நுனிப்புல்/Nunippul
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"Achtung, Achtung. Here is an announcement"
...Excerpts from
'Odessa File'
by Fredrick Forsyth
chapter.1
JFK photo: "From Dallas, Texas, the flash - apparently official -
President Kennedy died," CBS newsman Walter Cronkite told
America on Nov. 22, 1963. His emotional confirmation of
Kennedy's death has become an unforgettable TV image.
(CBS/Getty) #jfkdallas.
Click on the image for Link to:"Fan of John F Kennedy." ( facebook page)
Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what he was doing on November 22, 1963, at the precise moment he heard President Kennedy was dead. Kennedy was hit at twelve-thirty in the fternoon, Daflas time, and the announcement that he was dead came at about half past one in the same time zone. It was two thirty in New York, seven-thirty in the evening in London, and eight-thirty on a chilly, seet-swept night in Hamburg.
Peter Miller was driving back into the town center after visiting his mother at her home in Osdorf, one of the outer suburbs of the city. He always visited her on Friday evenings, partly to see if she had everything she needed for the weekend and partly because he felt he had to visit her once a week. He would have telephoned her if she had a telephone, but as she had none, he drove out to see her. That was why she refused to have a telephone.
As usual, he had the radio on, and was listening to a music show being broadcast by Northwest German Radio. At half past eight he was in the Osdorf Way, ten minutes from his mother's flat, when the music stopped in the middle of a bar and the voice of the announcer came through, taut with tension.
"Achtung, Achtung. Here is an announcement. President Kennedy is dead. I repeat, president Kennedy is dead." Miller took his eyes off the road and stared at the dimly illuminated band of frequencies along the upper edge of the radio, as if his eyes would be able to deny what his ears had heard, assure him he was tuned in to the wrong radio station, the one that broadcast nonsense.
"Jesus," he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal, and sung to the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona toward the center of Hamburg, other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.
Along his own side he could see the brake lights glowing on as the drivers ahead swung to the right to park at the curb and listen to the supplementary information pouring from their radios. On the left the headlights of the cars heading out of town wavered wildly as the too swung away toward the pavement. Two cars overtook him, the first hooting angrily, and he caught a glimpse of the driver tapping his forehead in Miller's direction in the usual rude sign, indicating lunacy, that one German driver makes to another who has annoyed him.
He'll learn soon enough, thought Miller.
The light music on the radio had stopped, replaced by the "Funeral March," which was evidently all the disk jockey had on hand. At intervals he read snippets of further information straight off the teleprinter, as they were brought in from the newsroom. The details began to fill in: the open-car ride into Dallas, the rifleman in the window of the School Book Depository. No mention of an arrest.
The driver of the car ahead of Miller climbed out and walked back towards him. He approached the left hand window, then realized that the driver's seat was inexplicably on the right and came round the car. He wore a nylon-fur-collared jacket. Miller wound down his window.
"You heard it?" asked the man, bending down to the window.
"Yeah," said Miller. "Absolutely fantastic," said the man. All over Hamburg, Europe, the world, people were walking up to complete strangers to discuss the event. "You reckon it was the Communists?" asked the man. I don't know." "It could mean war, you know, if it was them," said the man. "Maybe," said Miller. He wished the man would go away. As a reporter he could imagine the chaos sweeping across the newspaper offices of the country as every
staff man was called back to help put out a crash edition for the morning breakfasttables. There would be obituaries to prepare, the thousands of instant tributes to correlate and typeset, the telephone lines jammed with yelling men seeking more and ever more details because a man with his head shattered lay dead in a city in Texas.
