Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (47 page)

Steven Spielberg

In 1963 future film director Steven Spielberg was a sixteen-year-old high school junior living in Phoenix, Arizona, soon to move to California. He had already won prizes for his 8mm amateur movies and had just written and exhibited
Firelight,
a 140-minute feature that became the inspiration for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The three-time Academy Award winner is a keen observer of world history and has produced or directed many historical narrative features.

K
ennedy’s election was the beginning of the new hope. It was very much a part of my life. I remember the inauguration, watching it on television with my parents. The only time I could remember a similar rebirth of the American dream, the way I define the American dream, was the election of Barack Obama.

I especially remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was the first time that something truly scared the life out of me, the living daylights out of me. We did a lot of duck-and-cover drills. Even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, we were doing that—but it was the actual crisis itself, when he came on television and said to the nation how close we were to being on the brink. My parents actually had gone away to a kind of a party in the neighborhood, and I was alone with my sisters. I remember looking out the window at all these contrails of B-52s flying over our house, the whole sky filled with contrails, because the big base was in Tucson, and I was in Phoenix. I remember filling the bathtub up with water and the sinks up with water, thinking this was the beginning of the end. I felt we’d have to start digging a hole in the backyard to move into.

I was in school on the day Kennedy was killed. I was in class. I don’t exactly remember what the class was, but I was in school when the public
address system came on in the classroom. We listened to the principal saying that the president had been shot, not that the president was killed, just the president of the United States had been shot, and then there was just a stunned silence. I remember not hearing anybody saying anything for a while, and then the teacher left the room. While the teacher was out of the room, the PA system came on, I think about twenty minutes later, and it was announced the president had died.

The first reaction I had was: I wanted to go home. That was my first reaction. I wanted to go home and be with my mom and my dad and my sisters. That’s when we got the news that class was dismissed, and we were all told to go back to our homes. I didn’t need a bus to get home—I always took my bike to and from school—I jumped on my bicycle, and I rode home. I got there in ten minutes. My mom was in the kitchen. She was sobbing at the kitchen table. She was alone. There was no one else in the house. My three sisters hadn’t gotten back from class, and my dad was still at work. I remember going over to my mother, and the television set was on. I remember putting my arms around my mother, and she just turned around, she just embraced me. I remember standing up above her because she was at the table and I was standing. She was just holding onto me, shaking and sobbing.

When it first happened and when I first got home, I began watching it on television; it was coming to me from the television, where reality was abridged by the medium. It took the event a while to sink in with me, and it really only sank in when the funeral occurred. We all sat as a family watching the funeral on our black-and-white television.

There’s been so much written about it. There have been so many documentaries made about it. Oliver Stone made his movie
JFK,
and there’ve
been documentaries on the Kennedys, on Jackie Kennedy—soap dramas as well. There hasn’t been the one definitive movie about the Kennedy family, the Kennedy dynasty, the Camelot that once existed in our country. The Kennedys were the closest we ever came to having American royalty in this country, and in a sense, when Kennedy was brought down, it was really the end of the dream.

The end of Norman Rockwell’s idealistic vision of America ended when Kennedy was shot and killed. Rockwell of course has had his tremendous resurgence in popularity and revival of popularity because we still believe in the great American dream. When Kennedy was killed, Rockwell went into his studio, and he painted Kennedy, a great portrait of Kennedy at the convention, when he was speaking after winning the nomination. I own that painting, and you can see the inspiration and the tragic sadness inside Rockwell’s entire being. His art was so expressive in the way he drew Kennedy. There was a sadness in Kennedy’s eyes, and here Kennedy was: He had won the nomination, and there’re signs in the foreground of all the states that had voted for him, and there’s Kennedy standing there with this kind of anticipation of a very sad ending in that painting.

It did change the country profoundly, but I was only really aware of how profoundly it changed the country years later when I was in college, because Kennedy’s assassination started a chain reaction—a kind of house of cards started to come down, not immediately but gradually over the next decade.

The revelations about Kennedy since then don’t temper my view of him at all because Kennedy was so iconic. He did such good for our image and for all Americans—“Ich Bin ein Berliner,” standing toe to toe with Nikita Khrushchev, having the ships turned back around, go back the other way during the missile crisis. Amazing things occurred in his short,
professional life span. He’s Teflon. He’s immortal, I think. He’s been immortalized by history because he was so handsome. He was movie-star handsome. He could have been a movie star—absolutely would have been a movie star—and he would have made some great movies. Probably one of them would have costarred Marilyn Monroe.

Conspiracy theories follow all assassinations. A conspiracy is always a part of some national trauma. The reverberations are like the aftershocks of a great earthquake, and it seems inevitable that there’re going to be conspiracies. I don’t 100 percent subscribe to the multiple-gun conspiracy theory, but I also don’t quite understand how Lee Harvey Oswald was able to get so accurately so many shots off with the rifle that he was shooting—to shoot so accurately, and kick back the bolt, and re-chamber a round, and fire again. That’s really confused me.

But I’ve never been tempted to make a film about it. Oliver [Stone] made the defining film about the conspiracy. When it first came out, I thought it was outstanding. Then the controversy started, and the great test about whether you still think a film is outstanding is: Does the controversy taint your first impression of the picture? The controversy didn’t taint my impression of how great a picture that was. I’m talking about cinematically. The best cinematic achievement of his career was the way he directed
JFK
—better than even
Platoon.

The thing about doing a piece on Kennedy is that there are so many compelling moments in his life. Probably the most compelling moment for me in Kennedy’s life is the Cuban Missile Crisis. That would be a pretty good film.

After Kennedy died, people were more open to looking at the unseemly side of the democratic process, which is all the things that creep and crawl in the shadows of our democracy, sort of unseen forces at work, unwinding things that are seemingly perfect, yet behind the scenes there’s some insidiousness happening. Paranoid cinema was spawned by the Kennedy assassination. A lot of those films came directly as a result, I believe, of Kennedy’s assassination.

When we were making
Band of Brothers
and
Saving Private Ryan,
what conjured up memories of Kennedy were two things that happened to me when I was beginning my career. The first thing was that the very first movie set I ever visited was
PT-109,
when it was in production with Cliff Robertson playing Kennedy at Warner Brothers. I was there, just part of a foot tour. This was before all the organized trams and buses and things like that. My dad took me on a tour of Warner Brothers because I was making little 8mm movies back in Phoenix, and he knew I was interested. We went to see the shooting of this movie, and it was the scene where the destroyer cuts
PT-109
in half. They had this full-size bow of a destroyer constructed and a breakaway full-size
PT-109,
and we waited for an hour and a half, watching them get ready for the big special-effect moment, the big physical effect. Just before they rolled the cameras, they cleared all the eyewitnesses from the sound stage. It was Stage 16 at Warner’s, and we were all told to leave. I never got a chance to see it until the movie came out.

Then the first script I ever sold with a writing partner, Claudia Salter, was a movie called
Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies,
which Cliff Robertson starred in. Fox hired me to do the rewrite of my own script, and I went down to West Palm Beach to meet with Cliff and spent about three weeks down there. Even though I was writing and rewriting this kind of barnstorming, post–World War I story for Cliff and the studio, all we talked about was Kennedy, and he said to me, “The greatest honor of my entire career has thus far been playing that president.”

I’ve talked to my kids about the Kennedy years when they studied Kennedy in school. They’ve all brought back stories, papers they had to write about presidents—“Pick your favorite president.” A couple of my kids picked Kennedy as their favorite president without ever being a part of that era or that generation, only what they knew about him. With this generation, anything that’s five years old is ancient history, let alone something that happened in ’63. But for a student, history is a gateway to understanding who we are today, and good history students really appreciate that you’re building a bridge to the past and building a better bridge to the future by knowing your history.

The important thing to understand whenever you’re recreating the past and there’s source material that you can dip into—no matter how accurate you are to your source material—we’re still making historical fiction. It’s still a movie. Whatever you do, it’s still historical fiction, which means that, even though we can quote chapter and verse what Kennedy said, what Lincoln said, the moments in the nineteenth century when there was no one, no secretary taking down verbatim notes of what was happening in cabinet meetings, it’s up to the writer to be inventive and be creative. Based on how steeped the writer is in history, the way Tony Kushner was when he did six years of research and writing on Lincoln that he so understood the sort of the idiom of the nineteenth century he
was able to create entire scenes that actually happened but nobody was there to tell us exactly what was said—that is the license that a screenwriter has when we’re telling true stories about the past.

It was difficult for me imagining how I was going to make
Lincoln
without Daniel Day-Lewis. He so became Lincoln that I really felt for a long time that I was actually sharing three and a half, four months of shooting space with the sixteenth president of the United States. That was a great honor for me, to feel that I was in cahoots with Abraham Lincoln and still be able to go home and realize that I’m in the real world. But with Kennedy, it’s just as difficult. There are actors, I’m sure, out there who could do a great job acquitting his personage, but it’s not for me. No, the recreation of the Kennedy dynasty, the Kennedy Camelot, the Kennedy legend isn’t something I would rush to as a filmmaker, but it is something I would rush to as an audience.