Monthly Archives: February 2016

Alastair Layzell  (2013)

One PM: Central Standard Time and The Day Kennedy Died were two of several documentaries that marked the fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination.  Leslie Woodhead’s film was screened by ITV on 14 November and in America the following weekend.  Alastair Layzell’s had, as well as television showings, a one-off screening at Curzon Soho, on 11 November.  It was shown on US television on the same day, as part of the long-running PBS series Secrets of the Dead, and on More4 – renamed as JFK:  News of a Shooting and shorn of around twenty minutes of its cinema running time – on 22 November.  The significance of the latter date is obvious; 11 November is poignant too.  Remembrance Day in Britain and the Commonwealth is Veterans Day in America:  on 11 November 1963, Kennedy attended the commemorative ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery and, according to Alastair Layzell, was so impressed that he stayed until the end, even though he hadn’t been scheduled to do so.  During the ceremony Kennedy is reported to have mused about where he himself would be buried when his time came.  His body was laid to rest at Arlington fourteen days later.  This kind of irony, hard to stomach in a dramatic feature, is harder to argue with in a documentary context.

In his commendably brisk introduction at Curzon Soho, Alastair Layzell (who was clearly frustrated by how long the ads and trailers lasted) said he hoped he’d succeeded in finding a new angle on the assassination.  One PM: Central Standard Time focuses on how American news networks gathered and – in the thirty minutes between the shooting and the confirmation of the President’s death – broadcast news of what had happened in Dallas.  Layzell is concerned particularly with events at the CBS studios in New York prior to Walter Cronkite’s announcement:

‘From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: ‘President Kennedy died at 1 pm (Central Standard Time),’ – two o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.’

One PM:  CST is fascinating as journalistic history.  There are vivid descriptions, from some of Layzell’s many talking heads, of pressmen (and the odd presswoman) grabbing any telephone they could get hold of – and there weren’t many – to phone in the news.  Other contributors assert that America changed culturally that weekend, with television replacing print as the medium whereby most Americans got their news.  The documentary tells the story of two men – JFK and Walter Cronkite.  It helps Layzell that they were exact contemporaries, were both personally ‘tempered by war’, and that Cronkite had done an interview with the President at Cape Cod in September 1963, to mark the lengthening of CBS’s evening news slot from fifteen to thirty minutes.  There’s reference to Kennedy’s own journalistic experience, which, it’s suggested, increased his standing among the White House press corps and beyond.  He was the first American President who knew how to use the media; as a result, the media regarded him as, to some extent, one of their own.  Layzell’s witnesses convey eloquently how television was the ‘defining medium of the Kennedy years’ and how grimly fitting it was that the President’s killing became a defining moment in the evolution of the medium.

Walter Cronkite was clearly a pivotal figure in American broadcasting and not just because his breaking the news of Kennedy’s death is perhaps the most famous ten seconds in US television history.  It’s claimed in the film that the word ‘anchor(man)’ was coined specifically to describe Cronkite’s presentation of television coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1952.  When he accepted the CBS anchor job, it was on condition that he was also managing editor.  This makes his role in the events being described by Layzell particularly fascinating:  Cronkite wasn’t merely repeating what someone else was feeding to him – he was making editorial decisions about what could be said.  His earlier career as a wire reporter enabled him, says one contributor, to ‘compose the wire on screen’.  The tension between competitive appetite and journalistic propriety was stretched to the limit that Friday lunchtime:  several of Layzell’s interviewees repeat the mantra ‘get it first but get it right’.   A lunchtime news broadcast wasn’t scheduled and getting the studio set up for one was not a quick process.   The early announcements of events in Dallas were, in effect, radio bulletins on a TV screen – the first one interrupting the soap As the World Turns (which was also broadcast live in those days).

Yet all this isn’t quite enough for a feature-length documentary about the assassination of President Kennedy and One PM:  CST evinces a sense of unease that the excitement of news gathering might be thought a disrespectful angle.  The dramatic reconstructions within the film are in the CBS studio or the Parkland Hospital, where the rookie UPI reporter Bill Hampton uses his wits to commandeer a pay phone.  These reconstructions, although they don’t compare with either the news film or the talking heads on screen, aren’t badly done.  They get across something of the journalists’ battle between professional and personal reactions to what’s happening.  (The young woman – the only one you see – in the CBS newsroom suggests someone propelled by a combination of adrenalin and disbelief.  There’s one shot too many, however, of one of her shellshocked male colleagues meeting the eyes of the President in his photograph on the office wall.)   However, the portentous music that Layzell uses – which is superfluous anyway, thanks to the gripping soundtrack of voices – doesn’t help allay concerns that One PM:  CST is in a sense using a national tragedy to tell a story about the heroics of journalists.  I don’t know if this is what caused Layzell to fill out the film with more familiar material about JFK the statesman and the short-lived golden age of his presidency but I think his decision to do so is counterproductive.

This reverent aspect is relatively shallow – it’s frustrating, for example, not to be given any substantiation of the claim made that in November 1963 Kennedy was on the verge of ending the Cold War (even if you can easily accept that the circumstances of his death suspended any possibility of a thaw).   The run-through of Kennedy’s achievements as a world leader was largely removed from the shorter version of Layzell’s film shown on More4.  These cuts, which made JFK:  News of a Shooting a more coherent (and honest) piece, also confirmed how peripheral the material had been to the core of One PM: CST.   Most of Layzell’s interviewees were or still are journalists and their testimony is absorbing and often affecting.   Non-journalist exceptions such as Bill Clinton aren’t nearly so compelling, partly because they’re too familiar and partly because they’re not part of the main subject of this documentary.  Among the journalists, there are a few well-known names and faces – such as Dan Rather and Robert McNeil (who worked for NBC at the time of the assassination); of those who were new to me, Marianne Means (the Washington correspondent for Hearst Newspapers) and Bill Hampton were the most striking contributors – Hampton especially.

Leslie Woodhead’s The Day Kennedy Died is centred on the recollections of those who weren’t either famous before, or professionally involved with, the events of 22 November 1963.   The opening montage of short excerpts from interviews with these people doesn’t augur well.  They come out with vague, melodramatic clichés about fear in Dallas about what would happen on JFK’s visit there, about America changing forever that weekend – without any suggestion of how it changed.  You don’t need to have been personally caught up in what happened to deliver insights like these.  But this prologue turns out to be no taste of things to follow – it contains just about the only tired words in the whole of Woodhead’s film.  The testimonies are personal and individual and the whole film is more emotionally gripping than One PM:  Central Standard Time (even though I recorded it and fast-forwarded through the commercial breaks).  More brutal too – with the references to what physically happened to the President’s skull and brain.   Woodhead also uses sound recordings that I’d never heard before – Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office, Lady Bird Johnson’s audio diary, in which she records her shocked admiration of Jackie Kennedy, ‘that immaculate woman’, whose clothes were stained with her husband’s blood.  After hearing this, I looked at Jackie’s legs when she walked from the plane after Air Force One landed in Washington and saw the dark stains that I’d never noticed before.   (This was a few days before seeing The Butler and Parkland.)

Watching The Day Kennedy Died made me realise what it meant for me personally that the Kennedy presidency was the first to be defined by television.  I remember watching coverage of the assassination on television (a couple of weeks before my eighth birthday); for me, television is the event’s fons et origo.  Woodhead alternates between colour film and black-and-white TV footage.  For the most part, the monochrome images are the more startlingly immediate – the inevitable exception is the 8mm colour film from Abraham Zapruder’s camera.  It still amazes how much there is of the events on contemporary record.  The close chronological structure of Woodhead’s film emphasises that nothing seems to be missing.  If Woodhead has inserted a few crafty bits of reconstruction, they’re certainly not obvious.

Both films are narrated by big-name actors – Layzell’s by George Clooney and Woodhead’s by Kevin Spacey.   At the Curzon Soho screening, Layzell offered as an appetising extra an interview done with Clooney after he’d recorded the narration for One PM:  Central Standard Time.   There was a slightly obsequious flavour to the information that the interview was done at Clooney’s ‘villa on Lake Como’ and the whole interview was odd.  Interspersed with clips from One PM: CST, it came across as a souped-up trailer and it’s strange seeing a trailer immediately before you see the whole film.  If you weren’t aware that he’s the son of a TV anchorman and knew Walter Cronkite well, you might wonder why Clooney is assumed to be such an expert on the man and the media world he was part of:  I’d guess there were people in the audience who thought Clooney was considered qualified rather because (a) he’s known to be a political animal and (b) he made Good Night, and Good Luck.  Layzell’s enthralment with Clooney lingers on into One PM: CST itself as the actor walks through a room looking at framed photographs of Kennedy and Cronkite – it’s as if Layzell feels his film needs this star imprimatur.  This is a pity because, once he gets into the business of narrating, Clooney is impeccable.  He shows perfect judgment in when to give the words a dramatic inflection and when to let them speak for themselves.  (The narrative is well written.)  While Clooney’s tone is spot on, Kevin Spacey – because you’re so used to hearing his voice delivering dry putdowns – doesn’t sound fully sincere.  You get used to his narration of Leslie Woodhead’s film without ever feeling that it’s right.

Fifty years on, it’s difficult to make emotional sense of what happened in Dealey Plaza – difficult too to imagine how tough it must be for Americans who were older than I was to get their hearts round it.  The sad-faced Bill Hampton says memorably in One PM:  Central Standard Time, ‘It was hard to take in.  Even harder now.’  Part of you still feels there must be an explanation which will prevent the assassination happening at all.  (This may be a reason, if not the main reason, for the longevity of conspiracy theories about the killing – that many Americans can’t accept that the President was murdered and, consequently, the explanation of how he was murdered.)   The death seems all the more incredible when, as in these films, there’s detailed coverage in archive footage of the earlier ports of call on Kennedy’s tour of Texas, including Fort Worth earlier on the morning of 22 November.  (It was rainy there but the sun was shining in Dallas, so allowing the roof of the presidential limousine to be removed for the motorcade.)  Although it’s been known for many years now that JFK was not in good health in 1963, he is shockingly in the prime of life arriving at Love Field, less than an hour before he was shot.  Alastair Layzell’s film also includes footage, which I don’t remember seeing before, of people waiting at the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy was due to give a speech (at 1pm Central Standard Time).  The footage is powerful because the people at the Trade Mart appear to be doing no more than waiting, puzzled as to why the President hasn’t yet arrived.

Alastair Layzell’s mini-hagiography, although it’s the flimsiest part of his film, is a reminder of President Kennedy’s enduring mythic standing – in spite of all that’s since been confirmed about the less public aspects of his life.   Before I saw either of these documentaries or other fiftieth anniversary fare, I read a piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, which concludes that:

‘When Kennedy died, and the mystery of his murder began, we took for granted that the patrician in tails with the perfect family and the sordid Oswald belonged to different worlds, just as Ruby’s Carousel Club and the White House seemed light-years apart.  When Kennedy was shot, the dignified hierarchy seemed plausible.  Afterward, it no longer did.’

There’s no gainsaying what JFK meant to many people and the tragic images of his assassination and its aftermath exert an unyielding grip:  Jackie and Robert Kennedy and the children on the steps of the Capitol; ‘John-John’, whose father’s funeral took place on his third birthday, saluting the flag-draped coffin; Walter Cronkite, adjusting his spectacles and taking a deep breath. There’s no denying either the power of Kennedy’s political rhetoric but Adam Gopnik’s piece is salutary.  You can’t help feeling that the affairs and the Mafia connections and the political chicanery tend to be elided in films about JFK in order to simplify as much as possible the idea that hope died at 1pm CST.

11, 14, 22 November 2013