Listening In: Cronkite, Lady Bird On The Death Of A President
The image of Walter Cronkite taking off his glasses as he announced President John F. Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, is one that seems seared into our collective memory — even for those of us who weren't around to see it live.
Nearly 40 years later, Cronkite revisited that moment and the rest of that unsettling day in a piece that aired on All Things Considered on Nov. 22, 2002.
Cronkite's story is one of the many that we're looking back on as we mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. You can listen to his recollections — and three other compelling pieces from the NPR archives — below.
Cronkite Remembers
In his piece, Cronkite explores the disorienting period immediately after the shots rang out in Dallas. Incredibly, six members of Kennedy's Cabinet, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, were aboard a jet on their way to Japan when the president was shot — meaning we have recordings of real-time updates from the White House Situation Room in the form of ground-to-air radio traffic.
Cronkite weaves together those tense updates with his behind-the-scenes insight into how the media — and through them, the public at large — learned about what happened on that fateful Friday.
"Those whose jobs often involve great emotional stress develop an amazing stoic power to defer emotion — a power that momentarily eluded me," Cronkite recalled in the 2002 piece. "None had it more than the men who had to give aircraft 972 the news."