Shocking images reveal JFK acted out his own assassination in mock home movie just two months before his death

Former President John F. Kennedy played out his own assassination just two months before he was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas.

The 35th President of the United States and his wife, Jackie, had decided in the summer of 1963 to make their own James Bond-style film, which were favorites of the then-President, according to VanityFair.

They then spent the weekend of September 21 and 22 filming scenes at Hammersmith Farm, a Rhode Island complex owned by Jackie’s family, with the First Lady acting as director and partner of the lead photographer, Robert L. Knudsen, behind the camera.

None of the actors — all of whom were friends of the first family or their Secret Service agents — realized that two reporters were watching the presidential party aboard JFK’s Honey Fitz yacht in a nearby boat that day.

The reporters were accompanied by a photographer who had a camera with a zoom lens and managed to take some photos of the set.

The photos were never published, even when the Associated Press published a story describing the scene on the pier with newspaper headlines such as “Kennedy’s cropped on camera at weekend retreat.”

But Knudsen’s son saved photos from the shoot, as well as some footage from the president’s short film, which he shared with Vanity Fair.

One of the photos shows Knudsen in a suit, with his camera on a pier.

Off to the side, the president could be seen holding a towel, presumably to wash away the ketchup that had squirted from his mouth as he pretended to die.

Jackie could also be seen standing next to the photographer, as if directing, and two children are also visible: Caroline Kennedy and Marcantonio Crespi, the son of Countess Vivian Stokes Crespi, who spent the weekend with the first family.

For years, all that was known about the home movie was that the Kennedys enjoyed making a movie at Hammersmith Farm that weekend, with Kennedy’s close friend, Red Fay, initially claiming he was the only one killed in the footage.

“We were bored and decided to put the photographer to good use,” Fay told the Associated Press in 1983, after the publication of Ralph Martin’s JFK biography, A Hero for Our Time.

But Knudsen noted that Kennedy wrote the script himself, and that there were several takes. In some cases the president was the one shot, while in others Fay was the one who fell to the ground.

When the film was completed, Jackie received one copy and Fay another copy, but it is believed that he destroyed it after the murder of his old friend.

It was thought that no other copies existed.

However, Knudsen retained seven minutes from the original shoots.

One scene shows the presidential party leaving the Honey Fitz, when JFK suddenly clutches his chest and falls as if struck by bullets, Vanity Fair reports.

Others in the party then step over his body, but Fay trips and falls over the president, causing a “red stream to flow from the president’s mouth,” soiling the front of his shirt.

Another shot by Knudsen showed a station wagon full of Secret Service agents driving up to the house and screeching to a halt before eight jumped out of the vehicle.

Among the officers on the scene were Roy Kellerman, who would later be put in charge of the officers in Dallas, riding in the passenger seat of the presidential limousine, and Paul Landis, the First Lady’s agent.

She had asked them to participate in their project.

“We’re making a movie about the president’s assassination,” Jackie reportedly told the officers, “and we’d like you and the other officers to drive up to the front of the house, jump out and run to the door.”

When they did, the officers found the president lying on the floor with ketchup smeared all over him, and Jackie sitting on the steps taking charge, Landis said.

He said he understood it was a joke and admitted it was strange, but he thought it was typical of the couple’s playful nature away from public view.

Other scenes showed Fay with a rope around his neck and ketchup on his mouth and shoulder, while others showed him and the Countess dropping a gun into a bag which was then taken away.

Records from the White House theater show that JFK and Jackie, along with Fay and another close family friend, Bill Walton, showed “home movies” the next day, September 23.

JFK and Jackie would watch the film again a week later with Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, a confidant of the president, and Bradlee’s then-wife, socialite Tony Pinchot.

But after JFK was shot in the head while riding in a motorcade with the top down on November 22, 1963, the film received renewed attention.

Some thought it showed the president’s willingness to take physical risks, as he did by insisting he drive with the top down, and staffers and outside observers joked that it showed JFK interacting with security after hours was on the road.

Knudsen, meanwhile, told the Associated Press in 1983, “I wondered if it was a premonition he had or a twist of fate.”

Mckinley Cheshire, a Palm Beach psychiatrist, also said that the film “could easily have been just a fantasy to release many of his own inner fears and counter his own phobic behavior – an attempt to face reality where his life was indeed located. Danger.’

The psychiatrist further suggested that JFK’s decision to let others step over his body was “his way of saying they had to move on without him.”

The president was well aware of the possibility that he could be assassinated while in office, Cheshire revealed.

He had once told the Irish ambassador: ‘Crowds do not threaten me. It’s that guy standing on the roof with a gun that I’m worried about.”

Just a month before his assassination, JFK also read a book giving a minute-by-minute account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and even on the morning of his death he made a comment about the possibility of an assassination.

The president reportedly told his wife at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, “You know, last night would have been a great night to assassinate a president.”

‘I mean it; There was rain and night, and we were all jostled,” Jackie later recalled.

“Suppose a man had a gun in a briefcase,” the president suggested. “Then he could have dropped the gun and briefcase and melted away into the crowd.”