Sixty years after PresidentJohn F. Kennedy’sassassination, some of the last surviving witnesses are sharing their testimony of that day and the events that followed for the first time in a documentary.
Former journalist Peggy Simpson, Dallas reporter Bill Mercer, and former police officer Rusty Robbins recall what they experienced on Nov. 22, 1963, inJFK: One Day In America —the second installment of National Geographic’sEmmy Award-winningOne Day In Americahistorical docuseries franchise.
The series, which premieres Nov. 5 to mark the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, serves as something of an oral history from the perspectives of those on the ground, tapping into their lived experiences.
“It was just impossible to believe,” Mercer, who was the first to inform Lee Harvey Oswald he was being charged with murder, says in the series of first learning that Kennedy had been shot.
President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.Bettmann Archive
“He was a known person. He wasn’t someone they expected to do any harm,” Simpson adds.
Bettmann / Getty Images
“I was sorry that he had messed up like that. He committed a grave error — one that you can’t eradicate,” Robbins says in the series.
He continues: “Jack did what he did. He wanted to be somebody. Everybody loved the president so everybody hated the man who had killed the president. Somehow [Jack thought] this was going to make Jack a hero.”
The three-part limited series, in official collaboration with The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, will encompass “a comprehensive account of that tragic moment in American history and the ripples that followed,” according to a press release.
source: people.com
