--- Tag: ["🗳️", "🇺🇸", "đź“ś"] Date: 2025-01-21 DocType: "WebClipping" Hierarchy: TimeStamp: 2025-01-21 Link: https://sundaylongread.com/2025/01/18/jfk-assassination-movie-trump-history-vanity-fair/ location: CollapseMetaTable: true --- Parent:: [[@News|News]] Read:: 🟥 ---   ```button name Save type command action Save current file id Save ``` ^button-PresidentialhistorianJimRobenalttalkssurprisingJFKhomemovieNSave   # Presidential historian Jim Robenalt talks surprising JFK home movie, mysteries around Trump assassination attempt - The Sunday Long Read On the last weekend of summer in 1963, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie made a home movie. But the subject of the playful short film turned out to be darkly prophetic. In the movie, directed by Jackie, JFK playacts his own assassination as part of a James Bond-esque spy thriller they had come up with. Exactly two months later, the president was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  [In a new piece for *Vanity Fair*](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/jfk-staged-murder-home-movie-hammersmith-farm), author and presidential historian [Jim Robenalt](https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/james-robenalt?srsltid=AfmBOor7OImBboOpO1HGbwvUgN08COxzcyXW9mAshB8ZTxr_U2SWBpCl), who has written about commanders in chief from [Warren G. Harding](https://bookshop.org/p/books/harding-affair-love-and-espionage-during-the-great-war-james-david-robenalt/12841670) to [Donald J. Trump](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/donald-trump-wiretapping-claim-214929/), uncovers the full story of JFK and Jackie’s surprising and little-known home video — and what it might say about the late president’s state of mind in his final months. As friends and family noted in the years and decades after his death, Kennedy had something of a “preoccupation with assassination,” Robenalt writes.  “My feelings about assassination are identical with Mr. Lincoln’s,” JFK once told one journalist. “Anyone who wants to exchange his life for mine can take it. They just can’t protect \[me\] that much.” *The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.*  ***Amanda Ulrich, Sunday Long Read:*** **You’ve written about JFK a lot — this isn’t the first time. Can you talk about when you first became interested in this particular former president?** *Jim Robenalt:* I’ve always been interested in JFK. I grew up a Catholic and, you know, it was a devastating time; I was like in second grade when he was assassinated. And my mother, her grandmother is a Kelly, Irish, very similar to the Kennedy family. She came from Limerick, just as the Fitzgeralds did. So I had this affinity for the family to begin with, and for him in particular.  But then two years ago, out of nowhere, I got an email from my publisher, saying: “Would you blurb this book?” And the book was called “The Final Witness” by Paul Landis. Paul Landis was Jackie Kennedy’s Secret Service agent, and he was in Dallas the day of the assassination. So I got this book. Paul is actually from Cleveland, Ohio, and Shaker Heights in particular, where I live. So I’d met him once before, briefly, but I thought, “Whoa, what’s this book going to be about?” So I read it, and I couldn’t stop reading it. It was very well done. And then you get to the end of the book, and he has this great reveal that he had found what we call the “magic bullet” in the limousine, as they were getting out of the limousine and taking the president into the hospital at Parkland. And I read that, and I thought, “My goodness, this is a big deal.” I knew enough about the Kennedy assassination, and so I called the publisher and said, “You know, this guy’s got to be 88 years old, and is he ready for the publicity that’s going to come his way? And can I help out in any way?” And Paul said, yeah, he’d be happy to have the help. So he and I then spent maybe 12 or 14 sessions, two hours each, going over what he remembers, what happened. ![](https://dotcompatterns.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/star1-1.png?w=100) ![](https://dotcompatterns.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/star2-1.png?w=100) ## Like this story? Subscribe to our free newsletter for more great reads in your inbox every Sunday. I was highly skeptical, but I came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth, that this wasn’t a recovered memory. So I wanted to write a long piece about it to justify this book, so to speak, and *Vanity Fair* picked it up. So [that was my first article](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/new-jfk-assassination-revelation-upend-lone-gunman?srsltid=AfmBOorUbd7cydd4b8p38SYzOhJLjA5QFfWzQ_MJM-Qu1tQN736AasDx) that I wrote last year, and that ended up being one of their top five most-read articles for 2023. That then led to the second long article about this spoof film, \[where JFK playacts his own\] assassination, which happened two months before his assassination. So it really just fell in my lap. It was an email that showed up. I wasn’t looking for it, but once I read it and got into it, I just thought I really needed to understand this better and to get to know Paul very well. And he’s now become a very good friend. **In thinking about JFK and Jackie and what their family was like behind the scenes, out of the public eye, it seems like a jarring, surprising thing that they would be shooting this home movie that’s so fatalistic. What did you think when you first heard from Landis that this home movie was shot so soon before JFK was assassinated?** As you say, it is shocking. There’s no other way to say it. It’s also incredibly sad. It’s quite an indication that JFK did have all these premonitions that people talked about, that he was going to be assassinated. In one of all of these sessions I had with Paul Landis, he said, “You know, at one point Jackie asked us to take part in a movie where they killed the president.” I said, “What?” He said that they were at Jackie’s girlhood home up in New England, a place called Hammersmith Farm in Newport, a big 28-room mansion right on the bay. Beautiful place. And it’s where JFK and Jackie went to really get away. And on this particular occasion, exactly two months before the assassination, they were visiting with \[JFK’s friend\] Paul Fay. Fay was his Navy buddy, and they both had great senses of humor. But they had decided for some reason that they wanted to do a film, a home movie. JFK loved 007, you know, James Bond stuff. And Jackie always wanted to be a director; she spent time in Paris while she was in college, and she loved film and was a photographer. JFK was trying to lift her spirits after she had lost their second son, Patrick, after a premature birth in which he died two days after he was born in August. So this is September, and he’s trying to lift her spirits, like: “Let’s do this, Jackie. You direct it and we’ll act as if I’m being shot and killed.” And they used Heinz ketchup. I mean, it’s really amateur. Paul Fay gets shot and killed, too. And they have this crazy, goofy love scene in it, too. It’s really Pink Panther meets 007. I mean, it’s just stupid, but they wanted to do it, and then they filmed it. I was just, like, I can’t believe this. And what am I going to write about this? It’s so sad, you know? It really is foreboding. And I realize, this whole Kennedy premonition curse — his sister died in a plane crash, his brother Joe had died in a plane crash in World War II — I think that JFK just understood that he was not going to live a long life, and he talked about it a lot. One of the things I point out in this article is that he studied Lincoln intensely, and studied Lincoln’s assassination very closely. So he thought a lot about it. He worried about it. And, ultimately, what was he doing driving in Dallas in an open car? He should have paid attention to the warnings, essentially, that he was given through some of his premonitions. That’s kind of my conclusion of the long piece.  **Fast forward to last year, with the attempted assassinations of Trump. Did this information you had heard from Landis about the home movies with JFK immediately spring to your mind after that happened? And also, with that quote that JFK said — “they just can’t protect me that much” — do you think there’s always a level of risk being in that position?**  The one lesson from Dallas, that the Secret Service talked about *ad nauseam*, was that they were never going to let that happen again, where somebody’s going to be on a building with a rifle with a scope. They were just not going to let that happen. So the fact that this happened, to me, is so crazy. And we don’t know enough about that assassination \[attempt\] yet; frankly, it’s shrouded in a lot of mystery. So there was this great lesson of Dallas, and it was not followed. But here it was just a complete failure of security. It’s not that you can’t prevent that. It’s that this was a massive failure by the Secret Service. **You write in this story that before JFK was assassinated, a lot of the American public thought that a presidential assassination was inconceivable, because it had been many decades since a president had been assassinated. Do you think before the attempted assassinations of Trump last year, that the American public felt a similar way? That they didn’t think this was a possibility?** I think people felt, and I think the Secret Service felt, that they had solved a lot of the problems with how they moved the president in and out of events like that, and how they scoped out events. You would see presidents driven to a garage underground, and they would come into an event that way, as opposed to what happened with Reagan when he was shot. So I think people felt that the Secret Service had a pretty good handle on it. I mean, Trump was like JFK: exposing himself by having these open-field rallies. It had to have been a nightmare for them all the way around to try to plan for something like this. But I do think that we all were lulled into a sense that it’s not going to happen again. These sorts of failures are indicative of the fact that you have to be really careful with the president wherever they go, because you just never know when somebody’s going to pop out of a crowd. *Compiled by **Amanda Ulrich**. Photo via Quick PS/Unsplash* #### Enjoy the full conversation with Jim and more great chats by subscribing to [The Sunday Long Read Podcast](https://sundaylongread.com/podcast/) anywhere you listen!     --- `$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`