Image of the Oswald family at Lee Harvey Oswald's funeral

Reporters at Lee Harvey Oswald's funeral were kept back from the Oswald family by Fort Worth police officers to respect their privacy. Seeing how close the family's chairs were to the gravesite, United Press International reporter Preston McGraw was inspired to volunteer as a pallbearer specifically to get closer to the family. "Frankly, what I had in mind," he recalled in a Museum oral history, "was to get up close to the family so I could ask Oswald's wife a couple of questions." McGraw, however, never had the chance. "No sooner had we sat the [casket] down then the cops pushed us back, and they formed a line between us and the [family]." Another pallbearer, Associated Press reporter Mike Cochran remembered that he initially had no intention of serving as a pallbearer until he saw his chief UPI rival, Preston McGraw, volunteer. Cochran, a young and relatively inexperienced AP writer at the time, reluctantly volunteered after McGraw, not wanting UPI to look better than the AP. When I told Cochran during a 2013 oral history that McGraw volunteered only so that he could get close to the Oswald family, Cochran smiled and said, "And that's the difference between an experienced reporter and a young inexperienced reporter." -- Stephen Fagin, Curator