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A ride for Mrs. Oswald: on November 22, 1963, I was working as a reporter for the fort worth star-telegram when I answered the phone--and got a close encounter with history.

Article Excerpt
IN 1963 I WAS THE NIGHT police reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the newspaper in the town where I grew up. I was 26 years old, made $115 a week, and worked the late shift: six o'clock in the evening to two-thirty in the morning. I hung out with cops, emergency-room nurses, barmaids, and other creatures of the night. Like most young reporters who covered crime, I considered myself a superb investigator, more cop than journalist. I wore a snap-brim hat, hoping I'd be mistaken for a detective, and when someone made that mistake, I never corrected him. The stories I covered were an endless series of car wrecks and murders, the hours were awful, and the pay was low, even by Texas-newspaper standards. I thought it was about the best job anyone could ever have.

But when I heard that President Kennedy was coming to Fort Worth, I wasn't entirely happy about it. In those days presidents didn't travel nearly as much as they do now, so it was big news for my hometown but bad news for me. The political reporters would handle Kennedy, and they would not need any help from me. For a reporter, there's nothing worse than being in the middle of a big story that someone else is covering. I was more than a little irritated.

Kennedy and his entourage flew into Fort Worth late on a Thursday evening, and assignment or no, once we had put the paper to bed early Friday morning, I hustled over to the Press Club, which was open late to accommodate the traveling White House press corps. The party was well under way when I got there, around two in the morning, and for me this was as good as it got. There I was, chatting up reporters I had known only by their byline: Merriman Smith of United Press International, Tom Wicker of the New York Times, and a dozen more.

Kennedy had come to Texas to mend some fences in the Democratic party and to raise money for the 1964 campaign. After a speech in Houston, he had flown to Fort Worth to spend the night and attend a chamber of commerce breakfast before taking a ten-minute flight to Dallas for a parade and a luncheon speech. The tour was to end with a huge fundraising dinner in Austin. Governor John Connally had convinced Kennedy that only in Austin, the state capital, could you get people from the rest of the state to come to a fundraiser. People from Houston wouldn't go to San Antonio for a fundraiser, Connally told Kennedy, and people from Fort Worth damn sure wouldn't go to Dallas. He was right about that. When Amon Carter was running the Star-Telegram, he made a point of taking a sack lunch when he had business in Dallas, claiming he did not care for the city's restaurants. Dallas repaid the courtesy when Fort Worth renamed an airport between the two cities Amon G. Carter Field. Dallas residents declined to use...

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