Synopses & Reviews
The authors of this riveting first-person account, Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix, and Wes Wise, were reporters for the Dallas CBS affiliate KRLD Radio-TV News, one of Americas largest and best equipped news organizations. These journalists covered Texas and worked with Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, and the rest of CBS News in bringing area news to the nation. When covering JFKs Dallas visit suddenly evolved into reporting a worldwide tragedy, they kept as calm as possible, to encourage the world to remain sane.
At the epicenter of that crisis KRLD News earned the nations highest honor for its on-the-scene reporting, presented by the Radio Television News Directors Association, which recognized the KRLD News staffs reaction to the sudden tragedy:
KRLD deserves the highest praise for the manner in which its personnel moved without a moment of hesitation from what was to have been normal coverage of the arrival, presentation and departure of the President, into fascinating, elaborate, complete and deeply detailed coverage at the local level of what has to be easily the story of our modern lives.
Review
"The first accounts of how the Kennedy assassination happened came from the local radio and TV reporters of Dallas. For the first time, some of the best of those reporters tell the gritty tale of how they did it. The story they tell is riveting, insightful and filled with new detail about that awful weekend that changed America." Bob Schieffer, CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent, author of This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV
Review
"Here, finally, is the view from the street about November 22, 1963. This reporters' account of the Kennedy assassination brings to full focus the personal anguish as well as the professional pressure endured that day by those who could not take the time to cry. This book will become part of the real and permanent history of a dark day for America." Jim Lehrer, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, author of Flying Crows
Review
"People often ask me 'what it was really like' to be in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot....When the News Went Live provides an eloquent answer to that tough question, as four newsmen who were there, on the ground, tell how it 'really was' through their eyes and ears." Dan Rather, CBS News
Review
"The bulk of the book is a fast-paced recounting of what [the authors] witnessed, accompanied by 43 evocative black-and-white photos....It concludes with two thought-provoking chapters about the business of news and its uncertain future. Recommended." Library Journal
Synopsis
With shots from a mail-order rifle, Lee Harvey Oswald set off a worldwide tragedy that developed too fast to print. Broadcast journalism came of age in that crisis and helped to hold a mourning nation together. Four reporters on the scene relate their experiences as staff of the local CBS affiliate working with Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite. When the News Went Live recalls their coverage of breaking news including the assassination, the first on-camera murder, and the trial of Jack Ruby.
Synopsis
When routine coverage of JFK's Dallas visit suddenly evolved into reporting a worldwide tragedy, KRLD reporters assumed the duty of reassuring a shocked nation and an anxious world. Broadcast journalism came of age in that crisis, and KRLD News earned the professions highest honor for its on-the-scene reporting. The writers worked in support of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite as they reported the first on-camera murder and initiated the first continuous live coverage. Reporters who were part of this watershed in broadcast journalism have had four decades to consider events that were too fast and stunning to allow emotional detachment or reflection. They have never written their account of what happened on the scene in Dallas in until this book, and no other group had quite the behind-the-scene perspectives these four shared.
About the Author
Bob Huffaker broadcast the JFK motorcade, then the sad scene at Parkland Hospital. He broadcast televisions first murder on CBS from the police garage when Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald, then interviewed the slain assassins mother and other principals in the case. He was a Warren Commission witness, and he covered Rubys murder trial and finally his death. Huffakers courtroom interview with Ruby won the Texas Association of Broadcasters award, among others, and he was editor of his and his colleagues broadcasts that won the RTNDAs 1963 national award for on-the-spot reporting.
Huffaker produced an early documentary on Texas Black Muslims that drew national attention. A former Army officer and policeman, he specialized in investigative reporting.
He left broadcasting in 1967, earned the Ph.D. and taught as an English professor until 1980, when, as investigator for the Texas Legislature, he exposed his former department at Southwest Texas State University for falsifying class records. In 2004, that university, now Texas State University, inducted him into its University Star hall of fame for his defense of press freedom when he taught there and headed its student publications committee from 1974 through 1980.
In the 1980s, Huffaker was a Texas Monthly editor, having served as an editor of Studies in the Novel, Studies in American Humor, and The Modern Humanities Research Association Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. His book John Fowles (G.K. Hall & Co, 1980) is still cited as seminal scholarship about the novelists work. In addition to Texas Monthly, Huffakers work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, The Dallas Observer, True West, Senior Beacon, and Texas Parks & Wildlife.
Huffaker lives with his wife, Veva Vonler, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where they both write and study nature, history, literature and cinema. Their son Kevin Huffaker is a sculptor and specialist in greenhouse design near San Marcos, Texas, and their son Zachary Vonler, a computer programmer and software designer, is serving in the US Navy.
Bill Mercer stood vigil at Dallas Police headquarters and confronted Lee Oswald in a bizarre press showing on the midnight after the assassination, and he informed the assassin that police had charged him with the presidents murder. Mercer remained a gentleman among the rowdy mob of reporters.
Mercer walked among flowers at the assassination site and reported words of sympathy on wreathsand on the minds of those who gathered to express spontaneous emotion at JFKs murder. His respectful and articulate reporting was dignified and moving in that atmosphere of crisis and grief.
In a career that spans a half-century, Mercer has been a sports broadcast pioneer, serving as the voice of the Dallas Cowboys, Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers, University of North Texas Eagles, and the Cotton Bowl. He is also a versatile journalist, professor, and author of a history of the Navy LCI: combat landing craft on which he served in the Pacific during World War II.
Mercer is a member of the Texas Radio Hall of Fame, baseballs Texas All-Pros Hall of Fame, and the University of North Texas Athletic Hall of Fame, to name a few halls that honor him. He is still professor of radio and television at the University of North Texas.
He and his wife, Ilene Hargis Mercer, live in the North Dallas suburban home where they raised four children. They have five granddaughters.
Mercer is active in amateur theater, and one claim to his fame is his prominent career as announcer of professional wrestling. He joined KRLD in 1953 to broadcast live television wrestling, and that peculiar role went on for decades, earning him a large and enthusiastic following. As quirky as it may sound, Bill Mercers wrestling broadcasts became the most popular television show in, of all places, Israel. And for a while, Bill and the Von Erich wrestling family were Israels leading television personalities.
Mercer was a regular on Comment, Dallas first radio talk showone of the nations first to accept listeners calls and feature prominent guests: from Dr. Edward Teller to Colonel Harlan Sanders.
George Phenix has spent his life in press and politics. After leaving KRLD News, George returned to Austin as a boy lobbyist for the Texas Municipal League, where he wrote speeches and television shows for a number of political figures, including Governor Preston Smith. Congressman J.J. Pickle recruited him to run his Washington office, where Phenix wrote more than 250 speeches for the legislator in a single year. After four years in the nations capitol, he returned to Texas as Executive Assistant to US Senator Lloyd Bentsen.
After a career as film-maker, speech writer, and political consultant, Phenix published several weekly newspapers in and around Austin. He co-founded Texas Weekly, the states oldest and largest political newsletter, and for more than twenty years he has served as its publisher.
Phenix, an avid bicyclist, invited his four children to join him on a twenty-six-mile ride to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. They allowed him to come in third, and he plans rematches.
Wes Wise is another pioneer of sports broadcasting. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was a well-known baseball play-by-play announcer for the nationwide Liberty Broadcasting System. He was Southwest Correspondent for Sports Illustrated, and his writing appeared in Time and Life.
Wise served the U.S. Army as instructor in Psychological Warfare Schools at Fort Riley, Kansas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
As a journalist, he won numerous awards including three Press Club of Dallas Katies and the Southwest Journalism Forum award from Southern Methodist University for continued excellence in journalism.
Wes Wise was elected Mayor of Dallas in 1971, serving five years in that office after four as a city councilman. He was President of the Texas Municipal League and a board member of the US Conference of Mayors.
Wise continues to lecture at universities, including the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, and Grambling University, as well as high schools in Texas and surrounding states.
He lives with his wife, Sally, on Cedar Creek Lake and divides time between there and Dallas, where he remains active in civic and political affairs.
Wes Wise touched more important developments of the assassination story than most reporters. As president of the Dallas Press Club, he greeted and escorted Adlai Stevenson at the days press conference before covering that nights fateful attacks upon the UN Ambassador. After capturing the only newsfilm of that fiasco, Wise helped federal agents prepare JFKs Dallas security for the next months visit. He covered the presidential motorcade, played a double role at the presidents aborted luncheon, encountered Jack Ruby the day before he shot Oswald, waited at the county jail for the Oswald transfer that went wrong, and testified for both sides in the Ruby trial.
In his five years as Dallas mayor, Wes Wise helped the city overcome its tarnished reputation. He not only reported this segment of history; he made some of it himself. As a reporter, he set records straight; as Dallas first independent mayor in decades, he helped the city toward racial equity, guided it through desegregation and the uneasy Sixties, fought to memorialize JFKs life and death, and with support of Dallasites, pulled the city up from international disgrace.