Times focused on 'lone gunman'

before smoke cleared in Dallas

Food for thought as we approach the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's murder.

From the early "city edition":

City Edition

KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER

AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS;

JOHNSON SWORN IN 0N PLANE

Texas Governor Is Shot;

Mrs. Kennedy Unharmed

Death Occurs in Hospital After Several

Resuscitation Efforts -- Condition of

Connally Serious But Not Critical

By Tom Wicker

Correspondent of the N.Y. Times

Dallas, Nov. 22 -- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.

He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet that was fired as he was riding through downtown Dallas in a motorcade.

[Paragraph on Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as president.]

Several hours after the assassination, Lee H. Oswald, described as a one-time defector to the Soviet Union and chairman of the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee," was arrested by the Dallas police. Oswald, 24 years old, was accused of slaying a policeman who had followed him into a theater. Oswald was subdued after a scuffle in the theater.

In the Late City Edition, the third headline was rewritten:

President Is Struck Down by a Rifle Shot

From Building on Motorcade Route --

Johnson, Riding Behind, Is Unhurt

Curious that Wicker, as reflected in the Times headline (which would not have been written by him), seems prematurely focused on the idea of a lone killer. Headlines in other newspapers averted this implication, simply asserting that Kennedy had been killed, slain, shot to death, assassinated and so on.

By the time of the Times's late city edition, the Texas School Book Depository "sniper's nest" claim had reached reporters, which shows that before the first edition deadline, neither Wicker nor the Times was aware of that claim by the Dallas police. And yet Wicker seemed very focused on not raising the issue of whether there might have been more than one gunman -- even though he and his editors were well aware that JFK had been the target of hate propaganda and that he had angered various powerful interests.

Of course, it might be argued that death very likely came via one rifle bullet, which came from one rifle, fired by one sniper. And yet there does seem to be here a decision to play down any hint that other rifles could have been fired.

Wicker, who eventually went on to become a Times columnist, defended the lone-gunman theory against all comers, deriding doubters as ignoramuses. And yet one of the early doubters was Sylvan Fox, who had written an expose of unanswered questions regarding the murder while an editor for the New York World-Telegram and Sun. After the Telegram folded he served as a reporter and editor on the N.Y. Times staff. But he fell silent on the assassination once he went to work for the Times. Fox later worked as editor of the op-ed page of Newsday, the Long Island newspaper.

Wicker, now deceased, wrote in a memoir that he had not bothered to bring his notebook that day, not expecting anything newsworthy to come of the presidential politicking, and was compelled to write notes on his shirtsleeves. As a former newspaper reporter, I find this disconcerting. I can't imagine a reporter of that era not bringing pen, pencil, a notebook or a handful of news copy paper when on the job. After all, the whole idea of NEWS is that stories often occur unpredictably. 

Yes, I can see a young, lazy reporter being so foolish. That said, we still have Wicker's lifelong defense of the official theory, and that tends to make me suspect that he "forgot" his notebook as a means of trying to avoid any suspicion that he might have had advance knowledge of treason.

Times page on JFK's slaying

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1122.html