from 1981 to 1993. Privately, he was a student of Kennedy’s assassination, developing a reputation as a leading expert.

Mack served as a consultant in planning “John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation,” the exhibit that opened at the Sixth Floor Museum in 1989. The museum is in the former Texas School Book Depository, and its sixth floor is the vantage point from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot at Kennedy as the president’s motorcade made its way through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.

Mack joined the museum staff in 1994 as an archivist and was named curator in 2000, becoming a name and face familiar to Kennedy history buffs. He also became the voice of the museum, providing the recorded narrations to exhibits and self-guided tours.

“I doubt if anybody anywhere knew more details about all aspects of the JFK assassination and aftermath than Gary,” author Hugh Aynesworth, a frequent writer on the assassination, told the Dallas Morning News.

Mack was born July 29, 1946, and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Arizona State University. He went into radio broadcasting, working as a disc jockey, music director and station director before moving into television work.

At KXAS, Mack was responsible for organizing and preserving the original film coverage of the assassination and its immediate aftermath, which stoked his already well-developed interest in the death of JFK.

When the idea of a museum first took root, he served as a consultant and eventually became the museum’s curator.

Mack had long professed at least the suspicion that Oswald did not act alone in the assassination.

“He started out as a pretty vicious conspiracy theorist,” said Aynesworth, who never bought into the conspiracy idea. But over the years, Aynesworth said he changed from a theorist to an authority.

Mack was active in debunking many conspiracy theories, and even those who believed that Oswald was a lone actor revered Mack’s expertise.

“He was always a remarkable source of information about the case and a wise guide who helped me avoid the many investigative pitfalls and black holes of JFK’s murder,” Gerald Posner, author of the book “Case Closed,” in which he concluded Oswald acted alone, told the Morning News.

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