JFK Assassination Interpretation

‘JFK: One Day in America’ Review: Assassination Interpretation
Story by John Anderson  •
11/02/23

‘JFK: One Day in America’ Review: Assassination Interpretation
© Provided by The Wall Street Journal
Delving into the almost 60-year-old Kennedy assassination, even for the very modest purposes of a television review, is a bit like bringing your ukulele to an audition for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. People have devoted their lives to the subject at hand; the literature has been memorized; the interpretations have been fine-tuned. Besides, as one Gen Xer of my acquaintance remarked about “JFK: One Day in America,” how many times can you revisit the same subject?

How many times can you play Mozart’s Requiem? Yes, the murder of President John F. Kennedy is familiar territory, the event so enormous that its minutiae have been burned into the brains of people whose parents couldn’t have been around to remember it as children. But times change, approaches evolve—and each interpretation can build upon the last, which is the element essential to the success of this three-part National Geographic special.
“JFK: One Day in America” takes great pains to avoid the familiar, opting for the kind of private, personal and nondefining footage a director might never use—not if he or she were making the first Kennedy assassination documentary. The material for that movie is in the heads of us viewers, even the youngest viewers, from the Zapruder film to the still photo of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder. “One Day in America,” by using relatively unknown shots and unfamiliar angles—of Jack Ruby, for instance, skulking around the press-police scrum in a Dallas police station on the night before he killed Oswald; or of Jackie Kennedy in a crowd, waiting to join her husband’s casket on the plane back to Washington—generates a sense of intimacy, and a consequent mournfulness. It is the kind of thing that might only be achieved through offhand, innocent-bystander-type material that might mean nothing out of context. Except that there is no out-of-context with the Kennedy assassination.

‘JFK: One Day in America’ Review: Assassination Interpretation
© Provided by The Wall Street Journal
It may not have been the intent of director Ella Wright to play such psychological mischief with our collective memory, but it works. And there is fresh material, too: Two members of Jackie Kennedy’s Secret Service detail, Paul Landis and Clint Hill (who, famously, jumped on the back of the Lincoln as the assassin was firing at the car), reflect on the day with a great deal of sadness and regret. Associated Press reporter Peggy Simpson recalls the astonishment among the media that Ruby, a “friend” of the Dallas police, was able to penetrate a scene that was supposedly so secure. Washington correspondent Sid Davis provides the kind of details that wouldn’t have made it into his news stories, but are fascinating regardless.

And not everyone among the “last witnesses”—as so advertised in “JFK: One Day in America”—was in Dallas that morning in an official capacity. Buell Frazier, who still seems rattled by what unfolded, worked at the Texas School Book Depository with Oswald and drove there with him on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963; he was later questioned as a suspect. And Dallas couple Gayle and Bill Newman remember how they took their two kids to see the president, and what they saw, and Ms. Wright cuts immediately to a photo of the couple, covering their children with their own bodies as they all lie on what looks like part of the infamous Grassy Knoll. A remarkable moment then, and now, and one that makes tangible the kind of terror that must have been in the November air and is among the few details of that day that may have slipped our minds.

Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.