Bill Ryan (NBC) on 11/22/63

[Stanislav]

One thing I've wondered about NBC's coverage of the JFK assassination on 11/22/63 is how the realtively unknown (to a national audience) Bill Ryan happened to anchor the coverage that day.

Ryan at the time was primarily a local anchor, doing the WNBC-TV 6pm newscast (along with Gabe Pressman, I believe). I think he did do some of those little 5-minute news updates that NBC used to run in mid-morning and mid-afternoon (though without schedules in front of me, I'm not certain NBC was doing those yet as of 1963).

And yet, from the start of NBC's coverage, Ryan was obviously the "point man" and the main anchor, even in the presence of two more well-known network colleagues (Frank McGee and Chet Huntley).

My theory on this is that:

(1)While McGee was a capable veteran newsman, he had not yet done much anchoring, and was primarily known as a reporter and correspondent.

(2)Huntley, while certainly a national figure, a network anchor with a longer history in the news business than Ryan, the Huntley-Brinkley Report was primarily a scripted newscast, and he perhaps had little experience of covering live, breaking news.

(3)Ryan, while primarily a local guy, had perhaps more experience covering unfolding events live on a local basis, so perhaps as a snap judgment they figured it would be best to let him be the central "glue" to tie all the disparate reports together.

Any other ideas?

(BTW, can anyone link to a decent bio of Ryan on the Net? I've looked around and can only find the barest details of his career. I'd like to perhaps expand his Wikipedia "stub" as a man who so capably covered such an historic event deserves a bit more recognition.)

 

[DM601]

I've also wondered about the same, and why someone so highly visible at that time didn't become more of a network news star.
I remember reading an Associated Press newspaper story about Ryan sometime in the late 1980s around the 25th anniversary of the JFK assassination.
Based on that and a few other mentions over the years, I've had the impression that NBC had to scramble to get whoever they could into the studio. Remember, they had to start their coverage with a patchwork crew during the lunch hour.
I've seen the '63 NBC coverage and my impression was that McGee was basically running the show, since he was handling the calls from Dallas correspondents and the segues to WBAP-TV; Ryan, who appeared to be on a higher stool than the others and was miked louder at first, was initially being handed and reading incoming wire bulletins -- maybe brought in for that purpose; and Huntley was more or less serving as a commentator. Frankly, to me he seemed to be rambling. I've read he was a personal friend of the Kennedys and emotionally affected more than the others by the events.
I would say that Huntley normally might have been the most experienced at breaking news, since he got the Huntley-Brinkley gig to begin with based on his and David Brinkley's handling of the 1956 political conventions.
Notably, Huntley disappeared from the broadcast shortly after the announcement of JFK's death, to be replaced by Merrill Mueller briefly before Ryan and McGee handled it themselves from there.
Ryan later worked for West Virginia's public TV network, according to the AP story.

 

[Stanislav]

If you ever find a copy of that AP article, online or otherwise, I'd love to see it.

I disagree with your assessment -- I think Ryan was running the show the same way that any anchor would preside over a newscast. You mentioned the stool and the miking (I don't have the footage at hand, but I believe he had a lapel mike while the others shared a desk mike) -- also, they framed him separately from the others far more often. Ryan was the one who would interrupt with breaking news, he was the one who would segue into and out of remote segments (WBAP, Washington, the UN, various correspondents, etc.), clearly he was the one being fed instructions and cues from the director. Had the audio line from Dallas worked properly from the start, McGee's role would not have even been that prominent -- he was there, I believe, mostly for commentary. If you want to use a sports metaphor, Ryan was play-by-play and McGee was color.

And BTW, to quell an old urban myth, while Huntley was indeed upset (and angered) about the events of the day, I don't believe he left the set because he was emotionally upset -- I still maintain that because he and Brinkley both left the coverage around the same time (Brinkley being replaced by a rotating set of reporters from Washington), they were simply off to work behind the scenes preparing the special edition of The Huntley-Brinkley Report that ran that evening. They brought in Mueller (another WNBC guy who is even more forgotten than Ryan) for a short time, but clearly he wasn't doing a whole lot, and they quickly figured the two-man team of Ryan and McGee was sufficient.