Both shooters were able to gain a high vantage point and avoid police suspicion, but the two events would end very differently.
When retired Texas news photographer Harry Cabluck — one of the few surviving members of President John F. Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963, motorcade — watched the television coverage of the assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, his thoughts didn’t wander to that dark day in Dallas all those years earlier.
Instead, in an interview Sunday, Cabluck expressed admiration for the intensity and calm of the photojournalists who captured the close-up photos and videos that told the story of the fear and confusion around the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, in real time and for generations to come.
“He didn’t flinch,” said Cabluck, now 86 and living in Austin, citing Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci. “Everybody got out, but he ran to one side and started shooting. He knew the exit route from the stage was going to be to the other side, so he ran to the other side and got between Trump and the limo.
“He was a pool photographer doing his job.”
Vucci, along with several photographers from Reuters and other news organizations, were able to capture photos of Trump’s immediate reaction to his injuries and the desperate efforts of Secret Service agents to protect him. There were no such opportunities amid the Kennedy motorcade, said Cabluck, who was a young photographer working for his hometown newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, when he was assigned to cover the presidential visit.
Like most of the other journalists in the motorcade that rolled through downtown Dallas during a lunch hour on a fall day, Cabluck rode in the press bus, several cars behind the now-iconic open-top Lincoln Continental carrying the president and first lady Jackie Kennedy, along with then-Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. Connally was seriously injured but survived.
The only images Cabluck was able to capture from the press bus showed the battle on the infamous grassy knoll near the assassination site. Instead of following the Lincoln to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the 35th president would be pronounced dead from a gunshot wound he had sustained, the press bus continued on to its planned destination, the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was scheduled to deliver a speech.
Cabluck, who would spend much of his long career at the AP — the last few years at the State Capitol Bureau in Austin before retiring in 2009 — knew the Trade Mart wasn’t where the story would be found. So he and a reporter from the Star-Telegram had to improvise.
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“We ran out onto the Stemmons Freeway and flagged down a woman driving a car and said, ‘Drive us to the nearest hospital,’” he recalled. “And she drove us to Parkland, and of course that’s where the action was.”
There are some similarities to the Trump rally shooting that left one rallygoer dead and others wounded. The Trump shooter, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, had a high vantage point similar to that of Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot Kennedy in Dallas nearly 62 years ago.
Both men were high above their targets and apparently did not arouse the suspicions of the Secret Service. According to reports, however, Trump’s shooter was aiming at a distance twice as far as Oswald, who was in the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, about 270 feet (83 meters) from Kennedy’s moving limousine.
Because Trump was speaking from a podium, Secret Service agents were able to quickly protect him after he dove to the ground after being wounded. Kennedy had no protection when the first shot rang out, giving his assassin a clear line of sight to fire the fatal bullet.
However, witnesses to both shootings told authorities they saw the shooter on the roof of a nearby building, although police did not see it.
In a late-night press conference after the incident at the Trump rally, Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens said police were investigating a number of “suspicious incidents,” including statements from witnesses who said they had tried to alert police to the activities of a person outside the rally just before the shooting.
A Dallas witness to the Kennedy assassination, steam fitter Howard Brennan, told the Warren Commission that he had been sitting on a concrete wall about 120 feet from the School Book Depository waiting for the motorcade and that he had seen a man in a sixth-floor window before the shooting. He described the initial explosion as sounding like “fireworks,” much like many people at the Trump rally would tell reporters.
“Well, then something, right after that explosion, made me think it was a firecracker being thrown out of the Texas Book Store,” Brennan is quoted as saying in the report compiled by the presidential panel charged with investigating the president’s assassination. “And I looked up. And this man I had seen before was aiming for his last shot.
“Well, it appeared to me that he was standing up and leaning against the left window sill, with the pistol against his right shoulder, holding the pistol with his left hand and taking positive aim, and fired his last shot. … He pulled the pistol away from the window as if he was pulling it back to his side and perhaps he stood there for a second to assure himself that he had hit his mark, and then he disappeared.”
The chaos and confusion that immediately followed the Dallas shooting stood in stark contrast to the swift action at Trump’s rally, Cabluck said, where officers quickly shot and killed the man suspected of shooting Trump just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“I didn’t make any comparisons,” Cabluck said of his initial reaction to the Pennsylvania shooting. “And I still don’t.”
