Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (42 page)

Jane Fonda

The daughter of Hollywood legend Henry Fonda, who had campaigned for JFK in 1960, Jane Fonda had appeared in just a handful of films by 1963, but with her first Golden Globe nomination as best actress, her star was on the rise. That summer, the twenty-six-year-old actress had gone to Paris to shoot a crime thriller with legendary French actor Alain Delon.

I
knew John Kennedy because my father, Henry Fonda, had supported him, had worked for him. When he was a senator, I would sometimes be out on a date at the El Morocco, and he would be there with Jackie. Then my father married an Italian, so we would spend some summers in the south of France, and Senator Kennedy and Miss Jackie would come over. I was just a little kid—kind of like, “Oh, my God. He’s so handsome.” When I got a little bit older, anything my father thought was good was OK by me, and I knew that my father thought he was an important person to have as president.

He impressed me with his handsomeness and with his activities. Because I studied with Lee Strasberg and I knew some actresses—well, put it this way: When I made
Klute
and played a call girl and a would-be actress, I had a photograph of Kennedy signed to me—my character, “Bree”—on my refrigerator. That had meaning for me because I knew another acting student would go to see JFK on a fairly regular basis, but nothing was said about that in those days.

I dated Teddy Kennedy a few times, so I knew the family. I had met Joe Kennedy when I was with Teddy Kennedy in the south of France, when I was about sixteen. Everything I knew about Joe came from the way Teddy reacted to his presence. Teddy and I were on the beach. It
was toward the end of the day, and he said, “ Come, I’d love you to meet my father.”

From the moment we stepped into the house, Teddy became a different person: very timid, scared of this man who was sitting in the living room. He never got up; he was sitting there, and he was a patriarch in the total sense of the word. I knew I had to be on my best manners, and Teddy was on his best manners. This man was the ruler of the clan; that was for sure. I don’t remember charm; I remember fear on the part of Teddy. That was what impressed me. I was siding with Teddy, and I was just like, “OK, the sooner we can get out of here, the better.” I don’t remember charm. I’m sure he was charming though.

I began to pay more attention to JFK simply because I was in France and I was with people who were very political and sophisticated and talked a lot about Kennedy and their hopes and dreams for America. Besides, his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was the US ambassador, living in Paris. Because I knew the family, I would go and see him. In fact, he became the godfather to my daughter, Vanessa. It wasn’t that I spent a lot of time at the embassy, but Sarge was a joyous human being. It was the opposite of Joe: He’d wrap his arms around you—just a lovely, wonderful, charming, life-affirming human being.

We’d finished work, shooting that afternoon, and I was coming home from the studio. I was staying at a little boutique hotel on the Left Bank, overlooking the Seine. I walked into the lobby, and I saw the actor Keir Dullea from
David and Lisa
. He was making a movie in Paris, as was I. He was standing at the reception desk, holding a phone, and his face was the color of a white shirt.

I said, “What is the matter?”

He looked up, and there were tears pouring down his face. He said, “Kennedy’s been shot.”

I just—we just both stood there and cried. It was impossible to believe. I remember then going upstairs to my room by myself and realizing I would probably never feel totally safe again. It just seemed so impossible that this great president, who was so adored by the world, was dead. It’s like everything became unsafe and never has been, ever since, quite as sure about the world. It shook my worldview. Simone Signoret—a very close friend of my family, and I had become very close to her—called me up and asked me over for dinner because she knew how I was feeling and how she was feeling. She had a home in Île Saint-Louis. I walked, and all I saw were French faces crying. All the cars on the street stopped and pulled over to the side while people cried.

A friend of mine here in Beverly Hills when it happened said the same thing. They were driving home from the studio, and all the cars were pulled over to the side of the road while people sobbed. I went to Simone’s for dinner. It was Simone; her husband, Yves Montand; and their very close friend Costa-Gavras, who subsequently directed some great films. Everybody was just crying and talking about what an unthinkable tragedy it was. That made a big impression on me because, again, I had been living in Paris during the Eisenhower administration, and it wasn’t that way, hasn’t been that way since. But I realized then the important place the United States played in the world even more than I ever had and that this man represented everything that people wanted to love about this country—and he was gone.

I think the Vietnam War would have ended had he not been killed, and here’s why: Johnson, perhaps, accomplished more on the civil rights level than JFK might have, but Johnson didn’t end the war. He told his biographer, Doris Kearns, “It was because I’d be seen as an unmanly man.” I think that was true for a number of subsequent presidents.

I don’t think Kennedy would have had that problem, this “premature evacuation.”

He wouldn’t have been scared to end the war, and I think he was coming to know that it was wrong. Some people even feel that was why he was killed, but I don’t want to get into that because I can’t say. But I do think he would have ended the war. I’m not 100 percent sure, but I think he would have. That would have been very important for the United States, all those people on both sides who died, and what it did to our global reputation—that would have been very different.

Shortly after Kennedy was killed, I met the man who would become my first husband. I lived in France for eight years. I was there during the so-called Tonkin Gulf incident. I was there for the Tet Offensive . . . in a country that had already fought the Vietnamese and lost. They knew. But we saw things on television in France that people in this country couldn’t see, the bombing of churches and schools. There were American soldiers in Paris who were resisting the war. They had been over there; they had fled, and they were looking for compatriots to help them with things like doctors, dentists, clothes, and so forth. I met them. I became friends with them, and they told me what they had experienced in Vietnam. They gave me a book called
The Village of Ben Suc
by Jonathan Schell, and that’s the book that changed my life. I read that book, and I said, “If my country is doing this, I have to go home. I can’t do this anymore. We’re being betrayed by our government.”

My life has changed so many times in some ways, but going to Hanoi—more than three hundred Americans had gone to Hanoi before me. I was far from the first, but I was the first big celebrity, and being an American in a third-world country of peasants and fishermen that were winning was mind-boggling. You had to look very carefully to understand, “What’s going on here? What does strength mean? How can the United States, with all our military might, not be winning this war?” It changed me, and it made me think about things very differently. I was there all by myself. That was the huge mistake I made. Then the picture—the most horrible thing I could have done in my whole life. I didn’t think what I was doing. It was the last day there; I was emotionally drained. There was this little ceremony. I tried to sing in Vietnamese, and people were laughing. I sat
down, and then I realized all those cameras—there were a lot of cameras, and I wasn’t paying attention, which wasn’t always the case. I guess it was a setup. I hadn’t thought about it, and then I begged, I said, “Please—” because what it looks like is not what was in my heart or who I was. I’d been working with American soldiers for several years before I ever went there. I knew more about being in the military than most laypeople do, most civilians do. But the image says what it says, and I will go to my grave regretting that terrible, terrible—

I don’t think any president will ever again be able to manage the message like that. Technology has changed everything, whether it’s WikiLeaks, whether it’s Tweets, whether it’s cell phones, whether it’s just whistleblowers. Those didn’t exist back then, and I think that’s good. We’re not perfect, none of us; we’re human, and he was human. He was the right person at the right time with the right kind of guts, and maybe a majority of the right instincts. Someone I mourn as much, if not more, is Bobby. Had Bobby lived, given everything, that could have changed the world.

We need heroes, and they were beautiful, they were wealthy, they were sophisticated, and they were exciting. And the way he spoke. [Speechwriter Ted] Sorensen, he was really good. The speeches were poetic. I think part of what was so exciting about them all was that you had the sense it was natural. Whether it was the wind blowing in his hair in Hyannis Port when he was at the helm of his sailboat, or he was in Washington, or whatever, it wasn’t studied; they were as close as we’ll ever get to royalty. It just was in their blood. That Joe, he made it happen. “You are going to be historic,” and they were. It was there. It wasn’t premeditated or set up or staged; no matter whether they were playing touch football in Hyannis
Port or whatever they were doing, they were perfect for the time; they were beautiful, they were smart, and they had great taste.

I’ve never felt as safe as I used to before Kennedy was killed. It made me, me as an American, and America as a country in the world, feel less secure. That’s one thing. The other thing: You can never really know what it means to be an American until you’ve lived outside America. To have lived in France at that time, when that president was killed, made me understand profoundly the importance of this country—what we do, how we behave, who our presidents are, and how important it is for whoever we elect to be able to be respected by countries around the world.

In other words, to understand differences. Because Kennedy was sophisticated, he understood differences. They didn’t scare him the way they scare some of the subsequent presidents. I tend to be drawn to politicians who I think can be global and not nationalistic, always rooted in America as being a country everyone in the world wants to love and should love, which means we have to behave in a way that deserves the love of the world. That’s what Kennedy’s presidency taught me because I was living outside America at that time. That was important to me, and it continues to inform the way I vote.

Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey

New Yorkers Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers and native Michiganer Noel “Paul” Stookey, all in their mid-twenties, were on the top of the musical world in 1963. After planting their folk flag firmly in Greenwich Village two years earlier, their careers were rocketing: As President Kennedy headed for Dallas, Peter, Paul, and Mary had three albums in the top-ten charts simultaneously and remained there for the next four months. Apart from a brief interlude in the seventies while they pursued solo projects, the trio continued to play to sellout crowds until Mary’s death in 2009. Peter and Paul continue to perform together.

N
OEL “PAUL” STOOKEY: 1959 was my first awareness of Kennedy. I was a young kid and had just moved to New York. I was not a political creature. I had come from a very affable, Midwestern background, and I was so into meeting girls and having fun that I didn’t pay much attention to politics. I was barely twenty-one in 1959, but I had an apartment on the fifth floor of a Lower East Side building, and it was really a hot, sweltering day in August. I opened the window, and I heard a noise. I looked out the window, and, through the narrow crack on East Fifth Street, I saw a limo go by with JFK in it, who was coming up the Lower East Side to advocate for his candidacy for presidency. That was my first awareness of JFK. Whoever thought, as a young kid looking out that window, that we would have a personal interaction with him just two and a half years later?

PETER YARROW: At the time we didn’t realize that he and his perspective would change America so dramatically. In 1959 I was at Cornell. Many of the things that needed to change, that he began to change, were ruling the roost. For one thing, success was all about how much
you got: how much stuff you got and how much status in the hierarchy you got. It wasn’t about success as a human being, to be a caring, giving participant-citizen of democracy, who gave to their country.

STOOKEY: It was the size of the fins on your car. That’s what it was about in the late ’50s.

YARROW: It wasn’t about who you were internally. If you were black, you were a second-class citizen. Women were very much second-class citizens. What he opened up by virtue of his point of view was the idea that, hey, we really have to be together, all of us, of all genders, of all backgrounds, of all religions. There was so much that to me, in Cornell, was oppressive because it was so unfair. It was so inequitable, so mean-spirited, and so hierarchical.

I was pretty much what they called then a “turkey”—kind of like a nerd without the cachet. A turkey was condemned to turkey-dom, and I was until I sang in a class as an instructor. That’s when I saw that the people, when they were singing these folk songs, these traditional songs, that their hearts were reachable. The music was creating a sense of connection that struck me and moved me because these are the people who considered me a turkey, and all of a sudden the turkey was leading the band. They were coming in droves. First hundreds and then up to one
thousand people. To do what? To do what we did right here at the Bitter End.

STOOKEY: The accessibility of the music was a metaphor for the accessibility that Kennedy was introducing into the world of politics as well. Nixon and the Republicans had a certain kind of royalty connected to the presidency. Although the public still gave it to them, even when the Kennedys were in “Camelot,” but from the top down, the perception when Kennedy took office was, “Between my family, between playing touch football, between showing you my humanness and my policies, I’m showing you that government is of the people, by the people.”

YARROW: Which was not the case before, in the Eisenhower years. In the Eisenhower years, God bless him, he did say some powerful things, but the mood of the country and the perception of each other was so constrained with the idea of separating people into groups and into who was in and who was out. All of a sudden, JFK united this country in a way that I, in my life, had never seen. I had never seen people feel
We’re on the same page together
and
We love this guy
.

STOOKEY: Where people might play the power card to remain aloof and have their agents or their people speak for them, Kennedy didn’t. When we had just performed for the second anniversary of his inauguration, Kennedy made a point to come to each one of us, the performers, and ask a question that in a sense betrayed a certain naiveté that he had, sweetness too.

YARROW: Our contact with the president started at a performance at the National Guard armory, where we, in a very unlikely way, were asked to join the likes of Yves Montand, Carol Burnett, Gene Kelly, and a lot of stars. Here we were, barely beginning our career, but there was somebody in the administration who said, “We’ve got bring these folks in.” We had just had our first and second hits, and one of them was “If
I Had a Hammer.” The other one was “Lemon Tree”—pretty, but it certainly had no sociopolitical agenda.

The audience was very receptive and warm to us, and then afterward we went to a gathering at the vice president’s house. This was only for the performers, the president, the vice president, and the staff who had worked on it, including Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, the presidential secretary. We started out by sitting down and having dinner.

STOOKEY: Somewhere in the course of it, the idea was introduced that each of the performers would perform what they had done onstage at the armory again.

YARROW: Mrs. Lincoln came over to me and said, “Would you sing for the president? The president would like you to sing. Would you consider doing so?”

When she asked me that, I said, “We will if the president really wants us to.”

She said, “Let’s ask him.” She took me by the hand to the president, and she said, “Ask him the question.”

I said, “Mrs. Lincoln has said you’d like us to perform for you. Is that something you really want us to do?”

He said, “You better, because if you don’t, you’re going to have to endure my singing, and you don’t want to have to deal with that.” His naturalness and his warmth were so clear.

We went upstairs, tuned up our guitars, and came down to the sunken living room. We started to sing, and the song that galvanized everybody was Mary singing “500 Miles,” and Mary didn’t move in time to the music. She moved in time to her emotion. Her passion about this song, when she was singing, she was saying with urgency, “Come home, America, to yourself.” That’s the way David Halberstam perceived it, and he was right. When they saw her singing like that, they went gaga.

STOOKEY: There is a vulnerability to folk music anyway, and when Mary reached out with just one voice and these two guitars backing, it has a way of connecting. After all the flush was gone, after everybody had performed, the president, in his inimitable way, made sure to make contact with each of us. He came over, and he was recalling that at the armory, when we had begun the chords of “If I Had a Hammer,” the
audience broke into a cheer. He asked us, “I notice that the audience knew the song you sang. What was it?” Peter said, “If I Had a Hammer,” and he said, “Yes, I was really surprised”—and Peter, wanting to help the president out of any kind of awkwardness, I think, began to volunteer the fact: “That was a top-ten single.” I was thinking,
What does “top-ten single” mean to the president of the United States?
It was on a 45 record, and Peter was holding his hand up like so, trying to describe what a 45 record was, and the president put out his hand and said, “Yes, yes, I understand. It’s just that I don’t get a chance to listen to the radio much, driving to work.”

YARROW: This was only a couple of years after we began to perform. The audience wasn’t aware of the quality and the tone of what folk music was asking. We weren’t entertaining them per se; it was asking for participation and unanimity of spirit and sensitivity. At a certain point, I said to the audience that was assembled, “This is called folk music, and it’s very common when people sing folk music that they sit down on the floor together in a very informal way. Since I think you might get tired standing, may I suggest that you consider doing that?”

The first one to sit on the floor was the president. He sat down. Of course everybody else sat down, and then we sang. One of the songs was a new song for us, “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Later I received a copy of a
Time
magazine article about that gathering, and at the top Lady Bird Johnson wrote, “We loved Puff too.” But what happened because of that music, sitting on the floor, the humanizing effect of it, was emblematic of what folk music was doing every time people encountered it, whether it was from us or the many other performers of that time. It was noted that this was the first party that Jackie had attended in its entirety rather than leaving because it was so boring and political. Folk music dispelled the formality.

STOOKEY: I was a Johnny-come-lately to the political process. I inherited much of my perspective through my partners, who had an understanding of the political process and also the communal aspect of politics. There was no doubt in my mind that Kennedy’s motives were very aligned with those of Martin Luther King, and perhaps during the war years there might’ve been more of a reluctance because he had a sense of the global community and what the concerns were vis-à-vis the Cold
War. You could say that Kennedy was a Johnny-come-lately, but it was just a process of being able to put ideas into action through the democratic political process.

YARROW: Kennedy’s heart was there, and that’s what inspired us all. But there’s distance between having your heart there and becoming a leader in a political sense that challenges the political balance of power and challenges your less-progressive support. What you’re talking about in the seat of power is the capacity to lead, but you need the groundswell of support to validate your point of view, so you can say, “See? The people want that.” What we had come to believe was that it was our job not to be so much involved in electoral political efforts but to be a part of that groundswell and march in Washington in 1963, which was subsequent to this gathering we’re talking about. We know from history that Kennedy had to be pushed. We know that ultimately that letter from Birmingham by Martin Luther King and the call to his brother Bobby were important. Bobby was undergoing a metamorphosis. Bobby became a different kind of leader at the end of his life and career.

JFK was also undergoing a metamorphosis from being a quintessential politician who had an extraordinary charisma but had to walk the walk of what presumably he espoused, in terms of ideals so that on the ground those changes took place to rid America of this horrific prejudice and hierarchy of human beings, whereby people of color weren’t only second-class citizens but could be lynched with no judicial repercussions, who in the nation’s capital couldn’t use a water fountain unless it said
For colored only
. We’re talking about a time of extraordinary change, in which JFK laid the groundwork with an ideological perspective that inspired us all to feel that we are one and we want to reach for a better, more equitable, more moral country, and to provide him with the grassroots basis for being able to act and move in that direction.

STOOKEY: Peter had flown earlier to Dallas. On the day of the assassination, the bass player and Mary Travers, we had a concert there that night, and about halfway through the trip the announcement was made of the president’s assassination. We couldn’t believe it. Our thoughts ranged
everywhere from
Is this like an H. G. Wells
War of the Worlds
hoax? Was this some kind of joke?
We changed channels. Pretty soon everybody was talking about it. Then of course came the secondary part of it, the part of denial, which was,
Okay, he was just wounded, but he’s going to be better. He’s been taken to the hospital.
” Then within the hour and a half or two hours left of the trip, the announcement was made that the president was dead. It was so unreal, and yet, as shocked as I was, when we finally pulled into Dallas, we went right to the hotel and canceled the concert right away.