The Youngstown, Ohio native, a Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. reporter on that day in Dallas, shared his views with the Dayton Daily News on Kennedy, alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Secret Service agent Clint Hill. The agent who rushed to the open-top limousine after Kennedy was mortally struck and helped first lady Jackie Kennedy back into the rear seat of the speeding car after she had climbed onto the trunk of the Lincoln presidential limousine.
Davis on Oswald
The veteran newsman said he did not believe there was a conspiracy to kill the president on Nov. 22, 1963. “I think that Lee Harvey Oswald did it by himself,” said Davis, of Bethesda, Md., and now in his 80s.“I don’t think that anybody was indicted, tried, convicted.”
Oswald was a former Marine Corps marksman, Davis said. “Every Secret Service man is able to fire three shots within the time frame Lee Harvey Oswald did,” he said.
Davis said records show Oswald bought the rifle through a mail-order house, and the weapon was delivered to Oswald’s home. “The gun was found in the sixth floor room where he shot from, under boxes (in the Texas School Book Depository),” he said. “His fingerprints are on the rifle. He had a powder burn I think on part of his hand or hip from the gun.”
There was no getaway car and no assistance, he said.
The veteran reporter said some have made “fortunes” by people who perpetuate myths about the assassination. “I just think it’s outrageous on some of this stuff where they even accused some of our public officials of complicity,” he said. “But some of the American people want to believe that baloney. So the myths go on.”
He noted Oswald was also blamed for the shooting death of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit the day of the assassination. Oswald was arrested at a movie theater after the murders of the president and Tippit. “(Oswald) certainly had signs in every way of a monster,” Davis said.
Davis on Secret Service agent Clint Hill
Davis said Hill, who is still living, saved the life of Jackie Kennedy that day “at great risk to his own.” Hill, assigned to protect the first lady, charged to the presidential limousine when he heard the first shot in Dealey Plaza as the limousine began to gain speed in a high-speed dash to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
He tried “to give his life for the president and he could have been killed,” Davis said, who called Hill a hero who suffered greatly over the decades and has been shown he could not have saved the president from the shots fired.
If Hill had “fell in the street trying to get onto that car, he’d have been run over by a five-ton Secret Service follow-up car and Mrs. Kennedy might have been thrown in the street and killed as well at that speed,” Davis said. “The presidential limousine was then approaching 60 miles an hour. Clint Hill’s salary at the time was 4,900 dollars a year.”
Davis on Kennedy
“Every reporter that was on this assignment with me felt the same way about keeping their mind on what the heck was going on and not thinking a lot about what a friendship you had, or what a great guy he was. Which he was,” Davis said of what it was like that day. “He was a fascinating president.”
Kennedy as a war hero in the Pacific during World War II who faced down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the Cold War of the 1960s even as the president confronted a failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, Davis said. Kennedy started the ball rolling on civil rights legislation, among other Kennedy ideas Johnson pursued or expanded in his presidency, Davis noted.
The assassinated president had been a “very vibrant guy.” He was “intelligent, handsome” and married to a “glamorous wife” with whom they shared two small children, Caroline and John Jr., Davis said.
“You probably could not have produced a better picture of an American family,” he said.
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