Here's an interview segment from Noonbreak on
WBBM Channel 2. In this clip,
Bob Wallace interviews
Jack Valenti,
President of the
Motion Picture Association of America (
MPAA), on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the assassination of
John F. Kennedy.
Valenti was part of the
Presidential detail that was in
Dallas on the day of the assassination of
President Kennedy on
November 22nd 1963, and in its aftermath became part of
President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff as
Assistant to the President.
This was raw, unedited footage from the original master tape, so there were no photo stills, film footage, or lower-third super text inserted (except a notice put on here early on); in addition, color bars (with 683 Hz tone) are seen in the first second, while the tone continues to be heard for the next three seconds as Valenti does small talk.
Includes:
Color bars and tone
Jack Valenti muttering something about
J. Edward Day,
Postmaster General from
1961 to 1963, before the sound fades out for 21 seconds ("
Sound Returns in a Few
Seconds" super a new addition) prior to tape break
Two-shot of Bob Wallace and
Jack, in which they get straight the name of the organization of which he is president, followed by countdown to start of interview
Bob starts off the interview by mentioning Valenti's close association with
LBJ and his being in Dallas on the day of the
Kennedy assassination. Valenti was eight cars behind the
Presidential motorcade when the shots rang out in Dallas (he notes that the crowd was friendly), after which the motorcade route became "a freeway"; he learned at the
Trade Mart that
Kennedy and
Texas Governor John B. Connally had been shot, and then commandeered a deputy sheriff's car to
Parkland Hospital where the President died. Valenti mentions such names as
Evelyn Lincoln (
JFK's secretary),
Cliff Carter (a
Johnson aide),
Lem Johns (a
Secret Service agent who later became chief of
White House detail) and Congressman
Albert Thomas in the course of this interview in which he gives his account of the aftermath of the assassination. A break in the tape signals the end of Part 1.
In Part 2, Valenti recalls the confusion around
Air Force One in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, with Secret Service not knowing if it was a repeat of the 1865 assassination of
President Abraham Lincoln (and the attempts on the lives of
Edwin Stanton and
William Seward); and the events leading up to the swearing in of LBJ aboard the plane by
Judge Sarah T. Hughes (with
Jacqueline Kennedy, still in her blood-stained pink dress, by LBJ's side). In this part, Valenti mentions such names as then-Deputy
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (who ultimately replaced
Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General), Congressman
Jack Brooks and Congressman
Thomas (again). (He also refers to the
Dallas police chief but does not mention his name -
Jesse Curry.) Another tape break.
In
Part 3, Valenti recounts the grief from both the Kennedy and Johnson camps in the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination; he charts the supposed hostility between them to
William Manchester's books, and insists that, in fact, there was no such hostility. Here, he mentions
Larry O'Brien (special assistant to the President under JFK who stayed on in LBJ's administration, was
Democratic National Committee chairman at the time of the
1972 Watergate break-in, and later became
NBA commissioner),
Kenneth O'Donnell (longtime aide to JFK),
General Godfrey McHugh,
Robert S. McNamara (
Secretary of Defense under both Kennedy and
Johnson), Walter Jenkins (who became Johnson's top adviser) and
Bill Moyers (future public TV mainstay who ultimately replaced Jenkins). He maintains Johnson, after the assassination, "was invariably courteous, warm [and] understanding" and that Kennedy had "always treated him with respect and understanding" and decreed that no one speak ill of Kennedy in his presence. (In a fit of irony, as brought up towards the end of the interview, Valenti later flew on the Air Force One that carried LBJ's body from
Washington back to
Texas after his death in
1973 - the very same plane that had carried JFK's body from Dallas to Washington nearly a decade before.)
FuzzyMemories FunFact:
Bruce DuMont was the
Executive Producer of Noonbreak during this time.
This aired on local
Chicago TV on Wednesday, November 22nd 1978 during the 12:00pm to 12:30pm timeframe.
- published: 01 Feb 2012
- views: 1672