JFK Played an Assassinated President Just Two Months Before Dallas
A prankish home movie, overseen by Jackie Kennedy, portrayed a ketchup-strewn JFK pretending to be dead
In a surreal and macabre coincidence, just two months before meeting his death in a fusillade of gunfire, President John F. Kennedy starred in a home movie — directed by the First Lady and featuring Secret Service agents who would be present in Dallas — in which he is assassinated … at least twice.
The film was shot in September 1963 at the Hammersmith Farm in Newport, R.I., Jackie’s family estate and the site of the first couple’s wedding a decade earlier. Also present was Paul “Red” Fay, JFK’s Navy buddy from his PT-109 days. Fay, too, would play the role of a slain character in one filmed scenario in which ketchup was used for blood.
White House photographer Robert Knudsen was recruited as cinematographer, for which he used a 16mm camera.
Knudsen was a Navy photographer who was detailed to the White House; he served every president from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon.
Knudsen’s son, Bob Knudsen, who lives outside of Washington DC in Virginia, shared snippets of the film from his father’s photography collection with author James Robenalt, who tells the amazing story in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. According the Vanity Fair piece, the film was likely screened at the White House a couple times, including once by Jackie, JFK, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and his wife Tony Pinchot. It’s unclear whether a copy of the full, edited version of the movie survived.
Last year Robenalt helped Secret Service agent Paul Landis go public with his story of finding a pristine bullet in the backseat of the presidential limousine at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital, throwing a wrench into the Warren Commission’s finding that this “magic bullet” had fallen out of Texas Gov. John Connally. It was Landis who alerted Robenalt to the home movie story.
Writer James Robenalt spoke with JFK Facts Editor Jefferson Morley about his Vanity Fair story, Paul Landis and more. Hear the discussion in this week’s JFK Facts podcast, which will publish here the evening of Nov. 26.
The way the jokey film anticipated epic tragedy is mind-boggling. Landis, assigned to guard First Lady Jackie Kennedy on November 22, had himself participated in the making of the film, as did Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman — who sat in the front passenger seat of the limousine on that day Dallas. The idea that JFK played dead, while spattered with ketchup two months before his head was shattered by a real gunshot is the bizarrest of mental images.
Perhaps the most remarkable actual image to come from the story is a photo taken by an unknown Associated Press photographer showing Knudsen standing atop a fence in his suit with the movie camera to his eye — eerily similar the image of Abraham Zapruder filming Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
The inspiration for the home movie, according to Robenalt, was a combination of Jackie Kennedy’s affinity for all things French, which at the time meant cinema, as well as Jack’s appreciation of James Bond books and the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” released four months before, in May 1963.
Was the president attempting to exorcize the premonitions of death that had been dogging him in 1963? JFK’s favorite poem was said to be “A Rendezvous With Death” by American WWI veteran Alan Seeger (1888-1916):
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air —
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath —
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear ...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
President Kennedy also endorsed the production of “Seven Days in May” (1964), a film he never lived to see, as a cautionary tale about a potential coup d’état in America. JFK had already helped the secure the production of “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), about a Cold War plot by foreign Communist powers to seize the U.S. presidency via assassination of a presidential candidate, allowing an ostensibly American right-wing domestic opposition to take the Oval Office.