Tag Archives: Washington

I went on a return visit (after going last year) to the Newseum to see the Civil Rights exhibit and ended up staying four hours to see that and a whole lot more. As a fan of US History from the 1960s onward, I.e. the current events roughly spanning my time on the planet, and as a sentimental former newspaper reporter, I love the newseums focus not only on recent current events but on how they were covered by the news media and how those events shaped the media. So the exhibit on now the media, for example, covered the Kennedy assassination and the civil rights movement, as well as FBI investigations into the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Branch Davidian fiasco at Waco, the capture of the Unabomber (whose creepy Montana cabin is in the Newseum), the Oklahoma City bombing and of course 9/11, was fascinating to me.

Imagine being the photographer who captured the shot of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot and worse, the photographer who snapped a photo a split second earlier when Oswald was still alive, just missing the drama shot? Imagine being the reporters beat up by racist thugs in the 1960s south, when they were covering the brave students fighting segregation? Strange to think that almost the entire nation tuned in for JFK’s funeral and, unwittingly, for Oswald’s death live on tv.
I also enjoyed looking at the Camelot photos taken of the young Kennedy’s and their two gorgeous little kids by the photographer first hired by Joe Kennedy to help sell his son as presidential material. The Newseum also does offer fabulous views of the capital.