Director Rob Reiner On Solving The JFK Assassination With His New Podcast [Exclusive Interview]
Rob Reiner has directed some of the most beloved movies in the history of motion pictures. His seven-film run of "This Is Spinal Tap," "The Sure Thing," "Stand by Me," "The Princess Bride," "When Harry Met Sally...," "Misery" and "A Few Good Men" is remarkable.
That he transitioned from his portrayal of Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law, contemptuously dubbed "Meathead," on "All in the Family" to being a first-rate director shouldn't have come as a surprise. His father, Carl Reiner, was one of the greatest comedy writers of the 20th century. No one is a preordained success, but if you decide to pursue a career in entertainment coming out of that environment, you at least have a rock-solid notion of what works.
Reiner also, thanks to his father, developed a social conscience. As he knocked out his string of hit films, he established himself as one of Hollywood's most outspoken celebrities. His politics were unabashedly liberal, which irked moviegoers who leaned right, but I don't know how you can fault the man for using his fame to fight for the legalization of gay marriage and the diminishment of the tobacco industry. These are righteous causes.
Now in the third act of his career, Reiner is tackling the most daunting cause of his lifetime. He is going to solve the mystery of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Reiner has teamed with journalist Soledad O'Brien for "Who Killed JFK?," a ten-part podcast dedicated to separating irrefutable facts from government-invented misinformation. He's assembled historians and assassination experts to knock down every false claim and assumption about the history-altering crime. He's doing this because he fervently believes JFK's murder derailed a country that was on track to a more peaceful, inclusive existence, and he wants to pull us back from the precipice of fascistic governance vehemently promised by Donald Trump.
Has Reiner succeeded? Judging from the two released episodes, I can say that, as someone who's read a ton of books on this subject, he's delivered an engagingly lucid primer. As for solving what he calls "the greatest murder mystery in American history," I Zoomed with the filmmaker, and he teased some of the revelations to come. We also discussed his directorial career, and how this podcast fits thematically in his oeuvre.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
'Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense'
I, like many Americans and many people worldwide, am fascinated by this topic and have read many books on the subject arguing both the single gunman theory and delving into the many conspiracy theories that have popped up. What did you think you could bring to the discussion, a discussion that we've been having vigorously for so many years?
Well, what I was hoping to do, because I've been focused on this on and off as information is revealed over the past 60 years, I wanted to find a way to put it all together. Because what happens is if you don't follow this, you get little bits of pieces of information that get revealed over time, and sometimes they're separated by decades. And if you don't understand the context and don't understand how it fits into the overall picture of something, you could come up with any kind of theory that would be like, "Oh, that's who did it! Oh, that's who did it!"
And what I wanted to do with this podcast was essentially take everything that we've learned over a period of 60 years and put it in one place in context with what happened. And for me, who was alive at the time and who was traumatized by this as the whole country was — it was a national trauma that an American president would be shot in broad daylight on the streets of an American city, and then, two days later, [Lee Harvey Oswald], who was accused of killing him, himself would be murdered on live television, which I saw happen. You go, "Oh my God." Your head is spinning. You go, "What's going on here?"
And at the time, we were the good guys. We had beaten the Nazis, we had stopped fascism, we trusted our government. The government told us that it was a lone gunman. It was a guy up in a sixth floor of the building, and that's how it happened, and we bought it. We believed it. And it was only until people started reading – it was a 20-volume report, the Warren Commission report — people started reading it and they went, "Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense." And people started criticizing it and analyzing it. And then over a period of years, many things have been revealed that we now know are true.
'The one thing we know for a fact is it wasn't a single gunman'
We didn't know at the time that the CIA had a voluminous file on Lee Harvey Oswald; that they opened a file when he went to Russia, and for four years before the assassination, they had thousands and thousands of pages on the connection between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald. We didn't know that at the time. We didn't know a lot of things. They never interviewed any of the Secret Service people that were actually there. So all of these things, we try to put it in an aggregate and tell what we think happened.
I've visited Dealey Plaza many times. I've read tons of books. I've talked to forensic experts. I've talked to everybody who was alive, who was there at the time — Secret Service agents, CIA agents — and you start to put the picture together and understand exactly what happened. And the one thing we know for a fact is it wasn't a single gunman. It just could not happen. It does not happen that way. It was a conspiracy. Then you have to figure out, well, what is the conspiracy? Who's doing what? How are they interconnected? And that's what the podcast will do. It'll lay it out on how it was done.
And the reason we know it's not a conspiracy ... I'll give you one little hint. I can't tell you the whole thing now because it won't make any sense unless you listen to the whole 10 episodes and we give you the context and we've laid the foundation, you'll understand how we get to the conclusion we do. But you approach it like a detective. You say, "Okay, who has the motive? Who has the opportunity, the motive? Who benefits? What are the forensics? What is the underlying situation?" We approach all those things and then a little bit of information comes out and we're, "Oh, wait a minute. I see how that works."
'Why did that first shot miss?'
It didn't hit me until fairly recently that the Warren Commission said there were three shots fired. They said that the first shot missed. And they had to say that because a guy got hit in the cheek with a piece of concrete [dislodged by a bullet] that hit a curb. So they had two shots left that had to kill Kennedy and make all the damage on [Texas Governor John Connolly]. But it wasn't so much that that was preposterous, that it would be a single bullet that would go from the sixth floor, six to eight inches below Kennedy's neck and then travel upwards and come out his neck and do all that damage to Connelly. That is preposterous on its surface. But the thing that I started thinking about is why did that first shot miss?
That's the thing that really opened it up for me, because you got a sharpshooter up there. You got somebody who was an assassin up there. He didn't just miss the president, he didn't miss the car, he missed the entire motorcade. He missed everything. Why would a guy like that miss? How could you miss so badly? And we'll explain why in how we put it all together. You put all these pieces together, and you make your best estimate. We know it was a conspiracy, but then we make the best guess of how that conspiracy unfolded.
'It is a loss of innocence'
One thing that you've said that struck me, and this is a thematic thing, is that this podcast thing is motivated by the loss of innocence that happened that day. There was a loss of innocence, certainly for young people, but really for most Americans. You said we thought that the country was in good shape, things were going well. I think that's a theme that pops up a lot in your work. People of my generation ... I was the same age as the kids in "Stand By Me" when that movie came out, and that movie changed my life forever. That theme, that loss of innocence as a throughline through your work, how do you feel about that and has that changed for you over your career?
I think you made a good point. It is a loss of innocence. I mean, you look at your mom and dad and you look at, in this case, the President and the First Lady. These are father/mother figures. These are people that you look up to. And like I said, the country was in a very good place at the time. And all of a sudden you think, "Oh, wait a minute. The government is lying to me? They're lying about this?" That really hurts.
And you look at where people were at the time, I think the approval rating for people trusting the government was [above 70 percent] at the time. Where we sit here now, as we're talking, it's in the teens. It started with the lies about the Kennedy assassination, but then it was Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, weapons of mass destruction ... and you really start to lose complete faith in the government.
'We have to build our democracy on the foundation of truth'
It's not like there haven't been conspiracies before and disinformation; they exist. We got into the Spanish-American War because they sunk the [USS Maine]. "Remember the Maine!" They made us believe that. The Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam ... all these things. But the more you distrust the government, the weaker democracy becomes. And that's one of the things I wanted to do with this. Right now, democracy is hanging by a thread. This next election, we're going to determine, and it's not hyperbole, we're going to determine do we want to continue 240 years of self-rule, or do we want to be a fascistic state? Do we want fascism? That's what we're going to determine in the next election. So if we are ever going to have a healthy democracy, it has to be based on trust.
It's like any relationship: You have to trust the other person, and that trust is based on truth. If you know the truth, then you can say, "Okay, we can build something from here." And if we're going to build a more perfect union, we have to come to grips with what we did to the Native population, what we did to African-Americans and the Black population in slavery, and we have to come to grips with what has been hidden from us as citizens from our government. So that's what I'm hoping to do. It'll start the process.
It's painful. It's painful to think that elements, rogue elements of the government killed our own president, but that happened. That happened. Elements of our government killed plenty other world leaders. And we know that because that came out through the Church Committee and through information that we learned many, many decades after the Kennedy assassination. So we're learning the truth, and we have to build our democracy on the foundation of truth.
'I mean, people, they hate me'
I 100% agree with you on that. It is a very frightening time in this country. I've got five more minutes with you, and I would kick myself if I didn't ask, but going back to your body of work, you've made some of the most indelible, entertaining films of my lifetime. No filmmaker can control this, but I'm curious as to how you want people — and you've got many more films to make, and maybe podcasts, too -– to look back on your work? How do you want them to feel about your career, and what do you want them to take away from it?
Listen, they take away what they want. I mean, people, they hate me. A lot of people hate me because I'm outspoken, and you just have to look at my Twitter, X Feed, whatever the heck they call it now, and the comments they make about me are just astounding. So people are going to have their own opinions about me. Some will like me, some will hate me. I just hope that they think that I try to do something honest and that whatever extension of my crazy mind has touched them in some way.
And then the political work I've done, people come up to me who got married because of the federal lawsuit that we filed for same-sex marriage, for marriage equality, and that makes me feel good that people come up to me and say, "Thank you so much for helping and doing that." You want to believe that you didn't take up space, that your time on the planet wasn't wasted, and you tried to do [your] best. I used to make a joke. I don't think I'm going to be buried, but I used to make the joke that if I get buried, the tombstone would read "Now I'm in this place." It's like, "I'm over here now, and I'll be over there."
'I don't know if it's my best, but it's the one that means the most to me'
Well, the political stuff, because my parents are Fox News addicts and I've kind of lost them, if I mention your name, they're going to roll their eyes.
Oh no, they'll hate me. They'll hate me.
Even though they love "The Princess Bride" and they love "Stand by Me."
Ted Cruz loves "The Princess Bride!"
Oh, that's good. Good to have him in your corner there. Which film of yours do you think is the most underappreciated, the one you wish people would give another shot?
Geez, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you mentioned "Stand By Me." I don't think it's underappreciated; people love that movie. That's the one that means the most to me, that has the most emotional connection for me of all the films I've made. I don't know if it's my best, but it's the one that means the most to me.
Why is that?
Well, because first I was 12 in 1959. I had three other friends; I didn't go through what they did, but I also had the feeling of not knowing how my father felt about me, and that is a main theme in the film where [Wil Wheaton] says, "My father doesn't love me." And the character played by River Phoenix says, "No, no, he loves you. He just doesn't know you. He doesn't understand you." So I had those feelings when I was growing up, and that became the basis for the film. And plus, it's kind of a combination: There's a lot of humor in it, but there's also melancholy and emotion and nostalgia and all of that. And that is more of a reflection of who I am than any of the others, I think.
"Who Killed JFK?" is currently available via iTunes and Spotify. Mr. Reiner would also like you to check out his excellent Albert Brooks documentary "Defending My Life," which is streaming on Max.