Bob Porter Oral History

Hired by the Dallas Times Herald in 1961, Bob Porter was among the last employees still working at the paper when it ceased publishing on December 8, 1991. As it happened, less than two weeks later, Oliver Stone's controversial film, JFK, was released in theaters, prompting renewed public interest in the Kennedy assassination and increased visitation to The Sixth Floor exhibit, which had opened in 1989. Although Porter initially planned to retire after the Times Herald folded, he soon learned of an opportunity at The Sixth Floor, which needed someone to manage the sudden flood of media inquiries following the release of Stone's JFK. Bob Porter worked as Director of Communications at The Sixth Floor Museum from 1992 to 2001. In addition to handling public relations, he was asked to spearhead a videotaped Oral History Project alongside former Dallas mayor Wes Wise, who was hired as a consultant and interviewer. Porter and Wise worked together on the project until the mid-1990s when Porter took over as sole interviewer and videographer. Over the course of ten years, he became a familiar voice behind the camera and recorded around 200 oral histories, including significant conversations with three Dallas mayors, prominent local businessmen and a number of reporters, law enforcement officials and eyewitnesses directly involved in the assassination story. His contributions to what is now a robust and diverse collection of nearly 2,500 recordings cannot be overstated. I had the pleasure of working closely with Bob as an intern, and briefly as the Museum's first Oral History Coordinator, on the recording of about twenty-five oral histories between 2000-2001. I learned a lot in a relatively short time from setting up the equipment to breaking the ice at the start of interview sessions. My most powerful memory of Bob comes from September 11, 2001. In our basement offices that day, Bob Porter had the only television set, and I remember sitting beside him for several hours that tragic morning as we watched those historic events unfold - similar, of course, to the way in which individuals absorbed equally historic news of the assassination in front of their television sets a few decades earlier. Bob Porter passed away on November 14, 2013, a little more than a week prior to the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. - Stephen Fagin, Curator