Defining Moment

It has been 40 years since these journalists played their various roles in the most dramatic and devastating event in Dallas' history. It was a different media era, when cops and reporters were routinely best of friends; when local TV stations didn't even argue over the idea of pooling cameras to cover a big event. Yet the horrific story they covered that November weekend in 1963, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is still seen as the finest hour for many of the city's journalists. It was a time when the "local yokels"--young men like Hugh Aynesworth, Darwin Payne, Bert Shipp, Eddie Barker and dozens of others--shined through the longest days they can remember, covering the tragedy and its aftermath in a textbook, if somber, fashion. Because of this, they remain, in a sense, a band of brothers.

Now, their recollections of the biggest story they ever covered are being heard. KERA-TV has produced a documentary titled JFK: Breaking the News, and Aynesworth has written a companion book that will bear the same title. A new book titled President Kennedy Has Been Shot provides, in the words of the reporters, "a moment-by-moment account of the four days that changed America." CNN is planning to air a special on the historic tragedy and how it was reported to the nation. Former Channel 8 and network anchor Murphy Martin's soon-to-be-released autobiography, Front Row Seat, will also add new insight to the event. All proof that there remains an insatiable fascination with the stories from the School Book Depository, Parkland hospital, Trade Mart, Texas Theater, the basement of the Dallas police station, even the lonesome burial site of the man accused of killing the president where it was reporters, not family members, who served as pallbearers.

It was Eddie Barker, working for what was then KRLD television and radio, who was, in fact, the first newsman to announce the death of the president. "I was still at the Trade Mart [where a luncheon/presidential speech had been scheduled] when a doctor I knew came up and whispered in my ear that the president was dead," Barker remembers. "He had called the Parkland emergency room and was told the president was DOA."

Barker, now living in East Texas, made a spur-of-the-moment "gut decision" that would ensure his place in history. "I just decided to go on the air with it. I said an unimpeachable source had told me President Kennedy was already dead when he reached the hospital." It would be another 20 minutes before CBS' Walter Cronkite broadcast the tragic news to the nation.

Aynesworth, then an aviation writer for The Dallas Morning News, is now viewed by many as the ultimate authority on the case, remembered as the only reporter who was in Dealey Plaza when the shots were fired; at the Texas Theater when accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested; in the police department basement when nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald; and who covered the Ruby trial.

And he began that infamous day without so much as a pencil. "I remember being disappointed that I hadn't been assigned to any of the coverage of the president's visit," he says, "so I had walked over to Dealey Plaza simply to watch the motorcade and see the president." When the three shots rang out from the School Book Depository, Aynesworth, now a Washington Times reporter stationed in Dallas, immediately assigned himself to the biggest story of his award-winning career. He offered two quarters to a nearby youngster for an oversized pencil he was holding and began taking notes on the backs of two envelopes--his utility bills he'd planned to mail later.

Remember the famous Zapruder film? The first reporter to learn of its existence was rookie Dallas Times Herald police reporter Darwin Payne. "I spoke with a couple of women who said their boss, Abraham Zapruder, had been filming the president's passing when a bullet blew much of his head away." Payne, who would go on to become a professor at SMU, author and publisher, rushed to the clothing manufacturer/amateur cameraman's nearby office and got his firsthand description of the gruesome scene he'd watched through his viewfinder.

That photograph of Ruby firing the fatal shot into the stomach of Oswald? It was taken by Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson and, by only a split second's edge, earned him a Pulitzer Prize over the News' late Jack Beers, who had snapped his camera before the shot was actually fired. "It was two hours before I knew what I had," Jackson recalled last week to a turn-away crowd that attended a panel discussion on the assassination at the Sixth Floor Museum. Now living in Colorado, Jackson was also a member of the press corps that had been riding in the historic presidential motorcade. He clearly remembers that just moments after hearing the shots he looked up to the sixth-floor window of the School Book Depository and actually saw the barrel of Oswald's rifle. His camera, however, was empty of film.