Susan Spencer of CBS News
OXFORD, Miss. – The late President John F. Kennedy’s role in revolutionizing American politics and press coverage will be the focus of a panel discussion at 5:30 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 7) at the University of Mississippi’s Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics.
This semester, Overby Center Chairman Charles Overby and Overby fellow Curtis Wilkie have been teaching a class on the Kennedy administration and its impact on the press and the nation. They will participate in the panel “Hail and Farewell,” which also features longtime Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant, who worked with Wilkie at the Globe, and Oliphant’s wife, Susan Spencer of CBS News. Oliphant and Spencer both possess keen insights into Kennedy’s influence, Wilkie said.
The event comes almost 50 years after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
“For the purposes of this program, it is really is something for us to do on the month when we mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination, but it won’t be about the assassination so much as it will be about JFK in general,” Wilkie said.
The informal panel discussion will explore Kennedy’s role in the evolution of the White House press corps ,and how journalists cover politicians, Wilkie said. For example, Kennedy had extramarital affairs, but the press at that time didn’t cover them, he said. This lack of coverage wouldn’t happen in the modern age of social media and 24-hour cable news channels.
Tom Oliphant of The Boston Globe
“Kennedy was protected by some of the people who covered him,” Wilkie said. “All the stuff he did, a la Bill Clinton, people don’t get away with anymore. … Things have changed.”
For more information about the event, contact the Overby Center at 662-915-1692 or overbycenter@olemiss.edu.