Voices Carry
Gus Russo 72 Traces the Lesser-Known Tales of the Kennedy Assassination
Ask Gus Russo72, political science, where he was on November 22, 1963 and he recalls it instantly. He was a student at Mount Saint Joseph High School, plunged with his fellow Roman Catholic school classmates into a deep communal grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy who was the first Roman Catholic president of the United States.
One of the guys sitting next to me in that classroom was the jock of all jocks, Russo recalls. A five-letter guy. He was the star of every team he was on…And the most macho guy of the macho guys was crying more than anyone else.
But for the past year, Russo has been asking other people to recount their memories of that tragic day for Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination a new NBC documentary hosted by Tom Brokaw. The interviews for that NBC special (with a foreword by Brokaw) have also been compiled and edited by Russo and Harry Moses into a book with the same title published by Lyons Press.
Russo says that many of the people that he and Moses interviewed for the project including prominent politicians and celebrities had the same reaction 50 years later that his high school classmates had on that dark day in American history.
I cant tell you how many people on set just lost it, observes Russo. Tears came to their eyes. Jane Fonda did on the very first question. [Secretary of State] John Kerry welled up. [Former U.S. President Bill] Clinton choked up. A lot of people just had to pause and take a breath.
Russo is an accomplished investigative journalist and author, with six books to his credit including books on the Mafia and a memoir titled Boomer Days (2011) that recounts parts of his time as student at UMBC.
Also among Russos publications are two books on the Kennedys and Cuba: Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro (1998) and Brothers In Arms: the Kennedys, the Castros and the Politics of Murder (2008). His expertise on the assassination has led to his involvement not only in the new NBC documentary, but in numerous other works about Kennedys murder including ABCs 40th anniversary documentary and (as a technical adviser) on Oliver Stones 1991 film JFK.
Though the NBC documentary boasts a lot of star power (actor Tom Hanks and talk show host Jay Leno also make appearances), Russo says that it is the stories of lesser-known people whose lives were transformed by the events that November day in Dallas that interest him the most.
Indeed, a key impetus for creation of the book was Russos desire to give the stories of figures close to the drama such as Marie Tippet (widow of the Dallas police officer J.D. Tippet, who was murdered by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as he fled the scene) and Buell Frazier (a friend of Oswald who drove the assassin to the Texas Book Depository on the day of the murder) greater prominence in the retelling of the story on this anniversary.
This year, Frazier started to open up, observes Russo, but for about 25 or 30 years he didnt talk to anybody. He was traumatized. Marie Tippet had never been on national television.
He adds that the stories of these often-neglected eyewitnesses to history help build the case for his view that Oswald was solely responsible for Kennedys murder. If you piece together what is known inarguably about Oswalds chronology, he says, you gain a picture of a man who was capable of doing awful things.
Russo started investigating the assassination decades ago from a viewpoint that there may have been a conspiracy against the president. But I wasnt going to turn my brain off to new evidence . I think its a sign of intelligence when you can change your mind. Some people think thats flip-flopping.
I was friends with all the [conspiracy writers], Russo continues, but when I saw the evidence and said, It is what is. Oswald did it, I became the black sheep and persona non grata with these people. They dont want to incorporate new evidence. Theyre stuck in 1963.
While five decades separate us from November 22, 1963, Russo concludes that the recollections of those who were touched by those events are best road to understand the event in human terms, especially if youre trying to relate it to a generation who didnt live through it.
(Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination was published on November 9, 2013 by Lyons Press. The NBC documentary for which its interviews were gathered will air on November 22, 2013 at 9 p.m. EST.)
(11/11/2013)
