Photographer captured funeral salute by JFK’s son

Dan Farrell, whose photograph of a young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting during the 1963 funeral ceremonies for his slain father became one of the most memorable images surrounding the Kennedy assassination, died April 13 at a hospital in Rockville Centre, N.Y. He was 84.

The cause was pneumonia, said her son, Daniel Farrell.

On Nov. 25, 1963, Farrell was on assignment in Washington for his newspaper, the New York Daily News, covering the funeral of president John F. Kennedy, who had been killed three days before in Dallas.

After beginning his day at the U.S. Capitol, Farrell moved to a spot across from St. Matthew’s Cathedral in downtown Washington. He stood on a crowded flatbed truck alongside scores of other photographers, about 150 feet from the cathedral’s front door.

Fifty years later, Farrell recalled the scene in an interview with the Daily News.

“It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” he said.

When the mourners emerged from the cathedral, Farrell trained his Hasselblad camera on the Kennedy family. As the president’s coffin was placed on a horse-drawn caisson, his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, leaned down and said something to her son. It happened to be his third birthday.

Farrell was watching through a telephoto lens.

“She said, ‘John, salute,’ ” he recalled in 1999. “He didn’t respond at first. I took a deep breath. She said, ‘John-John, salute.’ ”

The young boy, wearing a light blue jacket and short pants, stepped forward and raised his right hand to his brow. Farrell snapped just a single frame.

The moment was captured on newsreel film and by at least one other photographer, Stan Stearns of United Press International. Farrell’s photograph, sometimes cropped to show only John Kennedy Jr., was sent out on The Associated Press wire service and became an enduring symbol of one of the most solemn days in the country’s history.

“One shot. One frame,” Farrell said in 2003. “And it was all over.”

Daniel Boyle Farrell was born Oct. 31, 1930, in Hazleton, Pa., and grew up in Brooklyn. He served in the navy before joining the Daily News as a copy boy at about 1950.

Early in his career, he rode a motorcycle all over New York City, picking up film and delivering it to the newspaper office. He soon became a photographer and, in a career of more than 45 years, became one of the tabloid paper’s most admired staffers.