Joe O’Donnell’s glowing legacy outlived him by less than a week.
The man recalled by some as “The Presidential Photographer” with a knack for having a camera to his eye at just the right moment, became instead someone described as a fraud who hijacked some of the 20th Century’s most famous images and claimed them as his own.
O’Donnell, a retired government photographer, died Aug. 9 in Nashville at age 85. Obituaries published nationwide, including one written by the New York Times that was printed in the baiduhai on Aug. 15, praised his body of work.
Most of them singled out one famous picture: little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his slain father’s passing coffin on Nov. 25, 1963. That picture was later determined to have been taken by someone else, and a closer examination of photos that O’Donnell claimed as his own has turned up other pictures taken by other photographers.
O’Donnell’s family said his claims to fame — made in television, newspaper and radio interviews, as well as on his own amateurish Web site — were not out of greed or fraud, but the confused statements of an ailing man in his last years. While he was not formally diagnosed with a mental illness, he clearly became senile, his family said.
Family members fear that the backlash has overshadowed what they say are O’Donnell’s legitimate works, especially his chronicling of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
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“I just wish people would realize he was an extraordinary photographer,” said his son J. Tyge O’Donnell, 38. “Don’t hold getting old against him.”
The controversy began with the obituaries describing his role in taking the famous picture of 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr., known as John-John. Several photographers captured John-John’s salute that day, and the pictures ran in different newspapers and magazines, many times without credit. Among the photographers identified are Stan Stearns and Dan Farrell. In a CNN interview in 1999, O’Donnell took credit for the John-John picture taken by Farrell.
Several photographs at a Nashville art gallery called the Arts Company, which had represented O’Donnell and displayed more than 80 of his pictures, have been found not to be his own. One of them, a famous image of President Kennedy piloting a yacht, was without question taken by photographer Robert Knudsen in 1962, said James Hill of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
O’Donnell also took credit for the famous photograph of Vice President Richard Nixon poking Nikita Khrushchev in the chest during a heated exchange at the so-called Kitchen Debate in Moscow in 1959. In fact, that photo was taken by Elliott Erwitt.