JFK Coverage After Dallas Assassination: View From The Control Room | TV News Director Max A. Schindler
Jun 07, 2012 in View From The Control Room-Max A. Schindler, You Think So
You Think What proudly presents a series of remembrances of a television news director’s career. Max A. Schindler worked for the NBC News Bureau in Washington, D.C. for many years. In this first article he describes directing news coverage following the Kennedy assassination; what it was like to be present while capturing the televised images of JFK’s coffin being removed from Air Force One upon its arrival at Andrews Air Force Base. How he felt as an eyewitness to history on that mournful November day in 1963 for all Americans, and people around the world.
View From The Control Room Segment#1
by Max A. Schindler
November 22, 1963
I was in my car on my way to work, about 4 or 5 blocks from the NBC News Bureau in Washington, DC. . At a red light a woman in the car next to me was screaming…I rolled down my window and she said “Turn on your radio”. I turned on the radio and heard that President John Kennedy and Governor John Connally had been shot in Dallas, Texas. I drove to the bureau and raced into the newsroom. It was chaotic and people were running around…many were not sure of what to do. The bureau chief told me to have my wife pack a bag, for an untold number of days, and to send it by cab. A plane had been chartered to take a group of us to Dallas for the coverage. Before my bag arrived we heard the special news bulletin the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was dead. (more…)