How AP covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963
I grabbed that phone when it rang and Ike said, “Bob, the president has been shot!”
I said, “Ike, how do you know?”
He said, “I was shooting pictures then and I saw it.”
I said, “Ike, you saw that?”
He said, “Yes, there was blood on his face. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed him. She cried, ‘Oh, no!’ And the motorcade raced on.”
And I said, “Ike, what else did you see?”
And then he said, “I heard shots,” and went on with more detail. So I wrote the bulletin and it was not—it was just reciting what Ike had told me.
— Bob Johnson, Dallas Chief of Bureau, 1963-69
From an oral history interview, March 25, 2005
November 22, 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination while visiting Texas with his wife Jacqueline.
“A” Wire Copy Edited for the TTS (Teletypesetter) Circuit
22 November 1963
12:40 to 12:57 p.m. Central Time
The first bulletin announcing President Kennedy had been shot moved on the “A” or national wire at 12:40 p.m. Central Standard Time (“12:40 pcs” in wirespeak). It was reported by Dallas Bureau Chief Robert Johnson, cradling the telephone as he listened to James W. “Ike” Altgens at the scene.
The President had been shot in Dallas just before 12:30 p.m. His limousine arrived at Parkland Hospital five minutes later, and the president was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. News of his death, conveyed in a Flash, was delayed until 1:32 p.m. to allow Vice President Lyndon Johnson to leave the hospital for Love Field, where he would be sworn in aboard Air Force One.
On view here are select sheets of copy taken off an incoming printer at New York's general desk and hand-edited for transmission over the AP's Teletypesetter (TTS) circuit, which delivered formatted text to hundreds of smaller newspapers. The sheets, from the AP Corporate Archives, cover the period from 12:40 to 12:57 p.m. CST (1:40 to 1:57 p.m. EST).
Working quickly, editors marked the all-caps text to indicate the need for capitalization, added paragraph markings, and edited the copy. Note that the editor must also supply words that separated, with single letters cascading down the right margin, a result of pulling the paper out of the teletype while it was still printing. Seen individually, their graphic intensity mirrors the tragic events they relay.
Text and photo curation by Valerie Komor