Six-Tenths of a Second Separated Two Dallas Photographers in 1963, and Only One Won the Pulitzer

At 11:21 on the morning of November 24, 1963, Jack Beers was standing on a railing in the basement of Dallas police headquarters with a Mamiyaflex twin-lens reflex, and he tripped his shutter as Jack Ruby stepped into the open. Several feet lower and to his left, Bob Jackson released the shutter on a Nikon S3 six-tenths of a second later. Beers got Ruby walking; Jackson got the bullet.

What Each Man Was Carrying

Jackson, then a 29-year-old staffer for the Dallas Times Herald, had a Nikon S3 rangefinder with a wide 35mm lens and a strobe. Beers, 40, was a Dallas Morning News photographer working a Mamiyaflex with a 65mm lens on 120 roll film, which is why the negatives he shot that weekend sit in archive drawers today as squares a shade over two inches on a side.

Neither man had a motor drive. Jackson has said that motorized cameras existed in 1963 but that nobody in the basement was using one, and the strobes everyone depended on took up to five seconds to recycle between pops. There was no burst, no spray of frames to edit down later, no second chance a quarter second after the first. Each photographer in that basement got one exposure at the moment that mattered, and the only variable left was when he chose to spend it.

Both were shooting into a garage lit by a bank or two of television lights, which Beers later described under oath as adequate. Flash was not optional. It also meant every frame fired in that basement announced itself, which is what later let researchers time the still photographers against one another.

Where They Stood in the Basement

Beers got a midnight phone call telling him to report to the basement at 10 a.m. for the transfer, and he was at city hall just before 9. In his April 1964 deposition to the Warren Commission, he described finding a stretch of railing on the east side of the basement driveway, next to the live television cameras, where one cameraman could stand without obstructing their view. He was in place by about 9:15, sat on that railing for roughly two hours, then stood up on it when the transfer began. Standing on the rail at the top of the incline put him several feet above every other still photographer in the room.

That was his habit. Jackson has said flatly that Beers liked to be up high, and on any normal perp walk, the high angle is the better call: you shoot over the heads of the scrum, you keep the subject's face clear of shoulders, and you own a sight line nobody can step into.

Jackson took the opposite position, down at floor level near the incline but not on it, in the open lane where Oswald would cross. He had covered prisoner transfers in that basement before and knew where the door put people. He picked his spot in front of the jail office door and prefocused there, then checked more than once that his film was wound and got the flash ready before he put his eye back to the finder. An unmarked car backed into position so close that its bumper touched his left knee.

Shortly before Oswald appeared, a Times Herald reporter came over with word from the city desk: the transfer was dragging, and Jackson was to leave for Nellie Connally's press conference at Parkland Hospital, the governor's wife speaking publicly for the first time since her husband was wounded. Jackson refused to go. Nothing about that call was photographic, and it decided the picture.

The Order of the Flashes

Six other cameras were running in the basement, and the flashes they recorded are a clock. Gary Mack, then curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, worked through that footage frame by frame and timed the strobes against each other. United Press International's Frank Johnston fired first, with Ruby not yet in his frame. Nine-tenths of a second later, Beers fired. Six-tenths of a second after that, Jackson fired.

Beers described the trigger for his own frame in a letter written to Ruby's attorney in 1967. "Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw a sudden movement," he wrote, and his first read on it was mundane: a photographer out of position, or one working with a very short lens, trying to improve his position. He made his frame. What followed, he wrote in the same letter, was a curse punctuated by the shot, in a voice so unnatural and excited that he knew before it ended that someone had gone berserk and was attacking Oswald.

Jackson saw the same movement and read it the same way, as somebody about to ruin his shot. He fired six-tenths of a second behind, and he has been consistent about why. "The reason Beers shot too soon, in comparison to me," Jackson told the Dallas Morning News in 2002, "is that he saw it easier and quicker than I did. Ruby was more in his vision. I had a better position because I wasn't distracted by Ruby as much. I was still looking at Oswald's face, and I knew I was going to shoot before whoever that was blocked my view."

The Luck Story, and What the Record Shows

The version that has traveled for six decades is that Jackson got lucky. Colleagues at the News have said as much for years, and the case is not weak. Beers showed up early, as he always did. He picked a defensible position, he was focused on the right man, and he made a technically clean negative of an event that lasted about a second. He told his daughter for years, "Luck is a product of being prepared," and by his own standard he had done the preparing. Tom Dillard, the News' chief photographer in 1963, called him "industrious, careful, experienced, knowledgeable and dedicated," and said that on that day Beers was "a victim of timing and circumstance."

The record is more specific than that, and it cuts in two directions at once. Mack's reconstruction killed off the theory the News' side kept alive for years, which was that Jackson had simply reacted to Beers' flash and gotten lucky with the delay. The footage does not support it. "The footage shows that Bob and everyone else appear to be reacting only to Ruby's movement," Mack said. "Had he reacted to Beers' flash, [Mr. Jackson] would have taken his picture even later. At the same time, he isn't reacting to gunfire either. He's reacting only to movement, as everyone else was."

Nobody in that basement fired on the sound of the shot. Every still photographer in the room was reacting to a man moving, at ordinary human reaction speed, and the spread between them came from how early each one's eyes caught the movement and where each one's attention was parked. Beers, up on the railing with a clear line, saw Ruby sooner. The elevation that made him a reliable perp-walk photographer put more of Ruby in his view earlier, and it moved his finger earlier. Jackson, low and boxed in, was looking at Oswald's face and prefocused on the patch of floor Oswald was about to occupy, so his frame landed where his attention already was.

Call that luck if you want, but it is the same luck that shows up whenever a photographer commits to a subject instead of a scene. Jackson had one exposure, and he spent it on the face he had already decided to watch. Beers had one exposure, and he spent it on the interruption.

Jackson's was not the only camera running, either. Television carried the shooting live, and film and video cameras in the basement recorded it. Among the still photographers standing there, though, his was the frame that caught the impact, and his is the one that entered the textbooks.

What One Frame Did to Two Careers

In the News darkroom, Dillard looked at Beers' wet negative and told him he had just won the paper a Pulitzer. When the News hit porches the next morning, Beers' picture took up most of the front page; his obituary later noted that the only other photograph the paper had run that large in 25 years was also his, a shot of Kyle Rote grinning on his way to a touchdown. At the Times Herald, sports columnist and sports editor Blackie Sherrod, who was helping out the city desk that weekend, made the call to run Jackson's frame across all eight columns, and it went on the paper's front page on November 25.

Jackson won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Photography, plus the Texas Headliners Club award and Sigma Delta Chi's news picture award. The Times Herald handed him the reprint rights almost immediately, which by 2002 he estimated had brought in tens of thousands of dollars in licensing. He also spent the rest of his career being measured against a single frame he made at 29, and has said he tries not to let that bother him. He left for The Denver Post in 1968, came back a year later, moved to Colorado in 1980, and shot for The Gazette in Colorado Springs until he retired in 1999.

Beers went the other way. His daughter, Darlene Beers Williams, told the Morning News in 2002 that he repeated a single sentence about that morning for the rest of his life: "I was there. I was prepared. But I didn't get it." She and his former colleagues described a man whose confidence never came back, whose temper got shorter, and for whom photography stopped being the point and became a job he wanted to finish so he could go hunting and fishing. She said he lived with untreated depression, and traced it directly to the picture. A heart attack killed him at home in Dallas on February 17, 1975, at 51.

The people who worked with both men were not unanimous about any of it. Felix McKnight, who had supervised Beers at the News before becoming co-publisher and editor of the Times Herald, said that had he been on the Pulitzer jury he would have been tempted to give a double award, because both were once-in-a-lifetime photographs. Eamon Kennedy, a Times Herald staffer that year, granted the disappointment but not the injustice: Jackson's frame was the better picture, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned.

Both Negatives Ended Up in the Same Building

The two frames are now cataloged a few hundred feet from where the motorcade passed. Negatives Beers exposed that weekend are held at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in its Dallas Morning News holdings, filed under the collection named for Dillard, the chief photographer who told him he had won the Pulitzer. Jackson's camera came to the same museum on long-term loan and was formalized as a gift in 2024; it is on view in the core exhibition alongside a large reproduction of the frame it made. In August 2025, the museum announced it had acquired Jackson's archive, more than 15,000 images spanning 1960 to 1978, the largest photographic collection it has ever taken in.

Its special exhibition on the Times Herald's assassination coverage opened on April 29, 2026, and runs through March 28, 2027, built around original photographs, handwritten field notes, and press credentials from the reporters and photographers who worked that weekend. Beers is not among them, because he worked for the other paper. A print of the frame he made six-tenths of a second earlier sits in the same building, in a drawer.

Lead image by sébastien amiet;l, CC BY 2.0. Source.