Within an hour of Oswald’s arrival at the police department on November 22, it became known to newsmen that he was a possible suspect in the slaying of President Kennedy as well as in the murder of Patrolman Tippit. At least as early as 3:26 p.m. a television report carried this information. Reporters and cameramen flooded into the building and congregated in the corridor of the third floor, joining those few who had been present when Oswald first arrived.[C5-53]
On the Third Floor
Felix McKnight, editor of the Dallas Times-Herald, who handled press arrangements for the President’s visit, estimated that within 24 hours of the assassination more than 300 representatives of news media were in Dallas, including correspondents from foreign newspapers and press associations.[C5-54] District Attorney Henry M. Wade thought that the crowd in the third floor hallway itself may have numbered as many as 300.[C5-55] Most estimates, including those based on examination of video tapes, place upwards of 100 newsmen and cameramen in the third floor corridor of the police department by the evening of November 22.[C5-56] (See Commission Exhibit No. 2633, [p. 203].)
In the words of an FBI agent who was present, the conditions at the police station were “not too much unlike Grand Central Station at rush hour, maybe like the Yankee Stadium during the World Series games. * * *”[C5-57] In the lobby of the third floor, television cameramen set up two large cameras and floodlights in strategic positions that gave them a sweep of the corridor in either direction. Technicians stretched their television cables into and out of offices, running some of them out of the windows of a deputy chief’s office and down the side of the building. Men with newsreel cameras, still cameras, and microphones, more mobile than the television cameramen, moved back and forth seeking information and opportunities for interviews. Newsmen wandered into the offices of other bureaus located on the third floor, sat on desks, and used police telephones; indeed, one reporter admits hiding a telephone behind a desk so that he would have exclusive access to it if something developed.[C5-58]
By the time Chief Curry returned to the building in the middle of the afternoon from Love Field where he had escorted President Johnson from Parkland Hospital, he found that “there was just pandemonium on the third floor.”[C5-59] The news representatives, he testified:
* * * were jammed into the north hall of the third floor, which are the offices of the criminal investigation division. The television trucks, there were several of them around the city hall. I went into my administrative offices, I saw cables coming through the administrative assistant office and through the deputy chief of traffic through his office, and running through the hall they had a live TV set up on the third floor, and it was a bedlam of confusion.[C5-60]
According to Special Agent Winston G. Lawson of the Secret Service:
At least by 6 or 7 o’clock * * * [the reporters and cameramen] were quite in evidence up and down the corridors, cameras on the tripods, the sound equipment, people with still cameras, motion picture-type hand cameras, all kinds of people with tape recorders, and they were trying to interview people, anybody that belonged in police headquarters that might know anything about Oswald * * *[C5-61]
Commission Exhibit No. 2633