Deservedly the History Channel has been getting hammered for pseudo-science programs. But they are showing “JFK 3 shots that Changed the World”. They are actually a compilation of kinescopes,and news films with ongoing interviews taken immediately after Kennedy was shot. Many people don’t know that every minute of it shown on TV,. The country was glued to the TV and it was all the information you could get. Work, and schools were shut down and people just sat in front of their sets trying to make sense out of what happened. It was all that was on TV. It was like cable TV news but they actually had a story to tell.
How many people actually watched Ruby kill Oswald ,I do not know but it was shocking to watch a murder on live TV. I saw it and and I could not believe the cops let that happen. This program takes you back .
I get some sort of sick satisfaction from reading the nutso JFK conspiracy websites that plague the web. What I find frustrating is the lack of info on Carlos Marcello and the supposed New Orleans Crime Family. To read some of these websites you’d think Carlos Marcello was the most powerful Mafia don in the United States, and yet there seems to be very little info out there about him. Why is so little known about him, when there’s probably a library’s worth of information about all the other Mafia leaders?
Quibble: videotapes, not kinescopes. I was surprised how much videotape footage was kept by the networks, including off-air setups.
Hunh, I’m watching it just now and the television announcer called it “kinescope”. I know jack about camera work and wiki isn’t helping much. 
A kinescope is made by pointing a film camera at a tv monitor to make a duplicate to show elsewhere. While videotape was available by 1963 it was expensive and not used everywhere. I can imagine local tv stations still using kinescopes, even in a period when the networks had their old huge two-inch video machines.
I mean, I just don’t get it. The man has been dead for almost 42 years-and in his time (ca 1960),
Warren Harding was as remote from him (as JFK is to us).
Was Warren Harding the subject of such interest in 1960?
I mean, JFK was a pretty mediocre president-and his administration was the cause of many problems that haunt us to this day (the war on poverty, Vietnam, the “Imperial Presidency”, huge bloated government).
In addition, the stuff he is remembered for (the Apollo Moon project, the Peace Corps) have been found to be tremendous wastes of money.
I guess getting assassinated counts for a lot.
Judging by what the History Channel has become in recent years, I was expecting yet another bloated series featuring wide-eyed conspiracy theorists pontificating on how the CIA and/or Mob had to have killed JFK. And while it does have some of that, I was pleasantly suprised. I like how they mostly just let the footage, with no additional commentary, tell the story. I’d like to see this approach taken with other historic events, especially the moon landing where we only ever get to see anything beyond a few snippets of archival moonwalking footage.
The reason people care more about JFK than you do is that your version of him is, well, pretty non-mainstream.
Well JFK and his family were media stars and television had finally gotten into most every home in the US. Everything JFK and Jackie did was on TV. The cult of celebrity, much as is currently happening with a certain leader in our time. The actions of the JFK administration were not followed as closely by the general public as the ceremony was. A ‘People Magazine’ presidency. He was a war hero, she was beautiful, there were young children in the White House and all that Camelot mythology.
The assasination aftermath included interviews and re-creations, etc, that were interesting to watch. How long would the world have remained facinated by the event if we had to just read about it? No pictures?
And the assasination was fast and easy and difficult to believe. There must be more to it than there seems. But all that was really there was that the Marines were good at teaching Oswald how to shoot, and he was just a nut. But people couldn’t swallow that.
People like a good story and conpiracies are some of the most interesting.
Warren Harding > JFK assasination > **Warren **Commission investigation. Coincidence? You decide.
In the JFK coverage, the local affiliates in Dallas provided a live video feed to the networks, where the feed was videotaped onto 2-inch Quad.
But even most local affiliates had 2-inch Quad machines by 1963. Here’s a videotape of the break-in from WFAA-TV in Dallas. Note the on-camera reporter asking the control booth to make sure this was being videotaped:
But there were some small and rural stations that relied on kinescope films of network programs as late as 1969.
(Sorry if this all sounds as geeky as it is, but early television technology is an interest of mine.)
Considering the technology that spilled out of NASA and the public support for the Moon landing I don’t see this as a waste of money. Integrated circuites, GPS, Fuel cells, weather satellites etc… It’s all good.
The integrated circuit was developed at Texas Instruments, without any NASA funding at all. Apollo was actually the first manned space program that allowed the use of integrated circuits at all. The actual “spin off” from Apollo was quite small-most of the technology developed was one use-the Saturn V booster had no use outside of Apollo.
Of course, we knew (even in 1966) that the Russians were nowhere near a manned lunar landing-but maintaining that bit of fiction suited NASA very well-it kept the $$ flowing!
thespaceplace.com There are a lot of useful spinoffs from the space program.
The program takes you back like no other one I have seen. They show TV programs running and then interrupted by emergency announcements. They show commercials too.
I loved this program. What about that jerkwad at the Boston Symphony? He simply says “Zee President has been assassinated. We vill now play Beethoven’s funeral march” or some such insensitive nonsense. People in the audience are shrieking and he is worried about the next song.
Also that Dallas news reporter with the cigarette in his hand blowing smoke in everyone’s face that he interviews. Funny (but not meant to be) stuff.
Since I lived through the assassination at the time it happened, JFK 3 shots that Changed the World held a lot of interest to me. This particular special is really good because it has a lot of archival video that I’ve never seen before, and it’s all in one place. From Kennedy’s morning breakfast meeting in Ft. Worth to his flight to Dallas to his motorcade, it’s all there. The way they stitched together various home and news videos to recreate the situation and mood on Nov 22, 1963 was amazing. Yes, there’s stuff on various conspiracy theories, but it’s not given any more credence than the bare facts. Oswald and Ruby are given appropriate coverage too. The most incredible thing I get from all the video was how open Kennedy was to the public in his Dallas visit. He dove into crowds. He rode for many miles in an open car. There was no way that all those buildings along the motorcade route could have been secured. Those were certainly days of innocence in terms of protecting a sitting president.
Originally Posted by ralph124c View Post
I mean, I just don’t get it. The man has been dead for almost 42 years-and in his time (ca 1960),
Warren Harding was as remote from him (as JFK is to us).
Was Warren Harding the subject of such interest in 1960?
I mean, JFK was a pretty mediocre president-and his administration was the cause of many problems that haunt us to this day (the war on poverty, Vietnam, the “Imperial Presidency”, huge bloated government).
In addition, the stuff he is remembered for (the Apollo Moon project, the Peace Corps) have been found to be tremendous wastes of money.
I guess getting assassinated counts for a lot.
You are right, ralph124c is pretty non-mainstream, but ralph124c is deadly accurate in his assessment. Kennedy was extremely over-rated, and he failed at most everything. He had a very UNsuccessful presidency and he almost got us into an unnecessary nuclear war.
BTW, those of us who were around during Kennedy, did not give a thought to Harding.
Still, I like the History Channel show, and its a history show on the History Channel.
ralph124c is not accurate, in a deadly way or otherwise, in his assessment. None of the four things he lists started with Kennedy.
My mother keeps INSISTING that Oswald yelled at Ruby, “Ruby, you son of a bitch!” But wasn’t it Ruby who shouted at Oswald, “You killed the president, you son of a bitch?”
I honestly cannot convince her otherwise, but just for my own peace of mind, I want to clear this up.
That’s was LBJ.
LBJ was the one who sent combat troops there.
How was Kennedy responsible for that?
Neither Ruby nor Oswald said anything except Oswald’s loud cry of “Ohhh!” when he was shot.
Dallas police detective Billy Combest, when he saw and recognized Ruby, shouted, “Jack, you son of a bitch, don’t!”