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Sunday, November 24, 2013

IKE PAPPAS: “THERE’S A SHOT”

Reporter Ike Pappas (circled) in iconic photo seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby
 Fifty years ago today Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death

EXCERPT FROM THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB—“...Ike Pappas, legendary broadcast journalist and late National Press Club member, shared his detailed and chilling accounts of his coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in a 2006 interview for the Club’s Oral History project. A 20-minute excerpt of this interview is available on the Club’s website in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy.  [See below].

The late national correspondent Ike Pappas at the National Press Club
in Washington DC.
“He was the reporter for WNEW Radio in New York who, back on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, tried to get a comment from Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald the moment Jack Ruby stepped in and shot Oswald dead. “There’s a shot!” he proclaimed. “Oswald has been shot! Oswald has been shot! A shot rang out. Mass confusion here. … Holy mackerel.” The actual broadcast is on YouTube [See below]

“Pappas, who was a member of the National Press Club from 1975 until his passing in 2008, sat down with then-History and Heritage Committee chairman Marc Wojno, to discuss his life in journalism and his involvement with the National Press Club. Pappas’s clear, focused and detailed accounts of the coverage, including his keen observations of Ruby mingling amongst reporters and police earlier in Dallas, are part of the Club’s oral history interview.

“As a 25-year correspondent of CBS News, Pappas covered many pivotal moments shaping the latter-half of the 20th century, from the Civil Rights movement and several foreign wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, to the flight of Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon. Pappas shares these moments and his personal life in the Club’s oral history. The full, hour-long video interview can be viewed, along with hundreds of other oral history interviews, in the Club’s Archives office:

Ike Pappas National Press Club:

Ike Pappas, a radio correspondent in 1963 for WNEW-AM in New York, discusses his coverage of the JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations in Dallas on Nov. 22 and Nov. 24, 1963, respectively. This excerpt was repeated in observance of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death on Nov. 22, 2013.

Ike Pappas in Dallas 1963:


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