Click on the link here for Audio Player – ABC Radio News – November 22, 1963 (continuous) – Part 1 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection
Click on the link here for Audio Player- ABC Radio News – November 22, 1963 (continuous) – Part 2 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection
Click on the link here for Audio Player – ABC Radio News – November 22, 1963 (continuous) – Part 3 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection
Click on the link here for Audio Player – ABC Radio News – November 22, 1963 (continuous) – Part 4 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection
The news for this day in 1963 was about nothing else other than the nightmare unfolding in Dallas. For the next several days, the entire country was consumed by the shock, anguish and grief that went along with the tragic and senseless assassination of a President.
And since this day is being observed as the 50th anniversary of that event, here are the first 5 hours of that tragic day, as it happened via ABC Radio, and monitored by WRUL in New York, a shortwave station which was an affiliate of the network. It begins with a closed-network feed of music and then the bulletins start. It ends some five hours later with vice-President-now President Lyndon Johnson arriving back in Washington, along with Jacqueline Kennedy, accompanying the body of JFK.
To those of you either too young at the time or not around, it may not have the same impact – an event as witnessed in the abstract. Probably the closest you can come to comparing it for shock and helplessness would be September 11, 2001. The same numbness that accompanied the news when it was officially announced that President Kennedy had died, could be almost the same as it was when the World Trade Center Towers came crashing to the ground.
Grief, shock and sadness are the same. The horror of an unfolding event you don’t know how or if it will work out at the time is further proof history plays no favorites.
Here is a five hour extract of that day, as it was heard on November 22, 1963.
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