The school bus was just pulling out of the parking lot early that Friday afternoon when the whispers began. Something had happened to President Kennedy in Dallas. But it wasn’t until freshman basketball practice at the YMCA in town, where our gym-less school used the facilities, that the full story reached us.
We had just started layup drills when a man walked onto the gym floor and whispered in our coach’s ear. The ball dropped from his hand. When he spoke, he sounded angry, and I wondered why he was mad at us.
There’s no point in this now, he said, and walked off the court.
Practice was over. The President was dead. Coach told us to go home, but a group of us headed for church in a reflex that would have gratified the nuns at school.
Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Twenty years ago, I was in Dallas conducting writing workshops at the Dallas Morning News. The morning I left to fly home, I asked the cabbie who was taking me to the airport to wait a few minutes while I ran up to Dealey Plaza.
It was 6 a.m., before rush hour, and the shadowy scene was deserted and still. (You can see a live webcam shot of the scene here.) I climbed down the grassy knoll and stood in the middle of Elm Street, and looked back towards the sixth floor of the seven-story brick building looming behind a grove of trees to see what a clear shot Lee Harvey Oswald had at the Presidential limousine from his perch in the Texas School Book Depository.
The sign now read “Dallas County Administration Building,” but otherwise, the scene of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination seems virtually unchanged. Standing there felt like returning to elementary school for Parents Night and marveling at how tiny the desks were. The setting was so small and ordinary, a mundane location for such a momentous event.
In the Presidential motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, three reporters — Merriman Smith of United Press International, Jack Bell of The Associated Press, and Bob Clark of ABC News — sat in “a black sedan owned by AT&T, one of the favors Ma Bell offered the media in those days. The bigger favor, though, was the radio telephone in the front seat,” recounts Patrick Sloyan in a 1998 American Journalism Review article.
Sloyan’s piece, “Total Domination,” tells a fascinating but little-known story from that day — how two wire service reporters battled to be the first to break the news of what happened in Dealey Plaza four decades ago. Embedded in the tale is an important lesson for anyone trying to decide how best to write the news:
“When should you write a narrative?”
“Aren’t anecdotal leads better than boring straight ones?”
“I like to tell stories, but my editor always rewrites my leads.”
When I hear these questions and gripes, I’m always reminded of Sloyan’s vivid recreation of a brief but fierce struggle that broke out in the press car, five vehicles behind the convertible carrying John F. Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and their wives, after shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. The combatants were the wire service rivals who measured their victories in the minutes between each other’s bulletins that clacked over newsroom teletypes.
Merriman Smith knew gunfire when he heard it. He grabbed the radio telephone, told the operator to connect him to UPI’s Dallas bureau, and began to dictate.
Bell demanded the phone, but Merriman held on, doubling over to shield the handset as the AP man pounded Smith’s head and body in a furious attempt to wrest away the phone.
Sloyan, a young UPI staffer in Washington that day, described what happened next, at 12:39 Central Standard Time, when UPI reported Merrriman’s scoop.
“Around the world, editors heard five bells” from their UPI teletypes — the signal for Merriman’s news flash.
Later that night, after Smith returned to Washington in the same plane that carried the murdered President, his blood and brain-spattered widow Jacqueline, and his successor, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson, he lifted up his shirt at UPI’s Washington bureau to show Sloyan and his colleagues “the welts on his back from the flailing fists of Jack Bell of the Associated Press.”
When Smith beat Bell to the phone, do you think he began spinning a tale? Jackie Kennedy, resplendent in a pink suit and pillbox hat, stepped onto the blistering tarmac at Dallas’ Love Field this morning. Little did she know the tragedy that lay ahead.
No. He had news to report. He said, “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”
Near midnight, after a long day of deadline filing, including an eyewitness account of Johnson’s swearing-in aboard Air Force One, Smith sat down in the Washington bureau and wrote his eyewitness account of the day’s events. This time, he had a story to tell. “It was a balmy, sunny noon as we motored through downtown Dallas behind President Kennedy,” his dispatch, part of the day’s work that won the Pulitzer Prize, began.
With so much talk about narrative writing in newsrooms today, many editors worry that it will become as much of a cliché as the inverted pyramid.
Narrative writing, the blend of character, scene, complication, climax, and resolution that we recognize as a story, is a powerful mechanism to communicate information and experience.
But even the most fervent champions of narrative journalism are cautious about its use. “Not every story merits it, nor can every reporter be trusted with it,” said Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose book “Writing for Story” continues to influence writers. “Most stories should be short, to the point, and written in traditional journalistic style. A cop round-up, written in fake Joan Didion, makes the reader wonder if the journalistic world is asleep at the switch.”
Franklin believes most stories would be “better handled as inverted pyramid stories or, at most, delayed lead features. What could have been good stories come off instead as underreported and overwritten fluff.”
The next time you’re wondering how to write the news, remember Merriman Smith, hanging on for dear life to that phone in Dallas. Sloyan called his performance through those long tragic hours of Nov. 22, 1963, “the 20th century’s finest performance by one reporter on a breaking story.”
But to me they offer a powerful writing lesson as well:
When you have news, report it. When you have a story, tell it.