
Reporter Peggy Simpson of the Associated Press hurried to the scene shortly after President John F. Kennedy was shot dead while driving through downtown Dallas in his motorcade. She joined the police officers who had gathered around the building where shots from a sniper had been fired.
“I was kind of under their armpit,” Simpson remarked, adding that she would run to a pay phone to call her editors as soon as she could get any information from them, after which she would “go back to the cops.”
As the country commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination on Wednesday, Simpson, who is currently 84 years old, is one of the few remaining witnesses sharing his account.
The curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, that tells the story of the assassination via the Texas School Book Depository, in which Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper’s perch was found, Stephen Fagin, said, “A tangible link to the past will continue to be lost when the final voices from that time period are gone.”
“A great number of those who shared their memories ten years ago, such as law enforcement officers, reporters, and eyewitnesses, have sadly passed away,” he remarked.
“JFK: One Day in America,” a three-part series from National Geographic that was released this month, features Simpson, former US Secret Service agent Clint Hill, and other notable figures. The series mixes the recollections of the subjects with archival footage, some of that has been colorized for the first time. Speaking with those who were present, according to director Ella Wright, enhances the “behind the scenes” narrative that is added to archive video.
Wright stated, “We wanted people to truly experience the emotional impact of those events and what it felt like to be back there.”
Dealey Plaza, through which the presidential motorcade was traveling when Kennedy was assassinated, continues to draw large crowds of people.
According to Fagin, “The assassination definitely defined a generation.” “It signified a profound change in American culture for those who experienced it and grew up in the 1960s.”
President Joe Biden, who was attending college at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, recalled on Wednesday that he and his fellow students were “glued to the news in silence.”
“We recall that on this day, he saw a nation of light, not darkness; of honor, not grievances; a place where we are unwilling to put off the work that he started and that we all must now continue,” Biden said in a published statement.
Simpson had originally been scheduled to attend a Kennedy fundraising dinner in Austin that evening on the day of the assassination. Having some spare time before her departure from Dallas, she was directed to observe the presidential motorcade; however, she was not in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza.
Until she got to the building housing The Dallas Times Herald, which housed the AP’s office, Simpson had no idea that anything unusual had occurred. As she got off the elevator, she overheard the editor of the newspaper briefing the staff after the newspaper’s receptionist stated, “All we know is that the president has been shot.”
Running to the AP office in time, she watched over the shoulder of the bureau chief as he filed the news to the world. She then hurried to the Texas School Book Depository to gather additional information.
She claimed to have seen “just a wild, crazy chaotic, unfathomable scene” at police headquarters later on. As an officer passed through the hallways with Oswald’s rifle raised, reporters crowded the area. When the suspect’s mother and wife arrived, Oswald was questioned by reporters during an official press conference held by the authorities.
“I was merely searching for any piece of information alongside a large group of other reporters,” the woman stated.
After two days, Jack Ruby, the owner of a nightclub, unexpectedly emerged from a group of news reporters and shot Oswald dead while Simpson was reporting on the suspect’s transfer from police headquarters to the county jail.
Simpson hurried to a nearby bank of phones “and started dictating everything I saw to the AP editors” while police officers grappled with Ruby on the ground, according to Simpson. She was only thinking about breaking the news at that precise moment.
“When you’re an AP reporter, you just grab the phone; you’re not able to think at that moment,” she remarked.
Simpson claimed she heard the gunshot but couldn’t recall it.
She remarked, “I didn’t know him, didn’t see him, didn’t see him come out of the crowd of reporters. Ruby was probably two or three feet away from me.”
Simpson’s memories are part of an oral history archive at the Sixth Floor Museum, which, according to Fagin, currently has roughly 2,500 recordings.
“That weekend, Simpson was right in the thick of things and got swept up in truly historic events while just doing her job as a professional journalist,” the museum curator said of Simpson.
Oral histories are still being documented, according to Fagin. Many of the more recent ones have involved individuals who recall hearing about the assassination while attending school when they were young in the 1960s.
“To try to capture these memories, it’s really a race against time,” Fagin remarked.