Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (48 page)

Jay Leno

At the time of the president’s death, thirteen-year-old James “Jay” Leno was living in Andover, Massachusetts, with his family, soon to embark on a successful comedy and acting career. In spring 2014 he will step down from
The Tonight Show
after a twenty-two-year tenure as host.

I
was in school. I went home, and my mother was very upset. But the part that really got her—and this was a few days later—we had seen Oswald get shot on TV. They showed that. I don’t think anyone had ever been shot on live television before, at least certainly not in my lifetime. It didn’t look anything like how people got shot on
The Rifleman
or
The Big Valley,
where they would do this and fall over.

The thing that really did it for us kids was a guy named Vaughn Meader. He put out an album called
The First Family,
and nobody had ever done anything like this before. The record was so popular, and all the radio stations played clips of Vaughn Meader doing John F. Kennedy, Jackie, and all the other people in the White House. We all recited the lines. My mother would go: “Stop doing that voice. Stop. That’s annoying, stop that.” It was the number-one record, I think, in the country at the time—I don’t know if a comedy album has ever done that well again—so consequently we knew it as pop culture more than politics.

I was kind of a student of comedy at that time. Lenny Bruce had a show at Carnegie Hall. It was a couple of nights after the assassination, and his opening line was, “I guess Vaughn Meader’s career is over.” There was a silence, and then a huge laugh. It broke the ice a little bit, if that was even possible. In fact, Vaughn Meader was never heard from again.

But I remember watching the TV and the funeral procession and little John-John doing the wave, then the salute—and my mother in tears,
“Oh my God, what’s going to happen to that little boy? Oh my God.” I remember looking at my mom and then looking at the TV, and then, when you’re a kid, how do you keep your mom from crying?

Flash forward to thirty-five years later. I have John F. Kennedy Jr. on the show. I’m in the dressing room. I say hello to him. “Good to see you.” Very nice guy. Jerry Seinfeld had just been on. I go, “Please welcome John F. Kennedy Jr.,” and he walked out, I shook his hand, I looked in the monitor, and I saw my face and his, and I almost started to cry. I got very emotional because I could see my mom saying, “Oh my God, what’s ever going to happen to that little boy?” and it was almost as if I wanted to say,
Ma, he’s OK. He’s on the show. I’m with him right now, he’s not—

It didn’t affect me in the dressing room. It didn’t even occur to me, but the minute I shook his hand and just glanced at the monitor and saw him, our two faces together in the same shot, it was all I could do, really, to keep from tearing. I said, “Sit down. Good to see you.” It was just really overwhelming.

A lot of people lived that Kennedy kind of life, but they didn’t necessarily do things for the people who didn’t live that kind of life. That was the great difference. When you would see a Kennedy show up at a rally to help people get home heating oil or to do something for the poor—that was the difference. Nobody who had yachts and boats really did much for people who had kayaks and canoes, that sort of thing. I think that was the big difference—when a Kennedy would show up at a union rally or do something to help African Americans, that was the new part, I think.

Google “
I’ve Got a Secret
, Lincoln.” Remember the TV show
I’ve Got a Secret
? There’s one episode where this old man comes out—and there’s Dorothy Kilgallen and then the usual panel—and his secret was that he
was the last living witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was five years old, his mom put him in the box next to Lincoln, and he saw John Wilkes Booth. I said to myself,
Wow, I’m watching somebody on TV who witnessed the Lincoln assassination
. I suppose to a young person now, someone who was at Dealey Plaza would probably seem just as amazing, but that just struck me as so bizarre, because when I was a kid, to me Lincoln might as well have been a thousand years ago as just a hundred. It was just fascinating.

When we do “Jaywalking,” we find most people think women got the vote in 1966. They know Kennedy was president. They’re not sure if it was before World War II or after World War II. It’s so funny because it’s as clear as a bell to me because I grew up in that era. But we asked people, “When did women get the vote?” The most common answer? 1966. They tend to confuse it, I think, with the Civil Rights Act. Most people aren’t even aware of a Civil Rights Act. It seems preposterous to them that—“What, you mean black people couldn’t—? What, it wasn’t equality? When was that?” You know, they look at you like that. They think it was 1860, not 1964. We don’t really talk about the Kennedy assassination in those segments, because there’s not humor there.

I don’t know if the assassination could be a subject of humor. Are there people who have joked about it? Sure. I mean, it’s not for me to say whether they should. Am I a good enough comedian to do a joke about it? No—and I wouldn’t want to. I think there are certain subjects—abortion is one, the Kennedy assassination—that aren’t humorous because there’s no hypocrisy involved. There are a lot of jokes about conspiracy theorists and things of that nature. Comedy works if it’s based on certain hypocrisies.

He would have been an excellent guest on
The Tonight Show
. He had a great sense of humor. He was a guy’s guy; he was kind of a raconteur. It’s interesting how guarded and sheltered he was, because that was an era when the press protected politicians. If a president said, “Listen, this
is now secure. I don’t want anybody to report this,” you didn’t report. Things have certainly changed a lot since then. It was sort of an old boys’ club, where if there was a party going on and there were women—
wink
. The reporters were in on it too. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. It’s probably worse.

But if he were on the show, I would have asked him: “When you said it, did you really think we could put a man on the Moon in ten years? Or did you just say that to inspire the country?” Because, don’t forget, we had had failed rockets, and we looked like North Korea at that point. The Russians were ahead of us, and the idea of leaving our atmosphere was sort of brand new and controversial. The idea of going to the Moon and coming back . . . I mean, it takes four or five years to come out with a new car, with just new designs and new features. “To go to the Moon and come back in ten years? Did you think, or were you just saying that? Or did you just say it to inspire the country?” I probably would have asked him that.

Tom Hanks

Living in San Mateo, California, Tom Hanks was seven years old in 1963. He later studied acting at the California State University at Sacramento before becoming one of the most successful film actors in history as well as a writer, director, and producer. Best known for starring roles in
Apollo 13
,
Big
,
Cast Away
,
Catch Me If You Can
,
Charlie Wilson’s War
,
Forrest Gump
,
A League of Their Own
, Philadelphia, Saving Private Ryan,
Sleepless in Seattle
,
That Thing You Do!
,
the
Toy Story
franchise, and
You’ve Got Mail
,
he has won two Academy Awards and produced the 2013 feature film
Parkland
about the hospital where Kennedy was taken after the shooting.

I
turned seven that July. I remember exactly what I was doing and where I was. I was at Lakeside Elementary High School in San Mateo, California. We were living with my aunt. My dad was between marriages. We were sleeping on sofa beds. My dad was sleeping in the vacation trailer they kept in their backyard. It was second grade during art class. The boys always drew the same picture over and over in art class: a strip of blue, which was the water, and we all knew how to make the outline of a ship with two little guns on the front of it, and then we would draw little airplanes—all we did was make naval battles. But it was like watching a movie when we did it, because it would be active. So eventually, with the explosions of the planes and that, you just had a picture that was just a bunch of flames. It looked like a Rorschach test.

We were doing that, and the principal came into the class. Seeing the principal was like seeing the senator from the State of California. He came in, wore a suit and tie, glasses, and he went over and whispered something to our teacher. Then he left the room, and we went back, and all you
heard was the drawing. Then all of a sudden we heard tears, weeping; we looked over, and our teacher was crying. To be seven years old and see any adult who is overcome with emotion and is weeping is a very upsetting thing.

We immediately felt as though something horrible was wrong, and we were all very uncomfortable. She broke out—literally these words: “They killed him. They killed the president,” and we thought,
They?
We were seven years old. How can anybody . . . and president of what? I didn’t know where Dallas was. I didn’t know how big the country was, but there was a sense of permanence to America and certainly to the office of the president of the United States that made it seem as though it should’ve been impossible for something like that to happen.

The principal’s voice came over the loudspeaker and spoke to the entire school. He said, “The president of the United States has been shot, and—we are going to send everybody home.” A lot of parents came and picked up kids, but our dad was a single dad. I don’t know where my aunt and uncle were, so I ended up walking home by myself at a time when usually you’re in school.

It wasn’t a long walk home, but it was a walk through total suburbia that was a landfill community. All the houses were housing development homes. They were kind of nice. We had these vast empty fields with surveyor stakes in them, with the little orange ribbons that say where it’s going to be. Everything was different. The lighting was different—I remember the light was different because it was early in the afternoon. It wasn’t when school usually got out. The buses weren’t there; there were fewer cars on the roads, and the ones that were seemed to be driving slowly. There was no hustle and bustle to it. I got home.

I’m sure we were gathered around the TV when Ruby killed Oswald. I wasn’t watching it; I was in the other room, but I heard the kerfuffle. By that time, my aunt and uncle had made a bit of a shriek, so the TV was on when that played live, and it was just days from that walk home from school to being in an apartment of a friend of my dad. I was alone then too, because I was parked there for the day when Kennedy’s body was in state in the Capitol Rotunda. I recall being overcome with emotion. There was just something that was so oppressively, viscerally, inherently sad about the way it was playing out. I had never seen anything that somber. I’ve never seen anything on TV that had that gravitas—the black-and-white images and the sound of the horses’ hooves as they were going through the streets bearing the caisson with the president’s casket on it.

I was alone then, and I didn’t even know why I was crying. There was just something so oppressively heavy and sad about it. Of course every human being, every adult, every caregiver I saw was incredibly burdened with sadness and confusion, and it bled down even to a seven-year-old kid.

He was the first president I remember, and everything he stood for was the best of the United States at that very moment. He was young, and he was gorgeous. His wife was gorgeous. He had little kids. But we were between fifteen and twenty years after World War II, which had been, up to that point, truly the defining conversation that I heard constantly over and over again. My dad was a veteran, and my teacher was married to a veteran. Everybody talked about their lives in three distinct passages. They talked about their childhood. But they always said, “When I was a
kid before the war,
dah dah dah
.” Then they came of age. My dad was a machinist in the Navy. He studied hydraulics in Pocatello, Idaho, and was somewhere in the South Pacific, and those five years were: “Well, that was during the war.” “When I was in the war, I was here.” “During the war, I was here.” Then the rest of life after was always: “Well, that was right after the war.” “Of course, back after the war happened,
dah dah dah
.” Even then, my personal history was shaped by those three acts of the American story: before the war, during the war, after the war.

Kennedy was all about after the war. The country was so positively proactive and doing great things, and even when you’re seven years old that positive spirit was reflected every day in school somehow. We talked about the American dream. We talked about our way of life. We talked about democracy. But we also talked about what the country was doing, how hopeful it was, how there was the Peace Corps, and there was the space program. There was this proactive sensibility that we had entered into the next phase of life as Americans, in which we did good around the world, if only because we were the beacon of goodness. We had these bad guys who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and we were in direct competition. Not only that, we were the polar opposite of everything they stood for. Here you can do anything you want to; there you can’t. Here you have the freedom to pursue every degree of happiness; there happiness is prescribed and doled out. Even if you were a seven-year-old, it was all about: We are on the cusp of a brand of greatness that we have earned, that we have fought for and saved, and that we are consciously choosing to go ahead and pursue.

We weren’t at the mercy of any events. Instead, we are powered by our own abilities, our own dreams, our own choices. That’s what I got. We even had a publication that was given to us every week,
My Weekly Reader
. It was a little mock newspaper that we had, and when we got it we would study it. We would have a moment where everybody read, and Mrs. Castle, who was my teacher after the assassination, would talk about what they were talking about. The things that were in there were stories, for example, about the great hospital ship
Hope
. It would travel around to the Third World and would heal the sick; it was about the Peace Corps. It was about the space program, which was, in and of itself, a lesson in science,
engineering, politics, history, and art. It was embodied by the president of the United States who was killed in Dallas in November ’63.

What always lingered from the John F. Kennedy assassination was not so much a question of how but a question of why. It didn’t make sense that anybody would want to murder the president of the United States. Therefore, how was it possible for some individual guy to decide to do it? From that begins this kind of stewing pot of all the aspects of what the country sort of fell into by then. Vietnam was going on. There was the huge social revolution that had rightly come along as a generation decided to make its own questions, answer its own questions. I didn’t get into the particulars of it all until some time in the ’70s. Suddenly all the rules were off the board, and everything—everything—the questions seemed never to stop, whether they were motivated or not.

Regarding conspiracy theories, you would go through a phase where you hear shaky details. What about this, what about that, and what about that? It becomes almost fun to partake in it. It becomes almost like a parlor game. When Ouija boards first came around, you invested this power in a Ouija board. Then you start having goofy séances to see what can happen. It was all the same sort of game that went along with it, and it didn’t matter that there were answers to the questions. The questions were far too much fun to ask.

Even a seven-year-old becomes a thirteen-year-old at some point and realizes: Hey, some of those people on TV aren’t telling the truth all the time. By the time we got into Vietnam and everything else was going on, well, it sort of made sense. If they’re not telling the truth now, did they tell the truth back then? I certainly fell into that idea. All these fun things that are kind of Rorschach tests: What about the badge man? What about that guy with the umbrella?—and all the other things that go along into it that become just part of a fun, distracting, and very complicated game that seems to have no end.

I will get all sorts of mail for saying this, but without a question, Lee Harvey Oswald acted completely alone. He did it all by himself, and all the other stuff that comes along with it is a very fun kind of connect-the-dots that don’t really make any sort of shape. The thing that’s very hard for people to accept is that it was possible to do. Lee Harvey Oswald had read
the paper and knew the president’s motorcade route because it was on the front page of the Dallas newspapers two or three days prior to it. The sad aspect of it all is that we lived in a world at that time where the president of the United States routinely rode in an open car so that he could wave to the crowds who were delighted to have a picture of the president—because why would John F. Kennedy do it any differently than Roosevelt did or Truman or Herbert Hoover? When you put together a few simple understandings of what basic human nature is, the sad conclusion is that not only was it possible, it was easy.

I’m sure the Mob wanted something to happen like that. They didn’t like the Kennedys, without a doubt. The thing you end up falling into is: Let’s go with them all. Mob, sure. Why not? Wait, wait, wait. The Castro people, sure, yeah, the Castro people. Wait, wait, wait. What about the military industrial complex? How about—sure, they—
Whoa,
wait a minute, what about those Indochinese people who wanted to have . . . There are so many people. Of course you go back in now, in retrospect, and say, “Was it Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe?” or whatever. Again, the fun continues in that way because the possibilities are endless, but you come back to a number of concrete facts—let’s call them facts that are also part of the story—and it all just breaks down because all of the conspiracies don’t take into account the very basic aspects of human nature.

I was sitting with my good friend Bill Paxton, who was in
Apollo 13
with me—we have these powwows every now and again. Bill lived in Fort Worth, Texas, and the president of the United States was going to be in Fort Worth, Texas, so his father said, “Boys, we’re going to go see the president of the United States,” and he was up on his shoulders. His dad put him on his shoulders when Kennedy came out of the hotel in Fort Worth just before the breakfast, and then he took the plane to Love Field and went into Dallas. Years and years later, Bill went to Dealey Plaza and saw the museum that’s there. He was
looking at raw footage from the media of that day, and he says, “God, you know, I wonder if they’ll have any footage of outside the hotel where we saw the president of the United States.” Sure enough, the camera panned right past him on his dad’s shoulders. That fostered in him a conversation that we had about that day and what it meant to us as Americans—literally little boys as Americans—where suddenly an aspect of our country and our consciousness was snapped in two, and for us it was now forever: “That was before Kennedy was killed,” and then, “That was right after Kennedy was killed,” which is one of the acts of our lives we go back over and over again in one way or another.