Retired White House Photographer Killed In Carolina Car Crash

 

HENDERSONVILLE, NC (September 15, 2009) – Jack Kightlinger, who was a photographer at the White House for 19 years, was killed on Monday in a two-car auto accident on Howard Gap Road near Hendersonville, NC. His wife, Adele, was severely injured in the wreck and she died today at Mission hospital, their family said. The Kightlinger's were both 77.

Starting in 1967, and for the next 19 years, Kightlinger photographed Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, before retiring during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Those who knew Kightlinger said that he was proud of a large framed print of a picture of President Reagan using Kightlinger's own camera to take a picture of the photographer on his last day of work at the White House in 1985.

"This is the guy who was really the dean of the White House photographers," President Obama's photographer Pete Souza told News Photographer magazine today while Souza traveled with the President in Philadelphia. "Jack was my mentor when I worked at the White House the first time." Souza was President Reagan's official White House photographer during Reagan's second term in office.

In 2005, Kightlinger told the Times-News during an interview for a feature story that he had traveled to 80 countries to cover the five presidents, and that the job had come to him as a "surprise" while he was serving in the Army Signal Corps in California. When he was 36, he told the newspaper, he was supervising 200 photographers at a military photo lab when he was instructed by telegram to report to Washington, DC, for "a possible assignment." Once there, he found himself competing with military photographers from each service branch for the job, including two lie-detector tests and a week of interviews.

"He was there when I got there," Souza said today, "and [David Hume] Kennerly had kept him on during the Ford administration, and he was assigned to Nelson Rockefeller when Rockefeller was vice president. But if you go back and look at different administrations, Jack is the one who had some of the really iconic images."

Souza said one of the images he remembers most was Kightlinger's picture of President Johnson in July 1968, sitting with his head bent low over a conference table as President sadly listened to an audio tape made by his son-in-law, Captain Charles S. Robb, while Robb served as a Marine officer in Vietnam. On the tape Robb was talking about leading Marines who were being killed in battle. Johnson's daughter Lynda later revealed that LBJ would frequently read the letters that her husband wrote home to her, as well as listening to the Marine's audio tapes, because "my father found them more revealing of the real situation [in Vietnam] that all his Generals' briefings."

A photograph Kightlinger took of Reagan during a bill signing ceremony in California in 1981 was later used by artist Michael J. Deas to paint the portrait of Reagan that was used on the U.S. Post Office stamp of America's fiftieth president. Kightlinger told the Times-News that he saw some "nice light" hitting Reagan's face that day, and so he pulled out a telephoto lens to shoot a series of images. It was one of these shots that Deas used to paint the portrait for the stamp. Reagan "had such a gleam in his eye, it just sparkled," Kightlinger told the newspaper.

On Monday the Kightlingers were traveling south on Howard Gap Road when a northbound Ford Ranger truck crossed the centerline and hit their Toyota Avalon head-on, police said. The truck overturned and caught fire, and first responders pulled the truck's driver, Candice Jenkins, 18, of Hendersonville, from the burning wreckage. Her passenger, Philip Spicer, 21, was also injured. Jenkins was airlifted to Mission Hospital and Spicer was transported by ambulance, the newspaper said. The Kightlingers lived in Flat Rock, NC.

A police investigation into the accident continues.

 

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