Memories of JFK, and One Sunny Day in Dallas

I met John F. Kennedy when he was in the Senate, just thinking about running for president. I covered his campaign in 1960. He was bright, he was frank; he was a very attractive man; women loved him, and vice versa. When he was campaigning, I would marvel at the crowds he drew. I’d walk next to him and talk with him; if you got close enough to talk to him, he’d talk about almost anything.

When I decided to write the book “John F. Kennedy and PT-109,” he tried to talk me out of it. “Bob, don’t do this,” he said. “You’re flogging a dead horse. Nobody wants to read about that war stuff.”

Somehow I got him to cooperate. When he heard I had gone to Japan and interviewed the guys who were on the other side, he couldn’t believe it. And so he agreed to talk with me. At the time, I remember, he was still in anguish over the death of his son, Patrick.

When the movie based on the book came out, the president called and said, bring your wife and children to see it at the White House. When we arrived, the president brought us upstairs to the family residence, and took us out on the Truman Balcony and we sat and talked. My son Peter, who was quite young at the time, thought you couldn’t talk to a president; he was thoroughly amazed. John-John came out with a box of toys, and started flinging them off the Truman Balcony. Down on the lawn below were two Secret Service men who picked up the toys and brought them back. But John-John just threw them over again.

The movie was a little sugary. It got the events right, but I thought it was a terrible movie, and Kennedy thought so too. It came out a year before his reelection campaign, and as we sat there, I heard Teddy say to Bobby: “God, if only this movie came out a year from now.”

I thought he was on the way to becoming a good president. He was doing well on foreign policy. He had started the Peace Corps, which was a very popular initiative. He couldn’t get a civil rights bill through Congress. But for the length of time that he was in there, I thought he did pretty well.

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The president had taken a campaign trip through the South, where he wasn’t terribly popular. But he was getting a good reception and was in good spirits.

We were surprised to see how many people were waiting at the Dallas airport, 3,000 or more. They applauded when he came down the steps from the airplane, and he went over--they were behind a kind of chain-link fence--and walked up and down shaking hands, which was not something he did very often.

As the motorcade proceeded into town, there was much more of a turnout than people had expected; you wouldn’t know he was in a city where there was a great deal of hostility toward him.

As we approached the Book Depository, the motorcade suddenly came to a stop. Some people had heard shots. A lot of us got out and walked around. Some people thought the president had been attacked, but I said, “That’s nonsense.”

The next thing you knew, the president’s car was not in the motorcade any more. No one could tell us what was going on.

Robert McNeil [then of NBC] decided that he’d better find a phone, so he walked into the Book Depository building. He asked a man in the lobby where there was a phone, and the man showed him. He found out later that the man was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Eventually we heard that Kennedy had been taken to Parkland Hospital. A couple of photographers had a station wagon, and we roared off for the hospital--most frightening ride I ever had, going against traffic half the time. When we came up to the hospital that way, people thought we were officials and waved us right in. We drove right up to the president’s limousine. And there in the back seat, sitting in a pool of blood, I saw the roses that had been given to Jackie at the airport.

We couldn’t get in; the hospital was locked up. We didn’t know he was dead at that point. But a couple of pool reporters were able to get into the hospital, and they were sending out news. And then there was a priest who delivered the last rites, and he said something like: “He was dead, all right.”

The strange thing is, it was a beautiful day. You would think that if something terrible had happened, it should be cloudy and gray.

Doug Kiker [then of the New York Herald Tribune] was angry. He said, “If I had the power to, I’d call the bombers over this place. How could a thing like this happen?”

I had already covered an assassination attempt against President Truman. I said, “It happens a lot.”