Reuters JFK beat

In the light of the recent controversy (mea culpa?) over picking up other agencies’ news stories [Editor’s ‘ethically dubious’ order challenged], it might be worth recalling on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy that it was AP that provided what was then Reuters with a magnificent beat in many parts of the world with news of that event.

In those days, we had few correspondents of our own in the United States, and they were virtually all in New York and Washington. Under a long-standing (and amazingly one-sided) agreement with our major rivals, Reuters’ New York desk was allowed to pick up their domestic stories and use them without credit, in return, I understand, for similar access for AP to the Press Association in the UK.

On 22 November 1963, Reuters of course had no-one in Dallas but New York was keeping a close eye on the AP service and turned round their bulletin on the shooting to Central Desk (forerunner of World Desk) in London within seconds. All Reuters regional desks at 85 Fleet Street were routinely provided by the Duty Editor with carbon copies, or “blacks”, of incoming stories which were delivered by messengers around the fourth floor.

My modest role in the almost global Reuter scoop, due largely to superior communications in an age when radio transmission was still common, was to get the AP story under the perfectly legal guise of a Reuter one to our subscribers in Jamaica and Trinidad (I think they totalled three, four at most, and one apparently hadn’t paid a subscription for a few years) several minutes before the AP original landed.

That night, a year after joining Reuters from university, I was the duty sub on the Westaf/Carib Desk. The transmission to West Africa, only Nigeria and Ghana at the time, had just closed so there was no hope there. The Caribbean cast, as it was called, was not due to open for another 10 minutes but we always ran a test band of punched tape through the transmitter for 15 minutes beforehand to allow the technicians at the other end in Kingston or Port of Spain plenty of time to tune in to the frequency. The Desk’s teleprinter operator, the legendary Ted Gulliver who was among the fastest tape punchers in the business when he was not taking a drag on his inevitable cigarette, turned the “Kennedy shot – eyewitnesses” snap into a looped test band, and fortunately the technicians at the other end recognised immediately, as we were told later, that this was something they had to pass on fast to their own news desks. Apparently the “Reuter” story was already on Jamaican radio before the AP one limped in on an inferior (to ours) radio circuit.

I doubt if AP even noticed that they were “beaten into the Caribbean” but they were certainly miffed at losing play in other parts of the world. However, it still took five more years before they got out of the agreement and Reuters was forced into doing its own reporting out of the United States. ■