CBS newsman Bob Schieffer was the night police reporter for the Star-Telegram newspaper in Fort Worth Texas in 1963. He tells the story of that fateful day in November of 1963 when the President of the United States was to visit Dallas. He tells the tale of driving the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite, to Dallas from Fort Worth where she lived on the afternoon of the assassination.
Here are a few excerpts from an interview PBS did with Mr. Schieffer:
By the time I got to the city room every phone in the place was ringing, and I just picked up the phone. The, the city editor had literally panicked when news came of the president being shot. He had sent everybody in the city room to Dallas and there was nobody there to answer the phones on the rewrite desk.
So I just answered a phone and a woman said, “Is there anybody there who can give me a ride to Dallas?” And I said, “Lady, you know, the president has just been shot, and besides, we’re not a taxi service.” And she said, “Yes, I heard it on the radio.” She said, “I think the person they’ve arrested is my son.” And it was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother.
….So when she said, “My son is the one I think that they’ve arrested,” I forgot that part about not being a taxi service, and I said, “Where do you live?” And so, another reporter and I, Bill Foster, went to her home on the west side of Fort Worth and we drove her over to the Dallas Police Station that afternoon.
It was a very interesting ride. I sat in the back seat. The other reporter, Bill Foster, drove. And she was making these outrageous statements — statements that were so outrageous that I didn’t include some of them in the, in the story I wrote the next morning for the Star-Telegram. The reason being that I thought she was just under such emotional stress, I couldn’t believe.
I mean, she would say things like, “Everyone will feel sorry for his wife, but they won’t feel sorry for me and his wife will get a lot of money and I won’t get any and I’ll starve to death.”
Not knowing that Schieffer was a reporter, he was allowed to stay with Mrs. Oswald in a room at the police station.
As nightfall came, she asked if she could see her son, and so I went to Captain Will Fritz, who was the chief of homicide, and asked. I said, “His mother would like to see him. Is that possible?” And he said, “I think so.” So, they took us, his mother, Mrs. Oswald — by this time I believe his, his wife was also there.
We all went into this holding room off the jail. And I’m thinking, “My God, they’re going to bring him down and I’m going to have this big exclusive. If I don’t get to interview him, at least I’ll get to hear what he and his mother has to say.” And finally, for the first time — and mind you, we’d been in the police station for hours — for the first time, someone said, “Who are you? Who are you with?” And it turned out it was an FBI agent, and I said, “Well, who are you?” And he said, “Are you a newspaper reporter?” And I said, “Well, aren’t you?”
So, I tell the story, at that point, I think, I received the first legitimate death threat of my life, because he said, “I’m going to kill you if I ever see you again.” I guess he was overstating it, but he might not have been, because he was pretty mad. Anyway, I excused myself, and so I never actually got to interview Oswald. But what an adventure. And it just underlines how different things were in those days.
Despite pouring over a lot of the material from that day, I’d never heard this story before. Thank you for posting it.