History Lesson 
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.
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WHY MARGUERITE OSWALD CALLED THE Star-Telegram that day remains a mystery, though she had a few connections to the paper. She had lived a vagabond life during most of Oswald's childhood, but she had eventually settled in Fort Worth, and when her son defected to the Soviet Union, Star-Telegram reporters had interviewed her. As recently as two weeks before the assassination, she had been working as a governess in the home of Star-Telegram founder Amon Carter's son. (The Carters, who had no idea she was the mother of a defector, had discharged her because their children thought she was "mean.")
I knew none of that as I began to think about how I was going to get her to Dallas. Somehow, taking her there in a convertible sports car just didn't seem quite right, so I went to Bill Foster, the paper's automotive editor. For years, local car dealers had furnished the auto editor with a new car every week or so and free gas. It was offered and accepted with the understanding that the editor would "road test" the car and write up the results in his Sunday column. When Bill told me he was driving a Cadillac sedan that week, I said, "Come on. I'll explain as we go, and you're gonna like it."
We found Mrs. Oswald standing on the lawn of a small home on Fort Worth's west side. She was a short, round-faced woman wearing enormous black horn-rimmed glasses and a white nurse's uniform. She carried a small blue travel bag. I got into the back seat with her, and Bill drove. She was distraught but in an odd way. I would later come to believe that she was deranged, but for most of the trip she seemed less concerned with the death of the president or her son's role in it than with herself. She railed that his Russian-born wife would get sympathy while no one would "remember the mother" and that she would probably starve. I chalked it up to understandable emotional overload, and I couldn't bring myself to use her self-serving remarks in the story I filed later that day. I probably should have. She would later be so brazen as to tell a reporter for Life magazine, "Mama wants money," a plea she repeated over the years. As she had predicted, the world showed her little sympathy, and she supported herself in the end by selling Oswald's clothing to souvenir hunters.
The drive to Dallas took about an hour, and when we reached the police station, Bill let us out and said he would join us after he had parked the car. Hundreds of reporters had converged on the station, most of them in a hallway where the detectives' offices were located. Wearing the Dick Tracy hat, it was easy for me to pass for a plainclothesman. There was a uniformed cop behind a counter in one of the offices, so I approached him and said, "I'm the one who brought Oswald's mother over from Fort Worth. Is there someplace she can stay where she won't be bothered by all these reporters?"
The officer guided us to a small space that seemed to be some kind of interrogation room and said, "How about this?" I thanked him, settled Mrs. Oswald in, and went into the hallway to see if I could help our guys. By then there were seventeen of us on the scene, but the problem was finding phones to call in what we had found out. Other reporters were having to walk several blocks. I began to gather up what our team had collected and call it in from the room the police had given me. Never once did anyone ask who I was. Later Oswald's wife, Marina, was brought to the police station, and an officer asked me if we would mind her sharing the room. I told them I saw no problem. The only difficulty for me was that she seemed to speak no English, only Russian.
Around sundown, Oswald's mother asked Detective Captain Will Fritz if we could visit her son. Fritz agreed and let us into a holding room below the jail. The group included Oswald's wife, his mother, an FBI agent, and me. I couldn't believe it. Oswald was being brought down from his cell. Whatever he said, this would be the story of a lifetime: an exclusive interview with the man who had just been charged with killing the president.
We had been there only a few minutes when the FBI agent casually asked me, "And who are you with?"
I had watched veteran interrogators bluff their way with a suspect by answering a question with a question, and in my best imitation I sort of half snarled, "Well, who are you with?"
The agent seemed a little edgy now. "Are you a reporter?"
Now I was really pushing it: "Well, aren't you?"
It was at this point that I believe I received my first official death threat. The embarrassed agent said he would kill me if he ever saw me again. Or at least that seemed to be what he was saying. I was already leaving as he said it.
It was the biggest story I almost got. I went back to the corridor and blended in with the other reporters. For the next two days, I would just be part of the crowd.
I SPENT THE FOLLOWING DAY at the crime scene. The nation was in shock, and nowhere was it more obvious than in Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy had been shot. Hundreds of people seemed to wander aimlessly, occasionally talking to anyone who happened by. Some left flowers; some just stared. I talked to one man who had come to Dallas to see Kennedy but had seen only the motorcade racing toward Parkland Hospital. It was as if he had lost a friend. He could not understand how it could have happened. His grief became the heart of a story I filed for the Sunday paper, a story that began, "Today, I walked with a man named Gregory Pontes, and for a moment he seemed to speak for all America." I've written thousands of stories since that day, but I've never forgotten the lead to that one.
Oswald was still being held at the police station but was to be transferred to the county jail the next day to await trial. We began to scale back our coverage. Our photographers were sent home. One of our reporters would watch Oswald as he was brought out of the city jail and placed in a car for the trip to the county jail nearby. I was to watch him arrive there. It was a trip he would never make. As two detectives brought him to the loading dock on Sunday morning, Jack Ruby walked from the crowd of reporters and onlookers, stuck a small pistol in Oswald's side, and killed him.
How could it happen? I have been asked that question many times, and when I explain that it was a different time, the answer seldom seems to suffice. But those were the days before metal detectors, identification cards, and concrete barriers—all the security precautions that we have come to accept as a part of modern life, particularly since 9/11. We didn't shoot our presidents, we didn't know much about terrorists, and the only people who used bombs were gangsters. As long as they confined their killings to one another, we didn't really mind. In those days, if you looked as if you belonged, you could usually get in most places. I had walked into the Dallas police station and secured the use of an office on the strength of nothing more than a hat that made me look like a detective. Ruby had been a hanger-on at the police station. Because he had looked as if he belonged there, no one had questioned his presence.
For the reporters, Oswald's shooting meant it was time to go back to work. Our managing editor, Lorin McMullen, decided to put out a Sunday afternoon Extra, something that had never been done before. This was no simple task. When the paper had churned out those Extras the day Kennedy was shot, the presses were already rolling with a complete newspaper that only needed to be updated. McMullen was talking about starting from scratch: a complete newspaper, including want ads, that would be on the streets early Sunday afternoon. Somehow, he managed to do it. We were so proud of the accomplishment that when the first copies were trucked over from Fort Worth, I grabbed a bundle and sold them myself at Dealey Plaza. I guess I still owe the paper some money. I don't remember turning in my profits, but in truth, I gave away more papers than I sold.
It was a sweet scoop. Not only had we managed to get our papers to Dallas hours before the Dallas Morning News had printed its first edition of the Monday paper, but McMullen had also found a way around having no photo of the shooting. The Dallas paper had a graphic shot of Ruby just as he rammed the gun into Oswald's stomach and had moved it as a copyrighted photo on the Associated Press wire shortly after the event. McMullen grabbed it off the wire, blew it up, and spread it across the front page. Beneath the photo, in the tiny type used in baseball box scores, was the line "Copyright 1963, Dallas Morning News." We had beaten the Morning News with its own photo.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED I realized the toll that long weekend had taken on me. I have heard of people who experienced traumatic events that left them so drained they were unable to feel pain, but for me the overpowering shock of trying to work during the chaos surrounding the assassination left me so exhausted mentally that for a while I somehow became immune to emotion.
Several nights later, back on the police beat, I was in the emergency room of Saint Joseph Hospital when the bodies of a family that had been fatally injured in a car wreck were wheeled by on gurneys. They had been beheaded when their car slammed into the rear of a truck loaded with metal pipes. A police reporter sees a lot, and injury and death were nothing new to me, but only after I had watched the bodies pass by did I realize that the sight had provoked no reaction at all.
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