Robert MacNeil Reflects on Reporting the JFK Assassination | MetroFocus

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Former co-anchor of the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour Robert MacNeil joins MetroFocus host Rafael Pi Roman in studio to talk about a new documentary "JFK: 1 PM Central Standard Time" premiering November 13 at 10 PM on Thirteen and about his memories of covering President and Mrs. Kennedy on their trip to Texas in November 1963.

MacNeil, then a correspondent for NBC News, was travelling in the press bus following the Kennedy motorcade through Dealey Plaza when shots were fired. MacNeil made the driver stop and was the only reporter to leave the bus. He raced to find a phone in the nearby Texas Book Depository building where he passed a young man now thought to have been the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. MacNeil tells Pi Roman he doesn't know if it was Oswald but says, "If the evidence points that way I have to believe it."

What matters more to him, he says, is "Why didn't I stop and talk to the people I passed lying on the ground when I ran up the grassy knoll, who a few minutes later gave incredible eyewitness accounts to reporters who had the sense to ask them. I was so fixated on following the police up the grassy knoll that I didn't stop. Why were the police running up there is the question.

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