BOOK REVIEW Reporting the Kennedy Assassination

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT you’d read everything you wanted to about the Kennedy assassination, Dallas’ Three Forks Press does its best to convince you otherwise. Reporting the Kennedy Assassination provides a venue for the recollections of those members of the local media who worked the story.

In 1993, SMU invited these reporters, editors, cameramen and photographers to a conference to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the assassination. The result is a fascinating, first-person account of how reporters like Hugh Aynesworth, John McConal and Vivian Castleberry became part of Dal-las history.

Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Biffle and WFAA-TV cornerman Tom Alyea entered the Texas School Book Depository just minutes after the shooting. Associated Press reporter Mike Cochran recalls being pressed into service as a pallbearer for Oswald’s funeral. “It became obvious that if we were going to write a story about the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald, we were going to have to bury him ourselves.”

What the book reveals is the consciousness of journalists who were first to ask the question that still haunts us today: How could this tragedy have happened?