By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Hugh Aynesworth, 77, one of the few Texas newsmen to cover President John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the initial shock of the shooting through the trial of Jack Ruby for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, considers himself “a one-man truth squad.”

“And I’m sick of it (refuting conspiracy theories about the events of Nov. 22, 1963),” he said in a telephone interview from his Dallas home. “It’s hard work trying to disprove a negative.”

Forty-five years ago this week, the nation was transfixed by Kennedy’s killing and thrown into mourning.

But in the years since the assassination, Aynesworth said, conspiracy theorists “have promulgated a lot of malarkey” about who is responsible. His exhaustive research supports the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the one and only gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Aynesworth, formerly of The Dallas Morning News, will be joined by reporter Mike Cochran, formerly of the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in a presentation at 4 p.m. Wednesday at Baylor University’s Marrs McLean Science Building about reporting and the JFK assassination.

Aynesworth, a science reporter in 1963, wasn’t assigned to cover the president’s visit to Dallas that day. But he wandered over for the spectacle, ending up only 75 yards from Oswald’s sniper’s perch in the Texas School Book Depository Building.

When the shots were fired, mortally wounding Kennedy and severely injuring Texas Gov. John Connally, Aynesworth recalled, the crowd’s demeanor switched from jubilation to horror. Parents threw their children to the ground to cover them with their bodies; others screamed, or ran, or shook in place and threw up.

“I didn’t even have a pen and paper on me, but I knew I had to start talking to people,” he recalled.

But Aynesworth did have his unpaid gas and electric bills in his pocket, and he grabbed a jumbo pencil from a small boy while tossing him two quarters for the “purchase” and set to interviewing rattled eyewitnesses. He talked to a man who saw the gunman firing from the window, and interviewed cops and weeping spectators for almost an hour. Aynesworth could hear the report on the police radio of an officer (J. D. Tippit) shot in nearby Oak Cliff. Figuring it had to be related, he said, he hopped into a vehicle with two Channel 8 WFAA-TV reporters to check it out.

Oswald’s capture

When the police call came in that Tippit’s murderer was in the Texas Theater, Aynesworth and colleagues headed there. As he opened the door to go in, he saw five or six policemen wrestling with the suspect, Oswald, who was yelling “I protest this police brutality.”

Two days later, on Sunday morning Nov. 24, 1963, Aynesworth said he arrived at the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters less than five minutes before Oswald was escorted under guard by officers. When a man jumped forward and shot Oswald, Aynesworth was astounded when he recognized Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, as the gunman.

Aynesworth said that the reason so many conspiracy theories exist to this day is that people question whether someone as lowly as Oswald could have brought down the leader of the free world without help. Ruby’s impulsive shooting of Oswald only accentuated that skepticism.

“Two losers changed the course of American history, and people can’t accept that,” he said.

After he left The Dallas Morning News, Aynesworth worked for Newsweek magazine in Houston, then for the now-defunct Dallas Times-Herald. He also spent time with ABC News’ “20/20” program and the Washington Times while writing true crime books.

“And every time the next plausible theory about the JFK assassination came along, I had to chase the damn thing down,” he said.

Aynesworth and Cochran’s talk is open to the public, said Baylor journalism professor Mike Blackman, who invited his friends and former colleagues to tell his students how they did their jobs on that “bizarre and incredible weekend” in November 1963.

“That story just doesn’t get old,” said Blackman, who was a Baylor sophomore the fall day Kennedy was killed.

‘They’ve shot Kennedy’

His own story comes rushing back: “It was a little after 12:30. We were coming back from Snappy Lunch, a little eatery in south Waco near the Baylor campus, and were walking toward the dorm (old Brooks Hall) when this kid came running out from the archway.

“It was A.J. ‘They’ve shot the president, they’ve shot the president,’ he said. We laughed, because he always was a prankster, this crazy, wild but brilliant kid. ‘No, no,’ he insisted, ‘I’m not kidding. They’ve shot Kennedy.’ But we didn’t think it was a very funny joke. ‘Not being funny,’ he said. That’s when we notice the tears running down his cheeks,” Blackman said.

The TV room on the first floor dorm was deathly still, with small clusters of students staring at CBS anchor Walter Cronkite trying to make sense of the reports out of Dallas. But shortly after 1 p.m., Cronkite told the nation that the 35th president of the United States was dead.

“I was so numb to it all, I just went to the pool hall across the street, behind a chili and burger joint,” Blackman recalled. “Nobody was there but the old, one-armed guy who ran the place. We played all afternoon, just the two of us. We never spoke, other than to say ‘rack ‘em’ a few times. I’d been struck dumb, basically. The manager never charged a dime either, all those games, not the whole afternoon.”

Blackman admits he’s been skeptical, too, over the years about the official version of the events that day. Especially when Oswald was murdered in police custody.

“I was in the Student Union Building when that happened. ‘My God,’ I was thinking, ‘What’s this place coming to? Is there more involved to this?’,” he said.

Aynesworth said he knows that he’ll likely face an audience of scoffers Wednesday.

“There are a couple of generations out there that have bought into this and every other conspiracy around,” he said.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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