BW - EP145—005: November 1963 With Jean Shepherd And JFK—JFK's Last Trip To Florida

On Sunday, November 17th, 1963, Frank McGee signed on for NBC’s Monitor with a look at Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Lincoln’s famous speech was about to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary. Meanwhile, President Kennedy was in Florida, unofficially on the 1964 campaign trail. On Saturday November 16th, President Kennedy traveled to Cape Canaveral where he inspected the Saturn Control Center and watched a Polaris missile test launch. The next morning he and Special Assistant Dave Powers went to Sunday Mass at St. Ann’s Church in Palm Beach. On the day of this special broadcast, the President began his day at MacDill Air Force Base. Photos from this trip, which would be the President’s last to Florida, which had voted Republican in the previous two Presidential elections, show Kennedy smiling brightly, as did fellow Americans, especially those who shook his hand or lined the roads alongside the twenty-eight mile path his motorcade took in Tampa Bay. When Kennedy traveled to Miami, he addressed a democrat crowd at the airport. That same day, a fire killed twenty-six people at the Surfside Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the offseason the hotel served as a convalescent home for elderly people. Ten bodies were never recovered and only two of the other fifteen could be identified. A former mental patient and convicted arsonist would be arrested for the crime. He confessed he poured gasoline into the hotel's boiler and set it ablaze. However, an Atlantic City grand jury did not find probable cause to return an indictment. That evening, NBC-TV’s Huntley–Brinkley Report featured a four-minute news feature on The Beatles. It was the group’s first appearance on American TV.