The Man Who Glimpsed The JFK Rifle

Photographer Saw The Barrel Of The Weapon

I'd never heard of Mal Couch, a former TV cameraman, until I started researching something recently and found a gripping story written in 2003 by Michael Granberry for the The Dallas Morning News. You know how you just scroll through and click away from the stuff you don't need?
Not this time. No, sir, not this time.
This report just drew me straight in. It's got the headline ``Those who rode by Kennedy remember'' and it recounts the stories of some of the people who witnessed the JFK assassination - and the effect it had on their lives.
It's a terrific read, datelined Saturday, November 22, 2003 - 40 years after the assassination - and it can be found at DesertNews.com

Let Michael Granberry tell you the story ....

Mal Couch grew up in Dallas, where his father worked for Braniff Airlines and his mother was a housewife. Even as a Woodrow Wilson High School student, he got a job working as a part-time cameraman for WFAA-TV (Channel 8), for which he was still shooting film in 1963.
As part of the motorcade, he found himself riding in the "media" car, next to Bob Jackson, a photographer for The Dallas Times Herald; Tom Dillard, a photographer for The Dallas Morning News; and a Channel 4 cameraman whose name he can't recall. Jackson had taken his last picture and handed his film to Jim Featherston, a reporter waiting to receive it at the corner of Main and Houston. When the heavyset reporter fumbled it and began to chase after it, the men in the car found themselves laughing.
And then came the first shot.Couch remembers someone shouting: ``Look at the window — there's the rifle!'' By the time the third shot rang out, Couch had spotted about eight inches
of the rifle protruding from the sixth-floor window, and being pulled back in. He says he never saw a face, though some witnesses did.Moments later, Couch and his fellow passengers scrambled out of the car to descend on the madness of Dealey Plaza.
`` `God, don't let them do this!' I screamed. 'They can't kill the president!' And I'm running like crazy. In the plaza, it's mass confusion, total mayhem." So much so that the events began to feel overwhelm his instincts as a photographer.``I didn't film the window,'' he said. ``It was happening too fast. I did raise my camera to take black and white footage of a policeman pulling his pistol and people falling, which everyone has seen for years. But then I stopped filming. Why? Mercy, goodness, gracious, I don't know. When I ran back, I didn't film anything. I guess I was just too dazed to figure out what was going on. So nothing was filmed until I got to Parkland Hospital, where I saw Jackie getting into a hearse. So I filmed the hearse and people crying all over the place.''
For him, the Kennedy assassination continues to be ``a devastating marker''. It was, he contends, the opening of a 1960s Pandora's box, leading to Vietnam and two more assassinations, which claimed the lives of civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and the President's brother Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968.
``That little piece of metal sticking out the window started it all,'' said Couch.