Seizing JFK memories before they're gone - Historian speeds up attempt to log historic event

Stephen Fagin collects oral histories for The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. He is in a race against time.

By Friday, the 39th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Fagin hoped to have interviewed 30 people this year who were witnesses or who played roles in the drama of that November weekend in Dallas.

"That's the most we've had in seven years," he said. "Next year, we want to double it, partly because it will be the 40th anniversary and partly - how can I say this? - nobody lives forever."

In the four decades since Mr. Kennedy's murder, memories of the event are fading, even among the witnesses and players. And, one by one, the witnesses and players themselves are passing from the scene.

Earlier this month, Charles Nathan D'Hority, one of the Dallas Police Department's lead investigators in the assassination, died at 79. C. James Carrico, the first doctor in the Parkland Memorial Hospital Emergency room to attend to the president, died in July.

The year also saw the deaths of Tom Clinton Dillard, a Dallas Morning News photographer who rode in the presidential motorcade, and Roy "Kees" Higgins, a Dallas police officer at Parkland who helped move the mortally wounded president from his limousine.

Of the 250 people interviewed since the oral history project began in 1992, about one-fifth have died, Mr. Fagin said. Most were relatively minor figures. The toll among the principal players, most of whom were middle-aged in 1963, has been even more severe.

Of the six people in the presidential limousine at the moment of the shooting, only Nellie Connally - wife of the Texas governor - still survives.

When John Mark Dempsey, a professor at the University of North Texas, began in 1999 to research a book on the trial of Jack Ruby, he could interview only three jurors. One, though still alive, could not be found. The others had died.

"The facts in the trial aren't that hard to find. You can go to the record and find out exactly what happened," Dr. Dempsey said. "But what you can't get are people's emotions, their opinions, their personal reflections on things. ... That's what will be lost as more of them pass on."

The passage of time also creates problems for people who believe that the truth is still out there.

"Every year, you have people who appear on Dealey Plaza who claim they were there that day, and their stories get more outrageous," said Dave Perry of Grapevine, who is considered among the most cautious of the conspiracy theorists.

Mr. Perry has compiled a list of people who have been accused by other conspiracy theorists of being in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, with the intent of doing the president harm. His list has 67 names.

"What happens is that the people who were there and could definitely say that so-and-so didn't happen are no longer around," he said. "That allows people to claim anything, and nobody can say any different."

Thirty-nine years after the event, Mr. Perry says he fears he may never be able to name an accomplice to Lee Harvey Oswald, whom the Warren Commission described as the lone assassin.

But he believes that improvements in technology can provide better analysis of evidence. He noted that a 1970s acoustic study of the assassination site raised the possibility of an additional gunshot, later dismissed by others as being the sound of a motorcycle backfiring.

"I'd like to see what they'd find if they repeated that study, using technology that exists now," he said.

Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum, agrees that there is still fruitful evidence to be gathered.

"Most of the principal players were interviewed within a year after the assassination, and those interviews are on record for all time," he said.

"The problem is that new questions have arisen over the years, and those questions weren't necessarily asked in 1964."

Local residents often offer Mr. Mack photos taken on Dealey Plaza the day after the assassination. Most of them show crowds or mounds of bouquets, and the donors are surprised when Mr. Mack shows interest, he said.

"We know Jack Ruby visited Dealey Plaza sometime during that period, and I keep looking at those photographs of flowers, hoping I'll see him in the background," Mr. Mack said.

And museum officials keep urging those with even seemingly minor connections to the assassination to record their oral histories.

Mr. Pierce, 79, was the police lieutenant in charge of security in the Police Department garage on Nov. 24, 1963, when Oswald, newly accused of killing the president, was shot by nightclub figure Jack Ruby.

Although he gave only a few interviews throughout his life, Mr. Pierce decided to grant one to The Sixth Floor Museum - because of the institution's reputation and because he wasn't getting any younger.

"It was a historic event, and a lot of people had wanted interviews. I guess I felt like I needed to tell the stories," he said. "My memory is getting shorter all the time."

"Not only do people die off, but memories fade and people read books and it colors what they think they remember," Mr. Fagin said.

For that reason, Mr. Mack said, a doctor in the Parkland emergency room backed out of an oral-history interview.

"He said he was afraid he would misremember something, and that would only stir up more controversy where there was enough controversy already," he said.

Dave Wiegman, who was in Dallas 39 years ago as an NBC-TV photographer, gave interviews to the Sixth Floor Museum and to the Discovery Channel a few weeks ago. He figured it was now or never.

"I'm getting a lot of stuff together in the garage, old Kennedy photographs that I'm sorting out," said Mr. Wiegman, who now lives in Easton, Md.

"I'm 76, and hopefully I've got another 10 years or so, but I figured if I don't do it now, it isn't going to get done.

Out of uniform, in the right place

11/21/2002

JAMES RAGLAND / The Dallas Morning News

Around this time each year, Paul Bentley and I can count on being asked the same question about the Kennedy assassination.

Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

I keep getting queried because I was born Nov. 22, 1961 - exactly two years before President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

THE SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM

Paul Bentley (right), escorting Lee Harvey Oswald out of the Texas Theatre, hurt his ankle in the struggle but stood tall in Time magazine.

All I know is that I was in diapers somewhere in East Texas.

Mr. Bentley, 81, knows precisely where he was. He was sitting in his office at Dallas police headquarters when someone told him Mr. Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally had been shot. Like everyone else, Mr. Bentley was stunned.

Moments later, Capt. George Dowdy told him that a colleague, Officer J.D. Tippit, had been shot on an Oak Cliff street.

"And I said, 'Well, let me go with you,' " recalled Mr. Bentley, who was head of polygraph examinations at the time. "I was dressed in plain clothes."

He and other officers were inspecting the murder scene when they got a tip that a "suspicious man" was reported on Jefferson Boulevard. As they began combing the area, he said, they got another tip that the man had walked into the Texas Theatre. Mr. Bentley said he went upstairs to ask the projectionist to turn on the house lights. And when he returned downstairs, he saw Officer Nick McDonald confronting Lee Harvey Oswald.

"McDonald walked up in the row in front of Oswald and asked him to stand," Mr. Bentley said. "Oswald hit Mac with his left fist and reached for his pistol."

At that point, Mr. Bentley said, he jumped over some seats to grab Oswald. Mr. Bentley hurt himself in the process.

"I hung my ankle between the seats struggling with Oswald, trying to get the gun from him," he said. He tore some ligaments, requiring him to go to the hospital, where his foot was placed in a cast.

Among the 81 related artifacts he has is a photo of himself walking on crutches into Dallas City Hall the Monday after the incident.

But the most popular photo of himself undoubtedly is the one showing a dapper-looking Mr. Bentley chomping a cigar while escorting Oswald out of the Texas Theatre. That scene was in Time magazine.

"The funny thing is," Mr. Bentley said, "is that I don't remember smoking a cigar that day. I guess tension had built up so much, you just don't realize you had a cigar in your mouth. I more or less chewed on them more than anything."

Mr. Bentley's wife of more than 60 years, Mozelle, was surprised at the time to find out that her husband had been involved in such a historic and dangerous event.

"I was at home waiting on him and then he comes here with crutches and a cast on his leg," she said. "I thought he was safe at City Hall, and all the time he was right in the middle of it."

Mr. Bentley's brother-in-law, the late L.C. Graves, also became a historic footnote: He was at Oswald's left side when Jack Ruby fatally shot the assassin.

These days, Mr. Bentley tries to take it easy. He left the Police Department in 1968 "after 21 years and two days." He worked as director of security at First National Bank for 11 years before serving as vice president of a security firm until 1986, when he retired for good.

He has a 55-year-old son who used to work for the FBI. He had a daughter who died of a diabetes-related illness when she was 27. She left him with one grandson who's 32 and lives in Frisco.

CANDI DUKE

Several times a year, Paul Bentley talks about the JFK assassination, including at Richland College this month.

Mr. Bentley is active in Kiwanis Club and Park Cities Baptist Church, where he's a deacon and director of the Sunday school program. He lives in Lake Highlands. He is asked several times a year to do his slide-show presentation about the Kennedy assassination, mostly for school, church and civic groups.

He never turns down any requests, he says, unless he or his wife is sick.

"I've had people come to my house from Japan, England, France, New York," he said. The foreign media in particular seem to be interested in the big Masonic ring he wears on his right index finger, he said, because that ring scratched Oswald's face during their scuffle.

The one question he gets asked all the time: Does he believe Oswald acted alone?

"And I'll tell people before I start [my presentations] that, 'If you think it was a conspiracy, I won't argue with you,' " he said. "But I have no doubt whatsoever that Oswald acted alone."

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/columnists/jragland/stories/112102dnmetragland.66d38.html

Oswald's mother helped reporter grab big story

He didn't know it, but history was calling him

11/21/2002

By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News

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

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/stories/112102dnmetshieffer.66e04.html

Reporters bluffed their way into JFK motorcade and witnessed history

11/18/2002

By BRIAN ANDERSON / Dallas Web Staff

In November 1963, the more youthful members of The Dallas Morning News reporting staff had a unique way of describing their office location at the intersection of Young and Houston streets in downtown Dallas.

"We used to call it the corner of young and foolish," joked veteran journalist Kent Biffle.

Maybe that explains how a carload of reporters managed to bluff their way into the middle of John F. Kennedy's presidential motorcade.

Reporters Lew Harris, Larry Grove, Mike Quinn and Mr. Biffle were admittedly pressing their collective luck when they cruised toward a secured gate at Love Field just prior to the arrival of Air Force One .

"I guess our faces looked familiar to the police who were guarding the place," Mr. Biffle said, noting that most of the reporters had covered the crime beat at one point or another in their careers. "They waved us through."

Dreary skies gave way to sunshine as the charismatic President Kennedy and wife Jacqueline, smiling for the line of awaiting Dallas dignitaries, descended to the tarmac.

"(They) just looked like movie stars," Mr. Biffle recalled thinking to himself.

The four newsmen watched anxiously as the first couple waved to the crowd and climbed into the back of an open limousine. Their good fortune continued as Mr. Harris maneuvered the reporters' car ahead of a bus carrying members of the White House press corps, taking up position about a half-dozen cars behind the president.

"Lew just proceeds as if we knew what we were doing and falls into the motorcade," Mr. Biffle said. "They just waved us on through again."

Like football players in a homecoming parade, the reporters basked in the cheers of the crowd that turned out to greet the visiting president. They waved to acquaintances at roadside and paused occasionally to admire young ladies who had gathered for a glimpse at the procession.

"It was just a very, very positive day, and we were feeling pretty good going through downtown Dallas," said Mike Quinn, now a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

DMN FILE

Mike Quinn worked for The Dallas Morning News in the 1960s, when this picture was taken.

Only minutes later, the "very positive day" became one of the most remorseful moments in American history as gunfire erupted in Dealey Plaza and President Kennedy was mortally wounded.

For those reporters a few cars away, the most important story of their journalism careers was about to unfold before them.

"I thought some idiot had thrown a firecracker," Mr. Quinn said of his reaction when the first shot was fired. When a second round rang out, Mr. Harris was the first to declare it as gunfire.

"I heard three shots, but I didn't see the president hit exactly," Mr. Biffle said. "What is burned in my memory is Jackie crawling around on the back of the limousine."

Three of the reporters leaped from their car, leaving the surprised Mr. Quinn to grab the steering wheel from his position in the front passenger seat.

"Thank God I was in the front seat," he laughed. "The car was rolling and I was by myself. I think two of the doors were still open."

Uncertain if JFK had been injured, most of the men returned to their vehicle and bolted for the Trade Mart where the president was to deliver his lunchtime speech. Mr. Biffle, however, was left behind.

"I remember there were people who had fallen on the ground to get out of the line of fire. Nobody knew what was happening at that point," Mr. Biffle said.

Urged on by pointing bystanders, Mr. Biffle climbed the grassy knoll to the fence line, but he paused before going over for fear that a hidden gunman might still be lying in wait. A teenage boy bounded past the reporter. "He just vaulted over that fence," Mr. Biffle said, recalling how he quickly followed suit. "He shamed me into doing it."

Finding no obvious assassin behind the fence, Mr. Biffle then turned his attention to the Texas School Book Depository. He fell alongside WFAA-TV cameraman Tom Alyea and rushed inside with the first wave of police entering the building.

DMN FILE

Kent Biffle was a young reporter present in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was shot.

"We were lucky because as soon as the complement of cops got into the building, they locked the doors," Mr. Biffle said. "We were the only newsmen up there."

Mr. Biffle and Mr. Alyea spent more than two hours locked inside the Texas School Book Depository as police searched floor by floor. They looked on as police gathered evidence of the crime: a sniper's nest at the sixth floor window, spent rifle cartridges on the floor, a rifle hidden beneath a box of books.

Mr. Biffle expected to find a body as well, theorizing that the assassin had committed suicide after firing on President Kennedy. Instead, he found a familiar name.

A depository employee, Lee Oswald, was missing.

"Lee Oswald should have registered with me immediately," Mr. Biffle said. "I realized I know a Lee Harvey Oswald from Fort Worth. I had worked on the old Fort Worth Press when Oswald first defected to Russia. It was quite a story because he was a Marine and here he was defecting to our biggest enemy at the time."

Mr. Biffle had even spoken with Mr. Oswald by telephone a few years earlier while Mr. Oswald was residing at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow. With Mr. Oswald's mother on the line, Mr. Biffle attempted to begin an interview. He didn't get past hello.

"As soon as he heard her voice ... he walked off and left the phone just dangling and wouldn't return," Mr. Biffle said.

Mr. Biffle said a short notation in Mr. Oswald's diary recorded the call.

"You can believe the FBI took notice of that during the (assassination) investigation," he said, alluding to scrutiny he received following Kennedy's death.

Mr. Biffle's hopes of an exclusive story were dashed by the time he escaped from the Texas School Book Depository. After sprinting five blocks to The Dallas Morning News building, he was disappointed to find Lee Harvey Oswald's name already circulating on the wire services. But there was still much work to be done.

"It was a difficult story to write," Mr. Biffle said, remembering the state of shock that set in over the newsroom.

Bottles of booze and tranquilizers were openly circulated as the stunned staff came to grips with the enormity of the situation they were covering.

"It was chaos, but it was orderly chaos. Everybody did his part somehow and we got through it," Mr. Biffle said. "The whole world as we knew it was falling apart right there in Dallas. When I was writing my story, I had the sense that here I am -- writing history."

Almost 39 years later, Mr. Biffle is still writing history. His Texana column for The Dallas Morning News remains a must read for local history buffs. But the memory of that single story from November 1963 has dogged him for decades.

"It never seems to go away," he said.

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/stories/111802dnmetcojfkreporters.1c08529d.html

Thank you.

JFK artifacts: the eternal claim

11/23/2002

By FRANK TREJO / The Dallas Morning News

It could be just a nice geometric line drawing on an old envelope. Or it could be a part of history - if it was penned by Jack Ruby.

Dortha Good Harvey said she had forgotten all about the envelope until earlier this week, when she was going through a safety deposit box. It was the same day she read a newspaper story about artifacts being donated to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

Ruby purportedly made the drawing while in jail after shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, who was accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

"We hear about things like that all the time," said Ruth Ann Rugg, director of interpretation at the museum and one of those responsible for sorting through the many potential JFK-related artifacts submitted each year. "Sometimes it's nothing, and sometimes it is exactly what they say it is."

Dortha Good Harvey said she had forgotten about the drawing created by Jack Ruby and given to her first husband.
(JIM MAHONEY / DMN)

Whenever the Kennedy assassination is in the news, as it has been this week with Friday's 39th anniversary, the museum's phones ring off the hook with calls from people wanting to know whether they might have a genuine piece of history.

Mrs. Harvey said the envelope was given to her first husband, J. Fred Good, more than 30 years ago.

"I just thought maybe this drawing would be of interest to someone," said the 85-year-old Mrs. Harvey.

And it just might.

"We break a lot of hearts because a lot of people think they have things that are very valuable and perhaps in some case might bring some kind of new light to the assassination," Ms. Rugg said. "But for every handful of people we have to send away, there is that someone who has something terrific for our collection."

Ms. Rugg said officials must first determine whether an item would fit into the museum's mission. If it does, they then try to determine its authenticity.

The most common submissions are photographs. Unfortunately, she said, entrepreneurs made a lot of copies of photographs shortly after the assassination. People come across them years later and assume they are originals.

Still, she said, one man recently brought in two original color photographs of the rifle thought to have been used by Oswald as a police officer carried it from the Texas Book Depository. They are now part of the museum's collection.

Ms. Rugg said the museum welcomes the opportunity to inspect items.

"That's one way our museum is different than any other," she said. "We really are looking for the kind of cultural history that was preserved in a grass-roots kind of way."

One thing the museum does not do is appraise artifacts for people, Ms. Rugg said.

Mrs. Harvey, who lives in Denton County, said she doesn't know what she will do with the envelope she has kept for so many years. She plans to consult her son.

She said a deputy who guarded Ruby in the county jail gave the envelope to her late husband in 1965, when he worked for the Sheriff's Department.

"I really haven't thought about it until now," she said. "I've just been keeping it in my safe deposit box with all the other stuff."

E-mail ftrejo@dallasnews.com

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/112302dnmetrubydrawing.7851c.html

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