The summer of 1963 was marked by political upheaval. Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed an overflow crowd at the historic March on Washington. The Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb inside Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four schoolgirls.
Amid the tumult and tragedy, much of the nation looked for guidance and stability from a charismatic young president who had just begun to focus on what would become a cornerstone of his and Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s legacy: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After two and a half years in office, John F. Kennedy seemed in sync with the times—and destined for a second term. The string of politically charged assassinations that would convulse the country over the course of the decade were largely in the offing, despite the ominous pall cast by the Evers slaying.
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To many Americans, the assassination of an American president was inconceivable, a product of another era. (William McKinley had been killed in 1901.) Kennedy, however, was under no such illusion. In his imaginings, his murder was entirely plausible. And the largely untold story of a long-lost home-movie made by the president and first lady on the last weekend of the summer—a film in which JFK playacted his own assassination—is worth revisiting amid the recent disarray in the Secret Service and two attempts this year on the life of Donald Trump by would-be assassins, if only to see how far the country has come since those waning days of American innocence.
A visit to the website of the John F. Kennedy Library reveals a silent motion picture, some 16 minutes long, shot on the weekend of September 21 and 22, 1963. The footage depicts scenes of Kennedy, his family, and a few friends at various locations around Newport, Rhode Island, including Hammersmith Farm, the childhood home of first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
In one of the film’s vignettes, taken that Saturday, JFK sits in the captain’s chair on the aft deck of the presidential yacht, the Honey Fitz, reading the palms of Anita Fay, spouse of JFK’s wartime buddy and undersecretary of the Navy, Paul “Red” Fay. Kennedy then displays his own palms for the couple, interpreting his lifelines. What did he see? What did he say?
In fact, two months later—on November 22—the president would be assassinated.
Remarkable as this home movie is, what came after it ends takes one’s breath away—footage that has not seen the light of day until now. Chief photographer’s mate Robert L. Knudsen, a sailor assigned to the White House, had accompanied the first family to film the weekend’s activities on a 16-mm camera. He had also been asked by Jackie Kennedy to capture the presidential party on the Honey Fitz and then follow them back to Hammersmith Farm, along with the Secret Service, to document a spoof murder of JFK as part of a homemade spy thriller she and the president had devised.
I first learned of the movie from Paul Landis, the first lady’s Secret Service agent, who recently released a memoir, The Final Witness. In his book, as I described in Vanity Fair a year ago, Landis made the explosive disclosure that on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, he had discovered an intact bullet in the presidential limo.
At one point Landis told me that in 1963, he had taken part in a prank movie about an assassination. I didn’t really absorb what he was describing, but I filed it away. He was unsure of the date. I wondered privately, though: Why would a Secret Service agent be asked to take part in a film satirizing such a horrific act?
In a recent investigation for Vanity Fair, however, I was able to uncover footage from the film, confirm that the event Landis recounted did in fact take place, and determine that Landis was one of the agents asked to appear in the movie by its director: none other than Jackie, his boss.
Hammersmith Farm sits on 97 acres overlooking Narragansett Bay. The estate had been the young Jackie’s summer home, inherited by her stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., who had married Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee, in 1942, after her divorce from Jackie’s father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier.
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A decade later, in 1953, after the newly elected Senator Kennedy proposed to Jackie, the two were married nearby, in Newport’s St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. A huge reception followed at Hammersmith Farm, with more than 1,200 in attendance. The guests mingled among tables set up under tents and umbrellas. The backdrop was the family’s 28-room mansion on the sprawling lawn that gently sloped down to the bay.
Jackie was enamored of the arts, especially the visual arts. While in college, she had attended Smith’s junior year study-abroad program in postwar Paris. She then returned stateside to finish classes and eventually landed a job as a journalist and photographer for Washington, DC’s Times-Herald. She became taken with all things French, harboring a fascination with experimental film. She often expressed an interest in someday directing a movie. It was during her time as a photojournalist that she began dating her husband-to-be.
While JFK was in office, the Auchincloss residence would become a favorite retreat, typically less hectic and crowded than the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. And, along with the ever-present still cameras belonging to the official White House photographers, a movie camera was often on hand. As the home movies at the JFK Library show, the first family would swim in the pool at nearby Bailey’s Beach Club, play in the sand on its restricted beach, and regularly take afternoon cruises on the Honey Fitz, named for Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John Francis Fitzgerald, a onetime mayor of Boston and congressman.
September 21–22, 1963, would be JFK’s last visit to Hammersmith Farm.
During our talks, Landis would occasionally refer to those 48 hours. More recently, after I pressed him to open up further, his recollections came into focus.
He recalls that the first lady had made an unusual request. She explained that she and the president were making a humorous short film—a kind of spy movie. And she asked if the agents wouldn’t mind participating. I came to learn that Landis had been accompanied by eight colleagues, including Roy Kellerman, who would later be in charge of the agents in Dallas, riding in the presidential limousine in the front passenger seat. At one point, according to Landis, Jackie asked the agents to hurriedly drive up to the main house and react as if they had just heard shots. Landis says the agents entered the house and found the president lying on the floor in the foyer with ketchup smeared on him. Jackie sat up on the staircase, directing the action from the very spot where she and JFK had been photographed on their wedding day 10 years earlier.
Landis understood it was a prank and thought it odd but typical of the mischievous, playful atmosphere the first couple sanctioned when outside of public view. Everyone applauded and laughed when the filming was complete, Landis recalls.
But given the events two months later, the concocted scenario would soon take on a dark significance and is only rarely mentioned in Kennedy histories. The “murder,” meant as a kind of goof (more on this below), actually raises questions of warning signs that the president may have ignored. The well-known Kennedy competitive drive and the president’s willingness to take physical risks place a spotlight on the issue of whether JFK was acting recklessly by insisting that he ride in an open car in the Dallas motorcade—without its bubble-top covering, and with his Secret Service agents admonished to stay off the running board on the rear of the limousine lest they get between the president and the public.
What’s more, there were concerns among the staff and outside observers that JFK was playing fast and loose in his off-hours—acting with abandon in his romantic liaisons, staying up late with hard-partying family members, and sometimes going to extremes with close friends. It was not unusual, for example, for JFK to horse around with Red Fay, who agreed to appear in the film.
The pair had known each other since World War II, when both men were injured and recuperating at a South Pacific naval base. Their bond became lifelong; the Fays were frequent guests of the Kennedys, especially on long weekends. Jack and Red would often trade jokes, playing touch football and tennis—and socializing. In a rare comment Fay made about the movie, 20 years after the fact, he claimed it was all in jest. “We were bored,” he said, “and we decided to put the photographer to good use.” In what now appears to be an attempt to protect his fallen friend, Fay insisted that he was the only “victim” in the movie, but that is belied by the accounts of Landis and photographer Knudsen, who remember JFK and Fay taking turns being a casualty.
In 1943, the president, then a Navy lieutenant fighting in the Pacific theater, narrowly escaped death when a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat, PT-109, cutting it in two. During his childhood and as an adult, he endured other near-death experiences, receiving last rites several times. As a result, JFK reportedly maintained a healthy skepticism about whether he would ever grow old. His family, according to the well-worn myth, was laboring under an “Irish curse.” In August 1944, his older brother, Joe—whom the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., had hoped might become president one day—died after volunteering for a daring bombing mission. Four years later, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy Cavendish, a younger, vibrant sister and one of JFK’s closest siblings, died in a tragic plane crash in France.
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Irish lore contains tales of uncanny premonitions, though descendants of the Emerald Isle claim no monopoly on such experiences. Colm Keane, the Irish author and broadcaster, wrote an intriguing book in 2011 entitled Forewarned: Extraordinary Irish Stories of Premonitions and Dreams, in which he observed, apropos of his writing numerous books about death and dying: “It gradually came to my attention that some of those returning from near-death journeys found they had developed a keen ability to foresee happenings that had yet to take place.”
When reports of the home movie emerged in 1983 with the publication of Ralph Martin’s JFK biography, A Hero for Our Time, then senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy administration, remarked, “He was Irish. You can’t be Irish without knowing that eventually the world is going to break your heart.”
Kennedy had such forebodings about his own early death. Following his assassination, some of his friends and family came forward with stories of JFK’s preoccupation with assassination. Thurston Clarke, in JFK’s Last Hundred Days, cataloged Kennedy’s statements on the topic. One example: “When he arrived at the gates of the American ambassador’s residence in Dublin,” Clarke recounted of the president’s June 1963 trip to Ireland, “a cheering mob surrounded his limousine and forced him to walk. ‘Crowds don’t threaten me,’ he told the ambassador. ‘It’s that fellow standing on the roof with a gun that I worry about.’ ”
Clarke also pointed out that Kennedy spent time studying Lincoln. When Jim Bishop, a journalist and syndicated columnist, interviewed Kennedy in late October 1963 to write about a day in the life of the president, Kennedy spent considerable time questioning Bishop about his book, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, a minute-by-minute account of April 14, 1865. “My feelings about assassination are identical with Mr. Lincoln’s,” Kennedy told Bishop. “Anyone who wants to exchange his life for mine can take it. They just can’t protect [me] that much.”
Of course, the most oft-quoted example of Kennedy’s fixation on the subject came the morning of November 22, 1963, at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. As Jackie would later confide to historian William Manchester for his best-selling chronicle, The Death of a President, her husband casually told her and others that day: “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a President. I mean it; there was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase. Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase and melted away in the crowd.”
In the late spring and summer of ’63, Kennedy was in the midst of the most transformative time of his administration. In June alone he began to consider or implement initiatives on everything from US relations with the Soviet Union to civil rights to the vexing question of whether to withdraw US advisers from Vietnam. He delivered his famous “world peace” speech in which he called for “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” To top it off, that month, the book about Kennedy’s naval ordeal, PT 109, was made into a major motion picture with Hollywood heavyweight Cliff Robertson portraying a heroic Lieutenant Kennedy.
As the summer progressed, the US and USSR arrived at a momentous Cold War crossroads: signing a limited nuclear test ban treaty, a move JFK hoped would lead to complete nuclear disarmament. There was the inkling of a shift toward détente with the Soviets, a hoped-for tamping down of tensions between the superpowers. In September, Kennedy even proposed a US-Soviet lunar expedition.
In essence, the president was addressing not just the geopolitical moment but the larger question of the survival of the human race in the nuclear age. And this impulse to possibly realign national security priorities rubbed many elites in the state and defense establishment—not to mention the CIA—the wrong way. Others also held their own potential vendettas against Kennedy, including operatives in Russia; heads of the Italian American Mafia, then under investigation by JFK and his attorney general brother, Robert Kennedy; and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had been the target of unsuccessful US assassination plots. Many observers—historians and conspiracy theorists alike—believe that dark forces may well have begun to coalesce around the idea of JFK’s removal from command.
But let’s return, for a moment, to June. On the 11th, Kennedy went on national television to plead for racial peace and justice following the obstruction of desegregation efforts at the University of Alabama by Governor George Wallace. This was a dramatic and controversial change to John and Robert Kennedy’s previously cautious approach to civil rights; the pair understood that Democrats, at the time, held national office only by the favor of voters in the solidly Democratic South. Kennedy asked Americans to examine their consciences and consider new legislation (which, after his death, would become the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964). As if to underscore the seriousness of the threats to African Americans, later that night, the NAACP’s Medgar Evers was gunned down by a sniper with a scope.
Hyannis Port, basking in the accomplishments of a marathon month. But then, quite dramatically, the energy began to shift.
On August 7 the first lady decided to accompany her five-year-old daughter Caroline to horseback riding lessons at Allen Farm in Osterville, six miles west of Hyannis Port. Jackie was eight months pregnant and had limited her activities. She had a history of difficult pregnancies, including a miscarriage, a stillbirth, and her son John F. Kennedy Jr.’s premature birth. Landis noticed Jackie walking toward him with deliberation shortly after their arrival. She said they had to leave immediately but asked him not to interrupt Caroline’s lesson. Landis drove her back to Hyannis, a bumpy ride. Then a helicopter transported both of them to the military hospital at Otis Air Force Base, where doctors performed a cesarean birth. The baby boy, Patrick, was five and a half weeks premature, his lungs not fully developed. After being taken to a Boston hospital, Patrick died on August 9 in a high-pressure hyperbaric chamber as the president held his tiny hand.
JFK’s desperate prayers for the life of his second son echoed his own father’s prayers for him when he was just two and hospitalized in Boston with scarlet fever, his temperature spiking to 105. Through his grief, might Kennedy have wondered if Patrick’s death presaged his own? At the very least, the president was forced to intensify his focus on his life’s priorities.
What is certain is that his behavior changed. He renewed his close relationship with Jackie and, according to biographer Clarke, ceased his rampant womanizing. Knowing that Jackie had suffered from severe postpartum depression in the past, Kennedy was determined to keep her spirits up. “You know, Jackie,” he said, “we must not create an atmosphere of sadness in the White House, because this would not be good for anyone—not for the country and not for the work we have to do.” Clarke observed: “His reference to ‘the work we have to do’ stressed their partnership in a way that Jackie had to find gratifying, and promising. According to her mother, it made a ‘profound impression’ on her.”
Realizing that Jackie needed some time to get away and process her grief, her sister, Lee Radziwill, asked her to come along on a trip to Greece a few weeks later. Though JFK at first had been concerned about the optics of such a trip, especially since Radziwill reputedly was having an affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. (Jackie would marry Onassis in 1968.) Kennedy, at his wife’s insistence, eventually relented. In October, the sisters departed, accompanied by agents Landis and Clint Hill.
While in Greece, says Landis, Jackie confided that she would soon join her husband on a domestic political trip, something she had mostly avoided. Landis understood the first lady’s decision; he too recognized a reinvigorated bond between the two, sensing that they were determined to spend more time together.
It was during this period of trying to lighten the mood that the president and first lady came up with the idea of a home movie. JFK was clowning with Fay; Jackie had her interest in photography and directing; and JFK loved the James Bond books as well as movies in general (he had spent time in Hollywood, where his father had run three film studios). Kennedy even thought of writing his own spy novels.
JFK’s interest in 007 author Ian Fleming had begun in 1954 when he read Casino Royale while recovering from back surgery. He met privately with Fleming during the 1960 campaign. A year later, when Time-Life correspondent Hugh Sidey wrote about the new president’s reading habits, Kennedy praised Fleming’s work. “Like many of the world’s leaders,” Sidey noted, “he has a weakness for detective stories, especially those of British author Ian Fleming and his fictitious undercover man, James Bond.” At the time, Bond thrillers were only beginning to catch on in America, but with Kennedy’s endorsement, sales soared. The first 007 movie, Dr. No, hit US theaters in May 1963.
At some point that summer, the president, on a lark, sketched out a script for his own short humorous film.
Navy Chief Robert L. Knudsen was JFK and Jackie’s go-to person for home movies in Newport. Records from the projectionist at the White House screening room show that Jackie, while enjoying a variety of films there, took immense pleasure in watching family footage. Tech reporter Matt Novak of Gizmodo wrote in 2016, “The films that Jackie Kennedy watched in the White House are a mixture of diplomatic necessity (USIA propaganda movies), familial bonding (cartoons and home movies), and high-class foreign films. Of course, some of the films are perhaps better described as middlebrow and included at least two James Bond movies.”
JFK suddenly clutches his chest and falls, as if hit by bullets—and, in an absurd touch, those behind him nonchalantly step over him.
Knudsen’s story is not well-known. An Iowa native, he was nearly the same age as Jackie. While she was in Paris in college, Knudsen, having graduated first in his class at the Naval Photographic School, was just starting as a personal photographer for President Harry Truman. When Dwight Eisenhower became president, Knudsen thought his career in the White House was over: Knudsen was Navy; Eisenhower and his top staff were Army. In fact, Cecil Stoughton, an Army Signal Corps sergeant (later promoted to captain), was brought on board to take up photographic chores. Even so, Eisenhower kept Knudsen on the dole. Rather savvy about PR, the new president—who would hire actor Robert Montgomery as the first full-time White House consultant to engage with industry leaders in Hollywood—understood the importance of disseminating pictures to the public and the press. At Ike’s suggestion, Knudsen located a storage space on the ground floor of the West Wing to establish quarters for the White House photo staff in order to be closer to the action in the Oval Office.
When JFK won the presidency in 1960, Knudsen knew he would have an in with a former naval officer. To his good fortune, he ended up serving six presidents, from Truman to Ford. But he was especially close to Kennedy, capturing some of the most iconic photos of JFK in Berlin and Ireland.
For this article, Landis and I interviewed Knudsen’s son, also a photographer and also named Robert Knudsen. (His father died in 1989.) The younger Knudsen, who lives outside Washington, DC, told us that the film of the staged murder had been shot and edited by his father. He recounted how the amateur movie was meant to loosely parody a Bond caper—and that the first lady, a film buff, had directed each scene.
Once completed, a duplicate of the edited movie, he said, had been sent to Red Fay; another went to Jackie. No other copies are thought to exist. Knudsen believes that Fay, perhaps distraught after the assassination, destroyed his copy. Knudsen has no idea what became of Jackie’s. But fortunately for history, Knudsen’s father kept some of the footage used to make the film, snippets of which are still in the son’s possession. In all, Knudsen has approximately seven minutes from the original shoots, which he screened for me at his home in Virginia. (For security reasons, all of his father’s materials are maintained off-site.) Knudsen is cooperating with the production company Moxie Pictures on a documentary based on Landis’s book, The Final Witness.
As it turns out, there were multiple parts to the staged movie. The only time the elder Knudsen spoke about the filming with the press was right after Ralph Martin’s book was released, 20 years after the assassination. He told the Associated Press that Kennedy wrote the script and that for each scene there had been several different takes. In some, JFK is the person shot; in others, Fay is the person who falls. In amateur fashion, they had used Heinz ketchup to make it appear as though they were bleeding.
The first scene was enacted on the Newport pier that led to Hammersmith Farm. In this clip, the presidential party exits the Honey Fitz. Then JFK suddenly clutches his chest and falls, as if hit by bullets—and, in an absurd touch, those behind him nonchalantly step over him. Fay then trips and falls on top of the president, and a “gush of red surged from the president’s mouth,” soiling the front of his shirt. The whole vibe of the film was less Bond than the detective spoof The Pink Panther, which would premiere in theaters the following March.
Unbeknownst to the Kennedys or the “actors,” two reporters in a nearby chase boat, Frank Cormier of AP and Merriman Smith of UPI, were watching the group through binoculars. A photographer with them—likely a Newport freelancer or an AP staffer or stringer—had a camera with a zoom lens. Knudsen’s son has two prints from that long-ago shoot, which, as far as he knows, have never surfaced.
At the time, the reporters only wrote about the version of the home movie in which Fay is the victim. One of the photos shows Knudsen in a business suit, perched atop a pier post with his movie camera (eerily foreshadowing amateur photographer Abraham Zapruder standing on a concrete abutment in Dealey Plaza in Dallas two months later). Off to the side, JFK holds a towel, presumably using it to clean off the ketchup that had spurted from his mouth. Jackie stands next to Knudsen, looking like she is directing the scene. Two children are also visible: Caroline and Marcantonio Crespi, the son of Countess Vivian Stokes Crespi. The countess was also a guest that weekend. She and Jackie had met in Newport, where their mothers were friends. A statuesque blond, Vivi had married an Italian Brazilian count, Marco Fabio Crespi, but the two were in divorce proceedings by then. Their only child, Marco Antonio, became a childhood companion of Caroline’s.
A small article, sans photo, ran on the AP wire that night and was picked up in newspapers, describing the scene at the pier along with headlines such as “Kennedys Cut Up For Camera at Weekend Retreat,” and “Kennedys, Fay Get Big Scene Down On Film.” But the reporters were not privy to the action filmed at the Hammersmith mansion. A sequence shot by Knudsen in front of the house was taken from a third-floor balcony. It shows a station wagon full of Secret Service agents racing from their command post and screeching to a halt before eight of them jump out. The actors, at Jackie’s urging, were actual agents, including Roy Kellerman, Jerry Blaine, Art Godfrey, and Landis. “We’re making a movie about the president’s murder,” she told them, “and we’d like you and the other agents to drive up to the front of the house, then jump out and run toward the door.” So they did. And when they entered, according to Landis, they found the president lying in the foyer. Jackie, sitting on the stairs leading to the second floor, nodded as they ran in, while Knudsen kept filming. Everyone applauded when she said “Cut!”
I asked Landis to authenticate what remains of Knudsen’s footage. Sure enough, the film shows the agents, including Landis, scrambling out of a station wagon in front of Hammersmith Farm, looking startled and then laughing.
A third series of scenes was taken behind the house. In these vignettes, a love triangle is played out between Crespi, Fay, and Jackie’s stepbrother, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss, who lived in a separate home on Hammersmith Farm. Both men practice cuddling with the countess while the other happens upon them and, startled by what he sees, retreats from the room. Jealousy appears to end in the murder of one of the secret lovers.
In amateur fashion, they used Heinz ketchup on Kennedy and his friend Red Fay to make it appear as though they were bleeding.
There are other miscellaneous takes filmed on the Honey Fitz that variously show Jackie directing and JFK sitting next to Fay, who has a rope around his neck, and ketchup on his mouth and shoulder; as well as scenes in which the countess and Fay drop a pistol into a bag that is then surreptitiously spirited away. In related footage, Jackie carries the bag with the pistol, either directing or acting in the movie.
On Sunday, the day after the reporters witnessed the action on the pier, Knudsen reported for work at Hammersmith Farm before the Kennedys were about to go to church and was told that the president was “furious with him.” He was flummoxed. What had he done? Apparently, JFK thought that Knudsen—who hadn’t even read the AP item—had leaked the information that appeared in the story. He was summarily dismissed and told to head to the airport to return to Washington. But at the airport, he encountered either the reporters or the photographer, who shared both the article and two photographic prints, including one showing Knudsen standing on the pier with JFK. Knudsen immediately took the photos back to the president, who was relieved to see that the news story had not been the result of a leak by Knudsen. He had not wanted to fire the man he affectionately called Chief—who then dutifully went with the family to church.
Knudsen quickly turned his attention to the movie, editing the scenes into a short film. Records from the White House theater reveal that JFK and Jackie, accompanied by Fay and close family friend Bill Walton, screened “home movies” the next day, September 23. A week later, before Jackie left for Greece, she and JFK viewed the spy movie a second time, with The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, a confidant of the president’s, and Bradlee’s then wife, socialite Tony Pinchot, an artist-designer who had been on the staff at Vogue and was a close friend of the first lady’s. Evidently the Kennedys were keen to share their joint creation with the arts-oriented pair.
The content of the film, no matter how lighthearted at the time, would prove ominous. Looking back, the elder Knudsen saw a prophecy. “I wondered if it was a premonition he had,” he told the AP in 1983, “or a quirk of fate.” Around this time, a psychiatrist in Palm Beach, where the Kennedys had a winter compound, spoke with the press about his own personal knowledge of JFK’s premonitions. McKinley Cheshire said of the home movie, “It could easily have been just a fantasy to release a lot of his own internal fears and counter his own phobic behavior—an effort to face the reality that his life was indeed in great danger.” He also sensed that the president allowing others to step over his fallen body was his “way of saying they must carry on without him.”
If JFK had harbored any premonitions about his death at that point, they were clearly not specific enough to persuade him to change his plans to go to Dallas.
There is another oddity in the narrative that would hint at the misfortune to follow. The Kennedys watched dozens and dozens of films in the White House theater during JFK’s time in office. And the official logs of their screenings contain an intriguing entry on August 29, 1962. That day, Kennedy—along with his brother Robert—viewed the soon-to-be-released movie The Manchurian Candidate, the neo-noir thriller starring Frank Sinatra about a US serviceman who is captured by Soviet and Chinese agents in Korea and brainwashed to kill a presidential candidate. The penultimate scene shows the murderer loading a gun that resembles the bolt-action rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK’s assassination. (Oswald, as it turns out, was a Marine who had spent time in the Soviet Union.) Reportedly, Sinatra had approached JFK to ask for his sign-off before appearing in the picture, portraying the character who attempts to foil the assassin’s plot. In hindsight, the coincidences between these filmed fictions and cold reality are chilling.
Knudsen was not in Dallas on November 22. Why? His son says that it was, in his words, another “quirk of fate.” His father had suffered an injury while working on antique furniture when a splinter flew into his eye, resulting in a brief trip to the hospital. He was recovering when JFK called to tell him of an upcoming trip to Miami, Tampa, and Dallas. Learning of Knudsen’s condition, he told Chief to take the week off. “I’m going down to Florida and then over to Dallas with Lyndon to get some more votes and…nothing’s going to happen,” the president said. “Be with your family. Enjoy them. We need to spend more time with our families.”
The next time Knudsen would see the president would be in the morgue at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he was tasked with taking autopsy photos. Those lost photos comprise a different tale about lost film footage. But that’s another story.
James David Robenalt is an attorney and Washington Post contributor. He is the author of four nonfiction books: The Harding Affair; Linking Rings; Ballots and Bullets; and January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever.
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