How news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination unfolded in KC

Not everyone was plugged into the latest technology, that 21-inch, black-and-white Philco console in the living room. So the late editions of the Friday afternoon Kansas City Star were snatched off many a lawn or drugstore counter for confirmation.

There it was in black ink, blaring the blackest of news.

“PRESIDENT IS SLAIN FROM AMBUSH.”

Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, was chilly, gray and rainy. Fitting. History had just turned sharply on two assassin bullets. We, America, would never be the same. We sensed it then. We know it now.

Returning to the files of The Star afternoon paper and The Kansas City Times, our then morning paper, is much like running one’s fingers through cold ashes of a monumentally destructive blaze of 50 years past.

“Scene of panic described by Star newsman.”

That was Jack Williams of the company’s fully stocked Washington bureau. He had drawn the assignment of following President John F. Kennedy and the first lady to Texas. No fault of his, he ended up always just a little bit behind the action on the day.

Of the shooting: “We had noticed a commotion up ahead of us just before the press bus stopped on its way to the Trade Mart where the President was scheduled to speak.”

Texas Gov. John Connally’s wife, Nellie, had just turned to Kennedy to enthuse on the friendliness of the curbside crowds when the shots began to ring out. But to Williams, “the crowd seemed flat. I would say Mrs. Kennedy was the star of the show.”

Williams arrived at the Trade Mart where thousands were beginning their lunch, expecting an address on the perils of ultra-conservatism. A rocking chair was to be presented. When the news reached them, Williams and the reporters scrambled to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where they looked into the presidential limo and noted the blood on its floor.

The Associated Press and other wire services were the news kings on this day. Even when Walter Cronkite choked back his tears over the official notice of Kennedy’s passing, he was reading something just ripped off the wire services’ teletype.

Back amid the Rothchilds ads for men’s “clicker coats” and 28-cents-a-pound tom turkeys at the A&P was a story the scrambling Star editors had missed: JFK was to honor nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer with the Fermi Award.

And the Missouri-Kansas game in Lawrence was postponed for a week.

Nov. 23, 1963: A nation reacts

The next morning’s front page of The Times was filled with fragments of an exploding news story.

“J.F.K. BODY HOME AS U.S. GRIEVES”

Just below: “JOHNSON TAKES OVER AMERICAN PRESIDENCY.”

The famous wire-service picture of Lyndon Baines Johnson being sworn in, flanked by his wife, Lady Bird, and a blood-stained Jackie Kennedy was there. Another photo captured the scramble in the ill-fated Lincoln limousine. And below was Lee Harvey Oswald with his maddening smirk.

The 7.65 mm rifle had been found in the Texas School Book Depository. Mrs. Kennedy was at Bethesda. The funeral was to be Monday.

The first hint for the budding industry of conspiracy theories popped up on Page 2 of The Times: In Oxnard, Calif., The Associated Press reported, a telephone company executive claimed that 20 minutes before the shots rang out on Dealey Plaza, “a woman caller was overheard whispering, ‘the President is going to be killed.’”

On Page 7, the Rev. Billy Graham revealed that he had tried to reach the White House to urge JFK not to go to Dallas. But he said he realized his premonition would sound ridiculous, so he dropped his efforts.

Williams dutifully pulled together a long wrapup. “All the carefully trained agents and police could offer no effective protection against a sniper who with murder in his heart, laid his plans so cleverly and diabolically.”

He also offered this nugget of misinformation: “Doctors believe only one .30 caliber bullet hit the President in the throat and ranged upward.” This was long before the “magic bullet” theory so discussed in later years.

The Times gathered reaction from across the city. “A young secretary, with streaks of eye makeup staining her cheeks, said she ‘didn’t want to listen any more to the radio, for fear of what was coming ’”

One interviewed would later be assassinated himself. Leon Jordan, who was then stretching out the political power of Kansas City’s black wards, said the news from Dallas kept him from thinking clearly.

The Times photographed Catholic children praying for Kennedy at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and revealed that the priest who had delivered last rites in the Dallas hospital room, the Rev. Oscar L. Huber, earlier had been pastor of St. Vincent’s on 31st Street and Flora Avenue in Kansas City.

Now was the time for Joe Lastelic, another in The Star’s bureau, to take advantage of knowing LBJ, having visited him on his ranch. His bio of the new president started: “When Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in a lean-to cabin in the hill country of Texas, his squalling was so loud some one predicted he undoubtedly would be a United States senator.”

Back behind the miles of classified ads and the funnies came the editorial: “More has been lost in the last few hours than could possibly be put into words. And with the loss, there is a scar, now, across the face of America. If the reins of democracy are dropped in the flash of an assassin’s bullet, they must be seized at once. Death’s closed one door; it must open another.”

Nov. 24, 1963: The killer

The main headline on the Sunday front says we were: ‘SURE’ OSWALD IS SLAYER.

Roy Roberts, a regional Republican power as Star/Times publisher, weighed in with some prescience musing that Kennedy’s legend would shine on longer than his deeds: “Both the man and the legend have their place in history and both will grow with the decades. Violent death, pointless death, so often guarantees that it will be so

“The present Congress had made a shambles of President Kennedy’s domestic program,” yet Roberts thought Johnson, “the grand master of the lodge,” could break the impasse on the Hill. Again, bingo!

Citizen Harry S. Truman was on the left side of the page, beginning: “I think the time has come for some plain speaking on the problem of civil rights,” in his call upon Southern congressmen to quit resisting history.

John R. Cauley, a Star Washington correspondent who had watched Johnson arrive at the White House by helicopter the night before, had two Page 1 bylines: a newsy trifle that Truman had conferred with Johnson at the White House; the other under the headline: “Kennedy, as a man, had ‘Class.’” In this piece, he recorded his friendship with the Massachusetts politician, some of it gained on the campaign trail of 1960.

To illustrate his access, he first recalled a talk in the White House for his review of James McGregor Burns’ book on Kennedy. Cauley noted Kennedy’s irritability toward Burns. “He wants me to bleed, to bleed like some of those ultra liberals in the Senate. I suppose I’m not the bleeding type.”

Further back, there was a photo of Oswald’s family — his mother, his Soviet-born wife and their two babes in arms, all victims in their own way.

The week after

“OSWALD SHOT DOWN AMID POLICE,” roared The Times Monday morning. The Dallas Times Herald photograph, which would win the Pulitzer Prize, made words unnecessary.

A NBC camera also was there; that night “Bonanza” was pre-empted. It was a tipping point. Later the same month, a national poll would show more Americans now trusted television over newspapers for their news.

Williams was still in Dallas holding the fort, now second-guessing the motorcade route. But The Star/Times had sent down reinforcements: Robert K. Sanford, who got there in time for what must have been the lead story of his career. “Oswald moaned, grabbed at the wound with his handcuffed hands, and fell to the floor.”

If Sanford was not in the police headquarters at that moment, the reader couldn’t tell. He was everywhere else over the next 10 hours, with reportage so vast and complete, it’s hard to believe it was just one man without a jetpack.

That Times edition was another of those collectors’ gems. Inside, Jackie Kennedy kissed the flag-draped coffin in the East Room, her children beside her. Jack Ruby was headlined as a “strange guy.” And this to put a chill over the coming decade: “Viet Cong Overrun Camp: Six Americans reported missing and 63 South Vietnamese soldiers are killed or missing.”

Monday afternoon, The Star covered the funeral from St. Matthew Cathedral to Arlington National Cemetery. In Kansas City, train crews stepped down from their rumbling diesels for a moment of respect.

The image that many of us boomers think of first, John John’s tender salute to his father’s passing coffin, was overlooked. (It showed up the next morning, on Page 8, along with news that a fellow named Zapruder had this film.)

Billions of trees have been sacrificed since then in the service of news, thousands of bylines retired. History has marched on, forcing us past tragedy after tragedy. And still we don’t know everything.

The Tuesday Times, on Nov. 26, put on record the call for a blue-ribbon inquiry into the assassination, one in which “all the details will be made public.” But it will be 2017, if then, before all CIA files on the assassination are revealed.

This story was originally published November 15, 2013 at 8:00 AM.