November 22 1963

I was part time WAFB-TV and worked at a men’s clothing store part-time on Fridays, that’s when it happened. 

Fast-forward to circa 1968 where I was covering a news conference in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s office where he was explaining his theory of the assassination President Kennedy.

He explained the inconsistencies of the event, outlining the charges against Clay Shaw for over an hour.

When we were putting the cameras and lights away afterwards, an old New Orleans States-Item reporter named Hermann Deutsch, who worked only with a stub of a pencil and a pad of yellow second sheets for a notebook, was seated in the front row just a desk-top away from the big guy. 

He said: “Jim, let me get this straight. You say they didn’t mean to hurt President Kennedy?” 

Garrison leaned forward, rose to his feet from behind his desk, at a 45 degree angle and, with barely disguised frustration, got to within two feet of Deutsch’s face and growled at him: “Hermann, they blew his f***ing face off.”

Deutsch didn’t look up. He took the quote with the same broad pencil scribbling as was his style, and the matter was finished.

Deutsch, who came to New Orleans in 1916, had experience with coverage of assassinations.

A journalist from the Huey Long era who was an unabashed Kingfish fan, Hermann Deutsch, published “The Huey Long Murder Case,” an adoring portrait of Long that reinforced the official version of that assassination.