MURDER AT HAMMERSMITH FARM

Two months before his assassination, JOHN and JACKIE KENNEDY wrote, directed, and acted in a James Bondinspired home movie in which the president was "killed." VF reveals the story behind the spoof, along with neverbefore-seen footage from that day

- JAMES ROBENALT

FOR THEIR EYES ONLY
In September 1963, White House photographer Robert Knudsen filmed a short spy comedy in and around the summer home of Jacqueline Kennedy's family, Hammersmith Farm, shown here that year. That weekend, Knudsen also took footage of President John F. Kennedy (opposite) aboard the Honey Fitz.

Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed an overflow crowd at the historic March on Washington. The Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb inside Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four schoolgirls.

Amid the tumult and tragedy, much of the nation looked for guidance and stability from a charismatic young president who had just begun to focus on what would become a cornerstone of his and Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s legacy: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After two and a half years in office, John F. Kennedy seemed in sync with the times—and destined for a second term. The string of politically charged assassinations that would convulse the country over the course of the decade were largely in the offing, despite the ominous pall cast by the Evers slaying.

To many Americans, the assassination of an American president was inconceivable, a product of another era. (William McKinley had been killed in 1901.) Kennedy, however, was under no such illusion. In his imaginings, his murder was entirely plausible. And the largely untold story of a long-lost home movie made by the president and first lady on the last weekend of the summer—a film in which JFK playacted his own assassination—is worth revisiting amid the current disarray in the Secret Service and Donald Trump’s recent brushes with would-be assassins, if only to see how far the country has come since those waning days of American innocence.