Julia Flynn Siler

President John F. Kennedy plays with children John. Jr., and Caroline in the Oval Office in October 1962, above, while below, his motorcade approaches Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Top photo from historyplace.com; bottom photo Walt Sisco, photographer/Courtesy The Dallas Morning News

I can’t remember the last time I choked up with emotion while visiting a museum. But the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas – which offers far more than just the preservation of historical artifacts behind glass cases – is an example of powerful storytelling about a tragedy that changed history.
What unfolds there is a recounting of the November 22, 1963, assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, an event that occurred when I was a toddler. Illustrating the ways in which multimedia storytelling is often so much more moving than print or broadcast alone, I used the audio tour to guide me through the exhibition. The audio tour’s spare, muscular prose was narrated by Pierce Allman, who was the first journalist to broadcast from the Texas Book Repository, where the assassin took aim at the motorcade below.
On that day more than four decades ago, 200,000 people had gathered in the streets of Dallas to welcome the presidential party. One of them was dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the convertible limousine that the President was riding in that day through the downtown streets with his 8 mm Bell & Howell movie camera. As the car passed directly beneath the Texas School Book Depository, shots rang out. The stills of these moments captured on Mr. Zapruder’s film are profound.

But one of the most powerful moments of the museum for me was when I listened to the audio recording of the moment when Jack Ruby assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald, as he was being transferred from the city to the county jail. The rawness of those sounds, which included the gunshots and shouting, made me feel I was witnessing the next act in this terrible national trauma.
I heard about the Sixth Floor Museum from a Dallas Morning News columnist and blogger named Josh Benton, who I met earlier this year at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation Conference on Narrative Journalism. In particular, Josh had mentioned the original teletype dispatches from the wire service reporter covering the story as an example of the power of raw reporting. I wanted to see it for myself – and since I was in Dallas on tour for the paperback edition of The House of Mondavi, I took an hour out of my schedule to visit.
As a reporter for so many years, I was dumbstruck when I stood in front of that teletype machine – similar to the one that my colleagues and I still used when I was a cub in the newsroom many years ago – and looked at the mixture of panic, fear, confusion, and adrenalin all expressed through a series of often misspelled words and fragmentary sentences expressing what was happening. It was a moving illustration of the role that journalists play in writing the first draft of history.