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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm grateful you're here. Speaking of gratitude on today's show, we'll talk about it with Chris Duffy, the host of the How to Be a Better Human. We'll also learn about the New York Times series Overlooked with founder and co-author Amy Padnani- it's now a book- and we'll speak with the costume designer behind the latest Hunger Games film. That's the plan. Let's get this started with a somber anniversary.

Right about now, 60 years ago today, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was in Dallas the second to last stop on a five-city two-day tour of the Lone Star State in anticipation of his 1964 reelection campaign. The President was fatally shot at approximately 12:30 PM Central time while in an open car motorcade. His assassination changed so much. It altered the course of American history. The aftermath became the first live television breaking news event. It also changed the people there that day, the onlookers who came to Dealey Plaza to catch a glimpse of Jack and Jackie, the teenager who drove his coworker Lee to work at the Book Depository that morning, and the Secret Service agents who still carry guilt.

Their stories are the meat of the National Geographic series JFK: One Day in America. The surviving witnesses are now in their 80s and early 90s and spoke to filmmakers for hours about the facts and their feelings. Plus, there's something rare. In conjunction with the sixth floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the filmmakers were allowed to colorize some of the museum's archival footage. We see Lee Harvey Oswald in custody in color, and some of the happier moments of the Kennedy's life, and the color of Mrs. Kennedy suit that day.

The result is as a review and Salon put it, "JFK: One Day in America restores the humanity to one of America's most traumatized tragedies." Let's listen to a little bit of the trailer.

Sid Davis: Thinking back, I'll never forget those sounds. [mimics gunshots]

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Clint Hill: It's been 60 years this year. There are a few of us left. Like, very few. I think about the event as it happened, and I go right back to the moment that it happened.

Speaker 1: We were one lane width away from him when he was shot in the head.

Sid Davis: I saw a father take his little boy and put his body on top of the boy.

Speaker 1: I think my maternal instinct kicked in.

Clint Hill: I jumped to the rear bumper. Mrs. Kennedy was screaming, "I love you Jack." I wasn't come fast enough.

Sid Davis: Mrs. Kennedy came forward, and I could see blood on her dress where she cradled the President's head in her lap. She said, "Let them see what they have done."

Alison Stewart: JFK: One Day in America can be seen now and Nat Geo Joining me now is its director Ella Wright. Ella, thank you for being with us.

Ella Wright: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. What do you remember about the day JFK was assassinated? Where were you? How did you find out? What did the world feel like that day and the days after? Were you watching when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby on live TV? Maybe you visited Dealey Plaza in Texas. What were your thoughts? Our phone lines are open, 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC, you can text to us at that number. You can also join us on air 212-433-9692. 212-433 WNYC or you can reach out via social media @AllOfItWNYC. Ella, where do you start on a project like this? What are the first steps?

Ella Wright: Wow, I know well, obviously it's such a well covered subject matter, and our first steps were really that we wanted to bring a different approach to it. I think a lot of the documentaries that have been made focus heavily on the conspiracy and take quite an analytical approach. We wanted to shed fresh light on these events. The way we wanted to do that really was to explore the human experience of those events and that time, and to really immerse the viewer in that world of the 1960s so that they were experiencing it emotionally.

Alison Stewart: As people can hear from your accent, you're not American. You're actually joining us from the UK right now. What impact do you think not being American had on your editorial choices?

Ella Wright: That's an interesting question. I think for us, it was really important to convey as well as the experience of that day and the experience of the people who were there, the power of JFK and just how much he meant to people. He was a global icon as well as a source of inspiration for the American people. It was really important to us that people understood, especially an audience who may not have been alive at that time, just how much influence he had and just how much it mattered to the people who were alive at that point. I think you really see in that footage, in the archival footage, people reacting incredibly emotionally. One of my favorite moments is you've got the crowds listening to coverage of the assassination outside the Rockefeller Center. People react incredibly viscerally. It's very emotional, and you really get a sense of just how much he meant to them.

Alison Stewart: What was the nature of the collaboration with the sixth floor Museum at Dealey Plaza?

Ella Wright: The sixth floor were incredibly helpful to us. They were actually custodians of most of the archival footage and we tell the story using testimony from people who were there, and archival footage from the time. One of the things that was really important to us was that it felt as unmediated as possible and accessible to anyone. We agreed with them that we would colorize the footage for the first time, which is something they've never done before. They were impressed by the scope of the project and the integrity of the project. We work with them and a company in France, who specializes in colorization to colorize bits of that footage that never been seen before.

Alison Stewart: How did you decide what would be colorized?

Ella Wright: What we really wanted to do was find moments where colorization would have a huge amount of impact. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald, the moment he's brought through the police department, we felt strongly that that should be in color. That's an incredibly iconic piece of footage. It really brings it to life, I think, seeing him in color for the first time. We couldn't colorize every part of footage, because of the format of the media, so we wanted to use it sparingly and during moments that had the most impact.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some calls. Our phone lines are full. Let's talk to Victoria. calling in from New York City. Hi, Victoria. Thank you for calling in.

Victoria: Thank you very much. I think I was about nine or 10 at the time, and I was going to school here in Manhattan at the Lycée Français de New York, which was a French school. English was taught as the foreign language. I was in class and my next door neighbor next to me was a woman of the Bouvier family, and two Secret Service police came in and quickly removed her from the classroom explaining that this was for her protection. That is how we found out that JFK had been murdered.

Alison Stewart: Victoria, thank you for sharing that memory. Let's talk to Lydia from Yonkers. Hello, Lydia, thank you so much for calling into WNYC. You're on the air.

Lydia: Thank you. Thank you for receiving my phone call. On this day in my life, I was a five-year-old child with my mother in Argentina in Buenos Aires. My father had just left two weeks earlier to emigrate here, set up an apartment for us. My mother and I were leaving a doctor's appointment, and that's where she learned the news. When we came outside, people were literally weeping in the streets. It was just a most surreal situation that, as a child, I had never seen anything like it. I was so confused. Of course my mother was terrified, thinking we're trying to leave a troubled country and now where are we ending up in the United States? What's going to happen? It was all very traumatizing, to say the least.

Alison Stewart: Lydia, thank you for calling in. That brings me to something I found very interesting in your documentary, Ella- by the way, my guest is Ella Wright. She's a director of JFK: One Day in America- is there's some box pops from different people, and they begin assigning blame to different groups right from the beginning. Some said communists. Some said extreme far rights groups. What did you hear in those interviews that made you want to include them and maybe even have some resonance today?

Ella Wright: I think it's interesting, as you say, like there are parts of the story that feel incredibly resonant. You have this sense that America was a divided country to a certain extent. We wanted to include those box pops to highlight those divisions, but also it was important to us that the story was unfolding minute by minute. I think when there is a live investigation unfolding like that, there is a sense of uncertainty. We wanted to keep people in the moment and explain how the investigation unfolded and evolved without hindsight if that makes sense.

Alison Stewart: You keep the editorial lane very narrow. There's no discussion of conspiracies, there's no discussion of infidelity. Why did you decide- well, what did the narrow focus allow you to do in this film?

Ella Wright: I think that focus really allowed us- it really allowed emotion, I suppose, to be our focus and that's what we were hoping to achieve. We wanted people to understand the emotional impact of these events. Both on those people who were there and experienced them. I mean, as you mentioned, Clint Hill, Jackie's bodyguard basically tried to take a bullet for JFK and narrowly missed, and it's still something that haunts him, that weighs on him. At the same time, as I say, we wanted to get a sense of the emotional impact of how it helped people cross America. I think by being quite purist about that approach, we allowed more space for people to really experience those feelings and to connect with the characters.

Alison Stewart: This is a little bit of a harsh question to ask, but I'm going to ask it, and I mean it from a place of curiosity and inquiry. Did you have discussions regarding the colorization about what to do about Kennedy's injury and the blood on Mrs. Kennedy's suit?

Ella Wright: I can honestly say I think those photographs we chose to keep them black and white, and I think that was actually to do with the archival source. We had to adhere to certain rules actually surrounding that, so it wasn't something that we really had discussed actually.

Alison Stewart: What is a common misunderstanding about what happened that day that you now understand after spending hours and hours and years on this project?

Ella Wright: I think I don't know if there were misunderstandings, but I suppose, we were interested in those sliding doors moments. For example there's that moment we mentioned where it's like president Kennedy wanted to keep the hood off the car because he wanted to appear visible to people. There were also things in the footage that I suppose that really surprised me. We've spoken about the fact that there are similarities of America today and America in the '60s, but actually there were things and footage that felt really alien as well. For example, the moment that the police carry the murder weapon through the third floor of the police department, and the moment that Lee Harvey Oswald gives a press conference. Those were things that I found incredibly surprising and interesting.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some calls. Let's talk to Cynthia from Washington Heights. Hi, Cynthia. Thank you for calling in.

Cynthia: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I was a senior in high school in San Antonio that day. The motorcade had come down the street, the big road from the airport right in the front of our high school the day before, and there were huge crowds. Everyone from the school was out there cheering and waving, LBJ, Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. and President Kennedy. It was a very personal thing for us. The next day we were in class, it was around midday, and all of a sudden the radio feed came on, I think it was CBS, came with no explanation. It just started, and you were saying, was this a mistake? What's going on? Then you could hear that they were talking about President Kennedy had been shot and everyone was just crying and so stunned.

Then in the aftermath, you would hear that Texans were instead, not just communists, but Texans were to blame for the assassination, and particularly people who lived in Dallas heard that all the time that Dallas was responsible. To this day, most of us who were there in that sense still remember it and talk about it.

Alison Stewart: Cynthia, thank you for calling in. A text, "I was playing miniature golf with my grandfather on the Asbury Park Boardwalk that day. An announcement was made and everyone left, went home stunned, and watched the news for the rest of the day." Michael is calling in for Manhattan. Michael, thank you for calling and you are on the air.

Michael: Thanks for taking my call. I was in seventh grade at Robert S. Wagner, junior high school, 167 on the east side. It was a Friday afternoon, Mr. Greenhut's Social Studies class, and the PA system went on. He was a very funny man, and when it went off, he fell. Somebody stolen the chairs out of the dining room, so everybody laughed and we didn't quite hear what was going on. Then we did hear it and everybody just froze. Totally stunned, and we were immediately sent home.

I was walking home with some friends, and I'm originally from Venezuela, and my parents had left there with me, because- just to avoid this sort of thing, because it'd been assassinations and political unrest down there. I kept telling my friends, "This should not happen here. This is just incredible." Then we spent the rest of the weekend literally from morning to night, just watching everything that went on. I mean, that's-- I remember every second.

Alison Stewart: Michael, thank you for calling in. We're discussing the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr. There's a terrific three part series called JFK: One Day in America. It's from Nat Geo. I'm speaking with this director, Ella Wright. Ella, the film actually starts with Jack, and Jackie's relationship and their life as a couple, and we see Kennedy in a really relaxed state. He's on the family boat off the coast of the Cape, curled up with his daughter. Some of that isn't color, some of it isn't black and white. Why did you want to begin the film there?

Ella Wright: Yes, that was really important for us, I think, because we wanted the viewers to feel that this was a personal loss. This was the loss of a husband and a father as well as the loss of a president. We also wanted people to understand, I suppose, the closeness of Clint Hill and his relationship within the fabric of the Kennedy family. You meet him on board that boat as well. I think it's important for people to understand that he was also losing a friend as well as his boss, and as his president.

We were really interested. One of the things, when we started moving through the archive and listening to the testimony, is we were really interested in Jackie's story. I think in this documentary, you see her in a different way. She's incredibly stoic and incredibly brave, someone who was obviously sitting next to her husband when he was shot. The way she carries herself throughout these events really struck me as incredibly brave.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to another clip from the film JFK: One Day in America, the series. The first voice you'll hear is Sid Davis, a correspondent for Westinghouse, followed by the voice of Clint Hill, who was mentioned, who was on Mrs. Kennedy's security detail. They are describing the morning of November 22nd and how Jackie's presence was a little bit unusual but very welcome.

Sid Davis: She had been through a terrible period previous four months. Her baby, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died in August. She was getting over that. This was her first visit out of the White House in the public. It was an uplifting thing for people to see her out and smiling.

Clint Hill: Prior to that, you'd never see them hug or kiss or hold hands in public. From that point on, they didn't care who was there. They'd hold hands, they'd hug, and it changed their relationship. It really changed everything.

Sid Davis: I've never seen her happier than she was that morning.

Alison Stewart: I was really struck by how the Secret Service agents were so very willing to talk about Kennedy's personal life and that they really understood a lot about them as a couple. Ella, why did you think they wanted to talk about that?

Ella Wright: I think, again for them, they really wanted people to understand Kennedy as a person as well, and the impact that this tragedy had on his family. There's an incredibly moving moment during the funeral where you see his son John saluting the casket. Because they had that closeness, I think it was important for them to highlight that aspect of the tragedy as well. It works really well in the series, because we are able to show the viewers what was going on at that moment. We are in the breakfast at Fort Worth, but then you have people like Sid and like Clint, telling you the behind the scenes story, which really adds to that tragedy. Knowing that Jackie had been through this personal tragedy and that she and JFK had come through it, only to be hit by this other incredible tragedy.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing JFK: One Day in America, a new docuseries from National Geographic. We're speaking with its director, Ella Wright. Will have more about the film and take more of your calls, your remembrances of the day that John F. Kennedy junior was assassinated. This is All Of It. This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Ella Wright. She's the director of JFK: One Day in America. It is now on National Geographic. Let's talk to Josh, calling in from Brooklyn. Hi Josh. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Josh: Hey, Alison. I was six at the time, but more relevant. My father was a young journalist in the motorcade in the press bus when Kennedy was shot. He had incredible stories about them hearing the shots, seeing the chaos at the front of the motorcade, and then the limousine taking off. Here's all these journalists with the biggest story of their lives and they've lost the story. It's an epic story about what happened afterwards, but I'll just cut to the chase and say that, by the time that they found out where Kennedy had been taken they'd been separated from the bus and my father and a couple other journalists ended up in a stolen car. A car that they stole going down the highway in the wrong direction down in the safety lane on the highway trying to get themselves to Park Lane Memorial and getting back to the story that they were trying to cover.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Josh, do you mind if I ask your dad's name or are you comfortable sharing it?

Josh: Sure. My dad went on to have a big career at the Washington Post as a comic, as David Roter. At that point, he was a reporter for the Washington Evening Star.

Alison Stewart: Your father did have a tremendous career. Josh, thank you so much for calling in and sharing that. I really appreciate it. One of the journalists in your film Ella we meet is Peggy Simpson, a young woman journalist at the time. Tell us a little more about Peggy Simpson and what she was doing that day.

Ella Wright: Peggy was one of the only female journalists from the AP at the third floor of the police department. She was in town covering an event, and she actually ended up witnessing the shooting of Lee Harvey Osborn by Jack Ruby. She was down in the police department basement as he was being transferred. Then she watched that all unfold right in front of her.

Alison Stewart: We have a clip from the film JFK: One Day in America. This is Peggy Simpson, a then a local reporter describing the aftermath and asking a very important question that day. Let's take a listen to this clip.

Peggy Simpson: I was on the phone with my bureau chief, and I heard the cops say, "This is Jack Ruby." They say the cops know this guy. They say it's Jack Ruby, and he said, "What? I drink in his bar. How could that be?" He was a known person. He wasn't somebody that they expected to do any harm.

Speaker 2: I understand that he was here passing out cards yesterday to members of the press, offering them to come by and get free drinks at his clubs.

Speaker 3: That's what I understand.

Speaker 2: Well, how does he have access to the police department, the nightclub owner in Dallas? I saw him walking around downstairs. How does he do this? Do he have a lot of friends in the police club?

Speaker 3: Well, I would think so. I don't know.

Alison Stewart: That was fascinating. How does events change the way the media covers tragedies?

Ella Wright: I think the assassination of JFK was really the first rolling news event. All the cameras were there to capture JFK and Jackie, and really every twist and turn of the story was captured on camera, which was extraordinary for us, because it meant we had this incredible wealth of material to work with.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mary, calling in from Pompton Plains, New Jersey. Hi, Mary. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Mary: Hi. It's good to hear your voice. I was 16 in England from weekend walking down the street with a friend and we got the news that he died. I come from an Irish family and when I turned around and went home, it was like a member of the family died. It was the most devastating that I've ever seen a group of people, and how it affected the Irish community enormously. He was so loved and respected. I could cry right now feeling what happened, and the effect that it had on my family and everybody else I knew.

Alison Stewart: Mary, thank you so much for calling in. I do want to go, John from Yonkers who had a different experience. John, thank you for calling in and sharing your experience.

John: Hey, Alison. I was in a Spanish class. I was a junior in high school in Algiers in New Orleans. It's across the river from downtown New Orleans. It was lunch time and my friend Sterling Gross came running down the hallway, burst into the back of this class, and he yelled, "They shot Jack. John they shot Jack." When he said that two or three guys in the back of the class stood up and yelled, and they were excited about it. It was a little bit like, if you can imagine the situation in the present political thing now of Let's Go Brandon.

There was so much and animosity towards JFK in New Orleans mostly because of the integration situation that was going on down there. I was on the basketball team and we played Holy Cross a Catholic school that night over across the river in New Orleans in the Ninth Ward. I couldn't believe really that we were playing a basketball game that night. It wasn't canceled particularly with a Catholic school, so that was it. It was just this very, very crazy situation of something as horrific as that, and yet some people they weren't troubled by it at all. I think history needs to record that.

Alison Stewart: John, I really appreciate you calling in with that. Thank you so much. That was interesting in the documentary, the idea that Kennedy had gone to Texas because he'd barely won it and he did not. There were people at Dealey Plaza with anti Kennedy signs, correct?

Ella Wright: Yes, exactly. I think it was a hostile state for Kennedy. Just before the assassination there had been some protest against Adlai Stevenson the ambassador who'd been down there. He did know that there was risk of a disturbance. I think Clint and Paul alluded to that, but no one could have imagined the extent of what happened. Actually they were surprised I think by the warmth of the reception they received. You see those crowds that love field. I think SSID talks about that warm welcome that they had, and particularly because Jackie was there.

She rarely got involved in politics and political campaigning, so that was a real draw for people. It's even more shocking and surprising what happened next.

Alison Stewart: We got a text from someone who says they're concerned that colorization robs the photos and the footage of their shocking impact. How would you address that issue?

Ella Wright: Obviously we wanted to be as accurate and as sensitive as possible. As I say, we worked with these specialists in France who properly color match the colorization. We worked with the Sixth Floor Museum who feel very strongly about this. Obviously people might be divided over the issue of colonization, but I think we wanted to be as technically accurate as possible, and we took advice from all the right people.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "I was a young boy living in Washington DC at the time. My friends and I got on our bikes to look for the killer not knowing it had happened in Texas. JFK was our hero/savior for us." Ella, is there anything else you'd want people to know about the docuseries and the making of it before they watch it that you think's important?

Ella Wright: One of the interesting things about it was that we felt this was an opportunity really to capture that testimony for the last time. A lot of these people were very aware that this might be the last time that they told their story. I think that was something that we felt was really important that we were capturing their testimony and their stories for the historical record. I think that's what really makes the series the series so unique. It's their incredible contribution and reflections on this period of history.

Alison Stewart: The Nat Geo series is called JFK: One Day in America. I have been speaking with its director Ella Wright. Ella, thank you for your time today.

Ella Wright: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: Thank you to everyone who texted and called in with your remembrances.

 

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