













The museum also has a spectacular minute-by-minute recap of how the press covered the day. It reveals that the media that day was modern in another sense: where once the President would be trailed by reporters with notebooks in their pockets, Kennedy's visit to Dallas included radio and television reporters in a car trailing him in the motorcade. When the President was struck, an NBC cameraman three cars behind his limo struggled unsuccessfully to get a picture of the vehicle before it sped off to Parkland Hospital. Ike Pappas, radio reporter for CBS, had better luck two days later. He was attempting to interview Oswald as Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fired the fatal shot.

From the studio, the television networks (in total: CBS, ABC and NBC) pulled information from the field, from teletypes, and dispatched correspondents to get reactions from notable people. As the New York Herald Tribune's TV and radio editor, Richard Doan, wrote the day after the shooting, "Veteran news hands like Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, were visibly moved as they grappled with the reading of bulletins and talked with correspondents in Texas. ...Dallas and Fort Worth stations fed eyewitness reports to the networks."

Within hours, TV and radio networks had to make nearly unprecedented decisions about balancing news with advertising and regular programming. According to Doan, several radio stations switched to liturgical and sacred music for the week. ABC canceled commercial programming on TV and radio on the 22nd; CBS stopped commercial broadcasts until after Kennedy's funeral. NBC suspended them indefinitely.

The assassination of the President came at the beginning of that era in media that September 11th closed out. Like television and telephones during Pearl Harbor, the web in 2001 was still young. News sites choked from the traffic. Blogs were uncommon; Twitter nonexistent. News came as it came in 1963 -- by television.

It's worth asking if these tools, particularly social media, would even today be robust enough to handle an event at the scale of September 11th. Media outlets in 1963 had the benefit of having a tested, distributed system that was limited in scale. Twitter handled recent big news well (the Japanese tsunami, for example, or, well, Beyonce's announcement) -- but its moments of failure are legendary. Still today, websites can crumple under heavy loads. Just today the publisher of the Washington Post expressed skepticism about how social media would fare in a moment of crisis.

But time will only make these tools stronger and more flexible. After all, there will -- unfortunately and inevitably -- be another Kennedy / 9/11 moment. It will happen in a new media era; people will learn about it quickly and stay updated, wherever they happen to be.

Asking the question "where were you when" from that point on will receive millions and millions of different answers. Far more than people in 1963 could have imagined possible.