Most people who were alive on Nov. 22, 1963, can tell you where they were when they learned that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Tom Wicker, a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times, was not only in Dallas that day, he was in Dealey Plaza, the only Times reporter riding in a press bus with the presidential motorcade when shots rang out.
“At first no one knew what happened, or how, or where, much less why,” Mr. Wicker recalled in the December 1963 issue of “Times Talk,” an in-house magazine about Times journalism that was published from 1947 to 2005. “Gradually bits and pieces began to fall together and within two hours a reasonably coherent version of the story began to be possible.”
In early 1963, The Times began copying each day’s National and City desk assignments onto microfilm, along with the copy desk schedules of the reporters and editors on duty. Many of those sheets are preserved in the Morgue, The Times’s repository for millions of newspaper articles, photographs and other archival materials.
The National desk’s scheduling sheets from the day of the assassination place Mr. Wicker in Dallas, working on the lead news article — named “Kennedy” — for the following day’s paper. The spreadsheets have columns for dateline, length and headline size. Handwritten notes turn the sheets from everyday to extraordinary. The sheet indicates that Mr. Wicker filed more than a dozen drafts from Dallas, sending “adds” and “inserts” right up to midnight.
The microfilm also contains an assignment schedule for Nov. 23, 1963, as Times reporters were sent out to cover the ripple effect of Kennedy’s assassination. Among those on the list: Milton Esterow, who was assigned to cover the reaction in the world of arts and culture; Robert C. Doty, who covered the “mood of the mourning city”; and Gay Talese, who was dispatched to Boston to cover the reactions of the Irish community there.
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