Robert MacNeil Oral History

Mr. MacNeil's interview was the fifth and final oral history taping for me during an intense and exhausting three-day visit to New York City in April 2004. Prior to Mr. MacNeil, interviews had been recorded that week with Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, and assassination researcher Edward Jay Epstein.

MacNeil's oral history was featured in the Museum's "Covering Chaos" exhibition from June 2005 to January 2006. It is now frequently used in Museum educational programming. - Stephen Fagin, Curator 

Writer William Manchester, in Death of a President, suggested it was Robert MacNeil who encountered Lee Harvey Oswald inside the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository a few minutes after the assassination. However, there is very good reason to believe that WFAA radio program director Pierce Allman was the man who spoke to Oswald, not MacNeil.

Both men went to the building entrance at separate times asking for a telephone and both encountered a man who took time to point to where they could find one. Manchester based his conclusion on noting what MacNeil did after hearing the shots and when his first report to NBC News actually aired. Unbeknownst to Manchester, Oswald admitted during questioning having been stopped by two men together, and one had a crew-cut hair style. News films and video tapes that weekend show Robert MacNeil's hair was much longer than a crew-cut and that Pierce Allman did, in fact, have that style.

Furthermore, in a report that was not published by the Warren Commission and was unknown to Manchester, the Secret Service concluded a few days after the assassination, based on interviews with both Allman and the man who was with him – Terry Ford, also of WFAA - that Oswald spoke with Pierce Allman at the Book Depository. Ironically, neither Allman,  Ford nor MacNeil had any memory of the man's features or whether he was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald. - Gary Mack, Curator