TV news came of age because of JFK, in life and death
The assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, changed the United States forever. Even if we haven’t considered how profound and long-lasting the change was, we know that because we saw it on television.
The nation will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination in the coming weeks in various ways – new books, special issues of magazines like Time and Life, and new considerations of the singular moment in history in other media. But it is particularly significant that the event will be memorialized in documentaries, re-enactments and news specials on television – not only because baby boomers remember spending that weekend watching the aftermath of the assassination, but because the abbreviated Kennedy presidency represented the emergence of a new and dominant role for television in news and public discourse.
Just as Barack Obama mastered the use of social media in our own century, Kennedy understood that television had grown beyond “Father Knows Best” and “The Original Amateur Hour.” Even before the 1960 presidential campaign, television had made an impact in public affairs with the broadcast of the Army McCarthy Hearings in 1954, which were aired by ABC and the Dumont networks.
It may be difficult for younger Americans to know what it was like that weekend in 1963. On Friday afternoon, children were sent home from school, parents wept and the world seemed frozen in a daze of shared disbelief. The networks broke into regular programming and tried first to ascertain what had happened and then tried to make sense of it all for viewers. We knew first that Kennedy had been shot, but no one could believe it would be fatal. That didn’t happen in the United States. Walter Cronkite confirmed, in that everlasting moment of raw, emotionally staggering television, that it could and that it had.
Television news seemed to grow up immediately that afternoon. For the rest of the weekend and on into the following week, there was only one thing on TV and it was the aftermath of the assassination. We saw Jacqueline Kennedy returning to Washington, her suit still stained with her husband’s blood. We saw the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, deliver his first official statement. He’d wanted his remarks to be televised live. And on Sunday, Nov. 24, we saw Jack Ruby’s arm thrust forward from a group of reporters and onlookers and we saw Lee Harvey Oswald’s body fold inward as his mouth formed an “Ohhhh.”
The same day, Americans saw JFK’s casket transported from the White House to the Capitol on a horse-drawn caisson. News reporters offered some commentary during the day, but nothing compared to the endless narration we’ve become used to in contemporary coverage of major events on TV. We were told that Black Jack, the riderless horse, with boots placed backward in the stirrups, was meant to signify a fallen leader. But mostly, Americans heard the repetitive thrum of the funeral drums as the procession made its way from the White House to the Capitol.
This story was originally published November 10, 2013 at 12:00 AM with the headline "TV news came of age because of JFK, in life and death."