Oswald's mother helped reporter get close to big story
Posted on 11/21/2002 3:38:50 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Oswald's mother helped reporter get close to big story
He didn't know it, but history was calling him
11/21/2002
Bob Schieffer, brooding because he wasn't part of the biggest news story in the whole world, grabbed the ringing telephone on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram city desk.
A woman asked if anyone could give her a ride to Dallas.
"Lady, this is not a taxi, and besides, the president has been shot," the young police reporter told her none too diplomatically.
"I know," she said. "They think my son is the one who shot him."
 Bob Schieffer says the Kennedy assassination and the Sept. 11 attacks are the biggest stories he has worked on. (CHERYL DIAZ MEYER / DMN) |
Minutes later, Mr. Schieffer and Bill Foster, the automotive editor, pulled up outside Marguerite Oswald's modest Fort Worth home in a Cadillac sedan, that week's test car. And just like that, Mr. Schieffer was traveling one of the stranger paths in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Or as the venerable CBS newsman explains it now, "I was an odd little footnote to what happened," a footnote he'll explain Thursday evening at a reception at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.
But on Nov. 22, 1963, the 26-year-old Mr. Schieffer just wanted a piece of the story.
The president had started his day in Fort Worth, but Mr. Schieffer wasn't a part of the coverage.
"Basically, I was told, 'Get your butt on down to the police station,' " his regular assignment. He wandered back to the city desk a while later and found it in chaos. So many reporters had been dispatched to Dallas that there was no one left to take their stories when they called in. So he volunteered, and promptly got Mrs. Oswald on the line.
"In all my years as a reporter, I would never again get a call like that one," he recalls in his soon-to-be-published book, This Just In .
Mrs. Oswald, a short, round-faced woman wearing black horn-rimmed glasses and a white nurse's uniform, was distraught, but strangely so, Mr. Schieffer said.
She seemed less concerned about the president's death or her son's possible role in the assassination than about her own future. She complained that the sympathy would go to her Russian-born daughter-in-law, Marina, and predicted that no one would "remember the mother."
She later took to selling pieces of Oswald's clothing to support herself and peddled autographed business cards reading "Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald" to tourists near Dealey Plaza for $5.
Lucky hat
As a police reporter, Mr. Schieffer had taken to wearing the sort of clothes favored by Fort Worth police detectives, topped with a snap-brim hat. His was black felt, he said, his "Dick Tracy hat."
If people mistook him for a police officer, he never tried to dissuade them. And when the Cadillac pulled up at Dallas police headquarters, the hat and Mrs. Oswald served him well.
"I'm the one who brought Oswald's mother over from Fort Worth," he told a uniformed officer. "Is there someplace she can stay where she won't be bothered by all these reporters?"
 Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, showed off photos of her son at her Fort Worth home in 1973. (FILE 1973 / AP) |
The officer escorted them to a small interrogation room, and Mr. Schieffer quickly set off to find the paper's other reporters. The police station was so flooded with reporters then that phones were almost impossible to find, so Mr. Schieffer collected the other reporters' notes and called them in from the interrogation room. No one ever asked who he was.
That evening, Marina Oswald was brought to the police station and an officer asked if she could share the room. Sure, Mr. Schieffer said. Trouble was, she seemed to speak only Russian.
Soon, though, Marguerite Oswald asked detectives if she could visit her son, and when the police agreed, Mr. Schieffer thought he had his scoop.
"The group included Oswald's wife, his mother, an FBI agent and me," Mr. Schieffer writes in his book. "I couldn't believe it. ... I would soon be face to face with the man who was being charged with killing our president.
"Whatever Oswald said, this would have to be the story of a lifetime."
They'd waited a few minutes when the FBI agent casually asked, "And who are you with?"
Mr. Schieffer tried a bluff he'd seen interrogators use, answering a tough question with a question.
"Well, who are you with?" he said with his best snarl.
The agent, suddenly edgy, asked, "Are you a reporter?"
"Well, aren't you?" Mr. Schieffer replied.
"It was at this point," he writes, "that I believe I received my first official death threat. The embarrassed agent said he would kill me if he ever saw me again."
Mr. Schieffer, already retreating, wouldn't get the interview of a lifetime, but he did witness the story that changed the nation.
'Remarkable day'
"It was such a remarkable day," he said, "a day that changed the way Americans got their news.
"Until then, people didn't believe something unless it was written down. After that, people sometimes didn't believe it unless they saw it on television. And it was the first time people saw how reporters gathered the news, all that jostling in the halls," Mr. Schieffer said. "They saw it wasn't a very dignified process, and that upset a lot of people."
But even more than that, the assassination demonstrated the frailty of life, even for a president. The president's death, then the war in Vietnam, and then Watergate triggered a period of cynicism in America, he said, "and turned us into a cynical people."
"In a funny kind of way, I think we sort of got over that after 9-11, and the reason I say that is we started to have the same heroes we had before the Kennedy assassination - police and fire and military people," Mr. Schieffer said.
Mr. Schieffer, who went on to cover the Vietnam War for the Star-Telegram before going to television, said those two stories - the assassination and Sept. 11 - remain the biggest of his career.
"They changed everything in so many ways," Mr. Schieffer said. "When people ask me about it, about the biggest story I've covered, I say that and 9-11.
"Not since the Kennedy assassination have I felt the way I felt that day. It burned out all my emotions. You're running on adrenaline, but the tragedy of it was just so overwhelming."
E-mail myoung@dallasnews.com
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