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 Hugh Aynesworth has 56 years of experience as a journalist
and author and his award-winning investigative work has included
some of the most significant news stories – nationally and
internationally – during that time. He has interviewed every
president since Harry Truman. From 1961 to the moon landing
in 1969, he covered every U.S. manned space flight from Cape
Canaveral and Houston. He has co-authored five books, two
of them bestsellers, on serial murderer Ted Bundy. He has
been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize six times, and was a
finalist five times. But Aynesworth is perhaps best known
for his extensive coverage of the events surrounding the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy.
As a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, Aynesworth
covered the JFK assassination like no other reporter. He not only
witnessed the shooting of Kennedy at Dealey Plaza on November 22,
1963, but he was also present during the police chase and capture of
Lee Harvey Oswald – and later was among the press in the basement
of the Dallas Police Department when Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald.
In the months and years following the assassination, Aynesworth
devoted hundreds of hours covering assassination-related
stories. His assassination-related reporting included a number of
exclusives, including:
- A
story describing the minute-by-minute escape route of Oswald,
less than a week after the assassination.
-
Aynesworth’s successful effort to obtain Oswald’s “Russian
diary,” one of the biggest stories of 1964.
- Daily
coverage of the Ruby murder trial. He talked with Ruby by phone
from his jail cell and was the only reporter invited inside the
closed Ruby funeral in Chicago in 1967. (He was offered, but
refused to be, a pallbearer.)
- The
first print interviews with widow Marina Oswald and the first
story of how the FBI knew about Oswald’s presence on the
motorcade route.
- Aynesworth’s
1967 scathing Newsweek report on JFK investigator Jim
Garrison – the first such anti-Garrison piece anywhere –
accusing Garrison of bribing witnesses and making up his JFK
probe.
Aynesworth later went on to work for national news organizations,
including United Press International, Newsweek, ABC’s
20/20 and The Washington Times, but never left
the assassination coverage completely. He has covered related
stories for those news agencies and went on to become an assassination
expert frequently interviewed by other national and international
media.
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