With shots from a mail-order rifle, Lee Harvey Oswald set off a worldwide tragedy that developed too fast to print. Broadcast journalism came of age in that crisis and helped to hold a mourning nation together. Four reporters on the scene relate their experiences as staff of the local CBS affiliate working with Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite. When the News Went Live recalls their coverage of breaking news including the assassination, the first on-camera murder, and the trial of Jack Ruby.
As a reporter for KRLD and CBS News, Bob Huffaker broadcast television's first murder when Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald. He broadcast JFK's ill-fated motorcade, then the sad Parkland Hospital vigil, interviewed the assassin's mother, and covered Ruby's trial and finally his death, having done an award-winning courtroom interview with Ruby. Huffaker and his KRLD News colleagues worked with CBS to bring Texas news to the nation. When broadcasting JFK's Dallas visit suddenly evolved into reporting a worldwide tragedy, they kept as calm as possible, to encourage the world to remain sane.
They earned the nation's highest honor for their on-the-scene reporting, presented by the Radio Television News Directors Association, which wrote, "KRLD deserves the highest praise for the manner in which its personnel moved without a moment of hesitation from what was to have been normal coverage of the arrival, presentation and departure of the President, into fascinating, elaborate, complete and deeply detailed coverage at the local level of what has to be easily the story of our modern lives."
Huffaker enlisted his former colleagues Bill Mercer, George Phenix, and Wes Wise as co-authors of his 2004 book "When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963." Their vivid first-person account is a clear view of the JFK assassination and its aftermath. From interwoven viewpoints at the center of that tragedy, they show what really happened, how they covered the stunning events for the nation, and how broadcast news has developed since.
Bob Huffaker was born in 1936 to Robert S. Huffaker, Sr. and Eunice Jane Thompson Huffaker in Fort Worth, Texas. He grew up in Port Arthur, the Texas center of oil refining, and in Bryan, the Central Texas city adjoining College Station. He earned an Army commission and B.A. in English from Texas A&M University, then served as a Transportation Corps officer, rising to Captain in the U.S. Army Reserve.
He left broadcast news in 1967 and earned the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and was an English professor at Texas State University until 1980, when, as investigator for the Texas Legislature, he exposed the school for falsifying class records. Now the university honors Huffaker in its Star Hall of Fame for defending press freedom when he headed its student publications committee in the 1970s.
Huffaker was an editor for Texas Monthly, Studies in the Novel, Studies in American Humor, and Modern Humanities Research Association. His widely cited book "John Fowles" (G.K. Hall, 1980) is seminal work about the novelist, and he has written for Southern Humanities Review, Dallas Observer, True West, Senior Advocate, and Texas Parks & Wildlife.
His wife, Dr. Veva R. Vonler, president of the Visual Arts Society of Texas, past chapter president of American Association of University Women, is retired after a career as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at Texas Womans University, where she still teaches poetry. Their son Kevin Huffaker is a sculptor (MonkeyAnvil.com) and Director of Classroom Technologies at Texas State University. Their son Zachary Vonler, who served as a Navy medical corpsman, is a software architect in Austin.
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