Obituary: Ralph Harris

Jan 21 2009 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE KNEW eight Presidents of the USA, the small and dapper figure, who once stepped eagerly along corridors of power in Birkenhead, peeping into the timber-panelled committee rooms beneath the green dome on the magnificent town hall.

And it is equally true to say that the Presidents knew Ralph Harris, but so did the councillors and aldermen in Birkenhead, where he was a cub reporter, learning the accuracy and crisp style of writing which would make him one of the most important journalists of his generation – the doyen of the White House press corps, as he was known to colleagues.

Indeed, had he been born 22 years later, he would have spent yesterday telling the world about Barack Obama and his hopes for America and the world.

Harris had reported on that infinitely sadder day, in November, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and then he personally witnessed the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby.

From a public phone box, he dictated his dispatch: “Oswald was being brought in and out for questioning by cigar-smoking detectives wearing 10-gallon hats . . . The fatal shot, fired by Jack Ruby into Oswald’s abdomen at point-blank range, in the presence of armed police and reporters, had such a stunning impact that the scene froze into a moment of paralysed amazement, then pandemonium as Oswald dropped to the concrete floor.”

Harris was born in Manchester, starting his career with the Birkenhead News, then a broadsheet bought by almost every family in the town.

After war service with the RAF in South Africa, Harris emigrated to the USA, working briefly for United Press before joining Reuters in Washington, in 1947. Almost from the start, he reported on the Presidents and travelled with them on international duty – covering the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Vietnam, Watergate and the humiliation of Richard Nixon.

He became the first foreign president of the White House Correspondents association. Married with two children, Harris, who retired in 1986, became an American citizen nine years later.

“He was a veritable institution among the Fourth Estate in Washington,” said President Reagan.

Ralph Harris, reporter; born January 31, 1921,died December 24, 2008.