Volume 37 DECEMBER 9, 1963 Number 49
THE WEEKLY NEWS
A current events magazine for the blind
Published weekly for free Distribution
by the National Braille Press Inc.,
Francis B. Ierardi, Manager
88 St. Stephen Street, Boston 15, Mass
Entered March 17, 1927, at the Post office
of Boston, Massachusetts, as free matter
under the Act of August 24, 1912
Vol. 37 Dec. 9, 1963 49
THE WEEKLY NEWS.
A current events magazine for the blind
Published weekly for free distribution
by the National Braille Press Inc.,
F. B. Ierardi, Manager,
88 St. Stephen Street,
Boston 15, Mass.
THE WEEKLY NEWS.
Vol. 37
Dec., 1963 49
George Gean Lorantos, Editor.
MEMORIAL ISSUE.
CONTENTS.
“A Thousand Well-Wishers”—and One Assassin 1
The Capture of a Killer 6
Accused Assassin is Slain 7
250,000 Pay Final Respects 8
Mansfield Tribute 13
Cardinal Offers “Rest In Peace” Mass 15
Cape Canaveral Renamed 19
Time for Reappraisal 21
Review of the Week’s News 22
“A THOUSAND WELL-WISHERS”—AND ONE ASSASSIN
(U.S. News and World Report, Dec. 2
Dallas—This had really been a triumphal tour for the Kennedy’s—the President and the First Lady.
The crowds at San Antonio when the president arrived on November 21 were tremendous. They were just as enthusiastic at Houston and Fort Worth.
And the same mood was in the air when we reached the Dallas airport the next day. Mrs. Kennedy was the first off the plane here, and she must have shaken the hands of a thousand well-wishers as she walked along the pathway from the plane to the motorcade.
That atmosphere carried over into the noon hour as we rode in the motorcade through the Dallas suburbs toward the Trade Mart, where Mr. Kennedy was to deliver a speech.
I was in a press bus with about 20 other reporters. Suddenly over the noise of the throng, I heard shots. I felt in my bones that tragedy had struck, even before I knew what had happened. The front end of the motorcade just sort of disintegrated. Some of the limousines sped away at breakneck speed.
I saw a helmeted motorcycle policeman running toward a building that overlooked the parade route—unslinging his gun as he went. People were lying on the grassy slope, as though to get out of the line of fire.
It was several minutes before we could reconstruct what had happened.
With the first shot, the President slumped forward. Mrs. Kennedy cried, “Oh, no!” and reached out to cradle his head as he fell.
The same volley of shots that hit the President struck Governor John Connally of Texas, who was riding beside Mr. Kennedy.
Ahead, a Secret Service man in a communications car grabbed a telephone and said: “Get to the nearest hospital immediately.” The cars sped off.
Just minutes before, the Kennedys and the Connallys had been chatting happily as they acknowledged the greeting Dallas was giving the First Family. At one point, as the motorcade moved along, Mrs. Connally turned to the President and said: “You can’t say Dallas wasn’t friendly to you.”
But now the First Lady was on the floor of the limousine, kneeling over her dying husband as he was sped to Parkland Hospital’s emergency ward. Mrs. Kennedy helped lift the President onto a stretcher. Her pink wool suit was spattered with blood.
At the hospital, all was confusion for the first few moments. When we reached the hospital we couldn’t find out whether the President was dead or alive. After a while a Catholic priest emerged from the hospital and said: “He’s dead.”
It was 1 p.m., Central Standard Time.
Up to the moment when those shots rang out, it had been an eventful and pleasant day for both the Kennedys.
It started early, in Fort Worth. There, at 8:45 a.m., the President walked bare-headed and without a topcoat to a parking lot across the street from his hotel. He spoke briefly to a throng of cheering Democrats who had been unable to see him at a breakfast appearance. He apologized because Mrs. Kennedy wasn’t with him—explaining that she was “organizing herself—it takes longer.”
Fifteen minutes after that, both of the Kennedy’s attended a breakfast sponsored by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Both were presented with Texas boots. There was a typical Texas hat for the President.
Later, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy departed for the brief flight to Dallas, where they arrived shortly before noon, Dallas time. As Mrs. Kennedy emerged from the plane, she carried a bouquet of roses. Young men in the airport crowd shouted, “Hey, Jackie!” Several young girls were screaming in delight as the President appeared. There was no sign of anti-Kennedy sentiment, although the crowds in Dallas seemed smaller to me than they had at other stops on the Texas tour—San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth.
The Dallas motorcade was approaching a triple underpass which feeds into Stemmons Expressway, en route to the trade Mart, when those shots rang out.
At the hospital, after it was all over, Dr. Malcolm Perry—one of 10 physicians who had been called to attend the fatally stricken President—told of the emergency efforts to keep Mr. Kennedy alive.
“I noticed he was in critical condition from a wound in the neck and head,” Dr. Perry said.
“Immediate respiration methods were taken, and Dr. Kemp Clark was summoned along with other members of the surgical staff. They arrived immediately, but at this point the President’s condition did not allow complete resuscitation. He was critical and moribund.”
Mr. Kennedy’s throat was opened against the possibility that air had gotten into the space between his lungs and his chest. Blood transfusions and fluids were administered, but to no avail.
“Shortly after I arrived,” Dr. Perry said, “the President lost his heart action.”
Mr. Kennedy’s body was removed from the hospital in a bronze casket. Mrs. Kennedy rode in the hearse to the airport.
At the airport, Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office as President of the United States. He was sworn in aboard the huge presidential plane—“Air Force One”—that had carried Mr. Kennedy into Dallas and, in a few moments, would take his body back to Washington.
The oath was administered to Mr. Johnson by Sarah T. Hughes, a federal judge in Texas who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Kennedy in October, 1961. Judge Hughes was weeping during the ceremony. It was over in less than a minute.
Said President Johnson: “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”
THE CAPTURE OF A KILLER
(U.S. News and World Report, Dec 2.)—The man charged by Dallas police with the murder of President Kennedy is Lee H. Oswald, 24. He is a self-styled “Marxist” and Castro supporter.
Oswald killed a policeman who accosted him after the President was shot. He fled, but was captured a few minutes later in a movie theater.
The prisoner is an ex-U.S. Marine. He went to Moscow in 1959, tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship to become a citizen of Russia. The Soviets rejected his request.
In 1962, with a Russian wife and a child, Oswald returned to the U.S. He turned up as head of a pro-Castro group in New Orleans, where he was arrested in a “back Cuba” demonstration. From New Orleans, he went to Dallas.
Police said they established that Oswald was in the building from which the assassin fired. A rifle with a telescopic sight was found in the building.
In the man hunt, Officer J. D. Tippitt stopped Oswald on the street. Oswald, police said, drew a revolver and shot the officer dead. A few minutes later, police learned that the gunman had dashed into a movie. Patrolmen rushed there. Oswald tried to shoot, but his gun misfired. He was subdued and taken to jail.
ACCUSED ASSASSIN IS SLAIN
(Boston Herald, Nov. 25).—President Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was fatally shot by a local nightclub operator Sunday, as police were transferring him from the city jail to the county jail.
The murder occurred in the basement of the Municipal Building at 12:26 P.M. (EST).
The assailant, Jack Rubenstein, known as Jack Ruby, lunged from among a cluster of newsmen observing the transfer of Oswald from the jail to an armored truck. Capt. Will Fritz of the Dallas Police Department, who headed the investigation of the president’s assassination over the last 48 hours, said that with Oswald’s death, “The case is closed.”
As the 24-year-old prisoner, flanked by two detectives stepped onto a basement garage ramp, Ruby thrust a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver into Oswald’s left side and fired a single shot. …
250,000 PAY FINAL RESPECTS
(The Patriot Ledger, Nov. 25).—By the tens of thousands, they came to look on the bier of their dead leader—many weeping openly, others seemingly bewildered.
And when the solemn procession finally was halted today by sympathetic police, an estimated quarter of a million persons had filed past the flag-draped casket of the late John F. Kennedy in the rotunda of the capitol.
The night chill was no deterrent to those who stood in line for hours on end. Some carried small children, many were lightly dressed. They came from near and far for 18 hours to pay their last respects to the man whose vibrant youth captured the imagination of so many.
Several thousand others still were in line when police finally were forced to bar further viewers at 9 a.m. They did not protest at being excluded and most did not leave. Instead they stayed to watch the funeral procession leave the capitol 9 minutes later.
After the huge doors to the capitol were closed to the public, senators and congressmen joined the last of the ordinary citizens in the rotunda in passing the closed casket. Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon and his wife also were among the last visitors.
Before the public was admitted starting at about 3 p.m. EST yesterday, the nation, via television, shared the grief of the sorrowful widow Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. She walked unexpectedly to the casket with daughter Caroline, 5, and the two knelt and kissed the flag.
Mrs. Kennedy returned to the Capitol several hours later and stood prayerfully for a minute at the casket before again kissing it.
Those in the rotunda when the former First Lady returned at about 9 p.m. wept openly as she left.
At one time during the cold night, in which the temperature fell into the 30s, the crowds patiently waiting to enter the capitol were estimated at far over 120,000.
At 8:25 EST, police formed a cutoff in the long line at a point about two blocks east of the Capitol. This meant that some thousands who had endured the near-freezing weather for hours would be disappointed.
The cutoff was necessary to assure that the rotunda would be cleared in time for John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s last ride to the White House. Hundreds in the Capitol when the cutoff came continued to shuffle forward to file past the casket.
As the last of the visitors passed the flag-draped casket at 9 a.m., EST, Capitol Police Chief Charles J. Sullivan estimated that 250,000 persons viewed the casket on its ancient catafalque shrouded in black.
Other, unofficial estimates by persons who had watched the crowds throughout the night put the figure at about 140,000.
In any event, it was a massive outpouring of affection and sorrow for the assassinated young President.
At midnight authorities had warned those at the end of the slow moving line—almost 30 blocks long—that they might not get a chance to get into the rotunda.
But still they came. Police repeated the warning at 2 a.m. and again at 3 and 4 and 5—and later. But still they came.
Among the last to pause in reverence beside the bier was the former vice president, Richard M. Nixon, the man Kennedy defeated for the presidency in 1960, and his wife, Patricia. They appeared at three minutes before 9 o’clock.
The massive doors to the Capitol were closed promptly at 9. Those inside the rotunda were allowed to file past the bier. By 9:05 a.m., EST, the last of the tens of thousands of ordinary mourners passed the bier.
The catafalque on which the President lay was the same as the simple bier of planks covered with black bunting used for another martyred commander-in-chief, Abraham Lincoln, almost a century ago.
Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy and her daughter Caroline were the first to approach the coffin in the rotunda yesterday after eulogies by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield and Speaker John W. McCormack.
Kneeling with her daughter, Mrs. Kennedy kissed the flag that covered the casket, then left the rotunda and her husband to the people.
But several hours later she returned unexpectedly with the President’s brother, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, and reverently kissed the casket for the second time. The attorney general took her arm when she rose and led her outside, where they walked quietly under the trees before entering a car to return to the White House.
The President’s mother, Mrs. Rose Kennedy, appeared a little later. Then his younger brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D., Mass.
It was nearly midnight when Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. and his wife filed past, followed later by Irish President Eamon De Valera.
When during the evening a member of the Kennedy family came, or some national or international dignitary, there were no murmurs from the throng. They were not curious, they were not disrespectful. They were mourners.
Only the hollow sound of the hundreds of shuffling feet broke the stillness of the rotunda. At 30-minute intervals the military guard of honor changed. The servicemen marched forward with slow and stately tread to relieve their comrades.