With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Gary Mack, Kennedy Assassination Expert, Dies at 68

Gary Mack, a Dallas broadcaster whose fascination with the Kennedy assassination led him to become a widely consulted expert on the event and, eventually, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, which is devoted to the assassination, died on Wednesday in Arlington, Tex. He was 68.

The museum said on its website that he had died after a long illness. The Dallas Morning News reported that his wife, Karin Strohbeck, said the cause was a rare and aggressive cancer.

Mr. Mack, like many Americans of his generation, stayed glued to the television set as the events of November 1963 unfolded. His interest was rekindled after seeing the Zapruder film footage of the assassination on television in 1975.

Interest became obsession when he began working in 1981 as an announcer, cameraman and news producer at KXAS-TV, a local NBC station, where part of his job was to manage and preserve the station’s film archives and its coverage of the assassination and its aftermath.

As he pored over the historical record, read every account of the assassination he could lay his hands on and inspected the footage frame by frame, he developed an impressive command of the subject. ...

Read entire article at NYT