Every Movie President John F. Kennedy Watched While In Office

President John F. Kennedy watched at least 66 feature movies during his almost three years in the White House, including the very first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), the Italian classic La Dolce Vita (1960), John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960), Splendor in the Grass (1961), starring Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, and the unfortunately semi-prophetic The Manchurian Candidate (1962), among a host of others.

After years of research, I’ve compiled the most complete list of President Kennedy’s movie habits during his almost three years in office, relying most heavily on the logs of Paul Fischer, the White House projectionist who started under President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and retired under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. But I also conducted research at the Warner Bros. archive at USC, scoured political biographies for hints about screenings and sometimes found public movie screenings in newspaper accounts from the time.

Ever since I became interested in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) around 2015, I’ve been obsessed with learning more about the movies that presidents have watched in office, dating back to Teddy Roosevelt in 1908. I’ve looked at the movies watched by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush. I’ve even looked at the movies First Lady Jackie Kennedy watched. And I’ve spent years compiling a master list of every movie ever screened at the White House and Camp David through FOIA requests to presidential libraries.

In one way, learning about the movies that presidents watched is just pure voyeurism. There may not be much to glean from knowing President Harry Truman watched Disney’s Cinderella with his family while on vacation in Florida. But it sure is interesting to imagine. In another way, there are some very real lessons to be learned from dissecting the movies that presidents watched. And in the case of President Kennedy, we get a glimpse at how presidents influenced their own image on screen, as precisely that happened when Kennedy helped cast himself in PT-109, a film about Kennedy’s service in World War II.

President Kennedy was raised on movies, since his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., worked as a producer in the late 1920s. The senior Kennedy, who was one of the wealthiest people on the planet, even had an affair with Gloria Swanson during that era, though the actress is best remembered today for a role that would come much later in Sunset Boulevard (1950). The relationship was right out in the open, with the press writing about it regularly. One newspaper in Boston reported that Joe’s calls to the actress, from New York to Los Angeles, were probably, “the largest private telephone bill in the nation during the year 1929.” The Kennedys even had a screening room when John was a child where they could watch first-run movies, a luxury almost no other kids got to experience growing up in the 1920s.

What Makes President Kennedy Different

While President Jimmy Carter likely watched the most movies per day in office, and Nixon arguably watched some of the weirdest movies, Kennedy easily watched the biggest variety of international films of any president, including the most in a foreign language, though the latter may have been due to his wife Jackie’s fluency in multiple languages. Kennedy watched plenty of British movies, while also viewing movies from Sweden, Italy, West Germany and France during his time at the White House.

Kennedy watched the Swedish film The Devil’s Eye (1961), directed by Ingmar Bergman, the German detective movie It Happened In Broad Daylight (1961) and the French drama Last Year at Marienbad (1961). However, it appears Last Year at Marienbad must’ve been a choice by the First Lady, since the president walked out after about 20 minutes.

President Kennedy watched 13 foreign language movies while in the White House and 21 movies produced by studios outside of the U.S., though 8 of those foreign-produced films were British productions presented in English.

The very first movie President Kennedy watched while in office wasn’t at the White House at all. Instead, Kennedy had to slip out to see director Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), which White House projectionist Paul Fischer didn’t have a copy of, on account of the film’s 70mm projection requirements. The White House theater’s projectors could only handle 35mm films.

Kennedy crossed a picket line to watch Spartacus on Feb. 3, 1961 at the Warner Theatre, not far from the White House, though it wasn’t over a labor dispute. The American Legion was picketing the film over the film’s writer, Dalton Trumbo, who was a Communist caught up in the anti-Communist fervor of Hollywood in the 1950s.

Kennedy went to Spartacus with a friend, Paul “Red” Fay, who the president knew through his service in World War II. Fay was tasked with buying the tickets so that nobody would know the president would be in attendance. But the theater’s management found out somehow, as Fay would recall years later in an oral history, perhaps because Secret Service had to ensure the theater was safe. The President and Fay arrived a little late to the screening, hoping to sneak in without being noticed, but it was clear everyone was waiting for him. They even stopped the movie and rewound it to start from the beginning, something Kennedy only learned about later.

The White House’s projector limitations would again become an issue when Kennedy wanted to watch How the West Was Won (1962), a sprawling Cinerama experience that required three projectors running at the same time. However, the studio did provide 35mm prints of that film to the White House, which Kennedy watched over two nights on April 3, 1963 and April 5, 1963. The 35mm version of the film wouldn’t be released to the general public until the summer of 1964.

Kennedy’s First Movie in the White House

The first movie Kennedy actually watched in the White House was The Misfits (1961), starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, on Feb. 18, 1961. Kennedy had an affair with Monroe and the FBI reportedly knew about it, thanks to a bug they’d placed in actor Peter Lawford’s house. The audio surveillance apparently captured the president having sex with Monroe in November of 1961.

Kennedy didn’t seem to like The Misfits, according to biographer William Manchester, whose book Portrait of a President, came out in 1962, while the president was still in office. Kennedy “gave up” on the movie, along with at least two other films. Apparently Kennedy walked out of Butterfield 8 (1960), starring Elizabeth Taylor, and the Billy Wilder-directed One, Two, Three (1960), according to Manchester.

One thing that shows up in several of the movies Kennedy watched is the tale of the rebellious loner who’s ready to take on the whole world. We see that in Spartacus, the story of a slave who took on the entire Roman empire, but it also shows up in films like Hud (1963) starring Paul Newman. In Hud, Newman plays a womanizing rebel who refuses to play by society’s rules, which Kennedy watched in Feb. 1963. Perhaps Kennedy, who became the youngest person to ever become president when he was sworn in at the age of 43, still identified with the rebellion of youth when he ascended to the nation’s highest office. We know for certain he identified with the womanizing elements of the film.

John Paul Jones (1959), another movie Kennedy watched in Feb. 1963, has strong elements of rebellion despite being a completely different style of movie. While Hud could perhaps be described as a neo-western, John Paul Jones is a biographical epic set during the American Revolutionary War. The film’s title character, played by Robert Stack, inherits his brother’s estate after he died, a storyline that may have resonated with the president, since his older brother died in World War II and was thought to be the man Joe Kennedy was preparing for greatness. Coincidentally, fellow Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt loved the story of the real life John Paul Jones enough to write a movie treatment of the Navy hero’s life in 1923, before he would become president, and sent it unsolicited to Paramount Pictures. Apparently it wasn’t any good and Roosevelt had to be gently told it wouldn’t be produced.

Another movie Kennedy watched with a man-against-the-world story was Lonely Are the Brave (1962), starring Kirk Douglas, on Nov. 27, 1962. The movie, which President Richard Nixon would also watch over a decade later at Camp David on Sept. 30, 1973, was screened for the president and First Lady along with friends, which included the Washington editor of Newsweek Ben Bradlee, who would describe the film as “brutal” and “sadistic.” Kennedy, who suffered from severe health problems throughout most of his life, including severe back pain, had an orthopedic bed brought into the White House theater to watch Lonely Are the Brave.

“Kennedy watched, lying down on a bed placed in the front row, his head propped up on pillows,” Bradlee wrote in a book published long after Kennedy had died.

In Lonely Are the Brave, Douglas stars as a Korean War veteran who feels like he was born in the wrong era. He’s a rancher who rejects everything about modern society and decides to break his friend out of jail. First, he has to get picked up by police by starting a barroom fight, and once inside the jail he successfully liberates himself, setting off a manhunt by the antagonist of the movie, Walter Matthau. Written by Dalton Trumbo, who also wrote Spartacus, the entire film is a meditation on living the life you want to live, no matter society’s expectations.

Lonely Are the Brave was directed by David Miller, who would also direct the conspiracy theory thriller Executive Action (1973), released a decade after Kennedy was assassinated.

The Hustler (1961) is yet another movie about a rebel who plays by his own rules, again played by Paul Newman. Kennedy watched The Hustler at the White House on Oct. 18, 1961. Newman was a popular leading man in the Kennedy White House theater, with the president watching another one of his films Paris Blues (1961) during his tenure.

From Black-and-White to Color

Kennedy’s time in office, Jan. 20, 1961 to Nov. 22, 1963, is an interesting period in Hollywood history, if for no other reason than movies were making the switch from black-and-white to color. Color movies existed decades earlier, but they were expensive to produce in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

By the early 1960s, the cost of color film stock had come down and, most importantly, the movie industry was struggling to compete with television. While most Americans had a TV by the early 1960s, most of those were black-and-white sets. In 1962, when ABC debuted its first color show with “The Jetsons,” less than 3% of American households had a color TV. Color was a way for movie producers to differentiate the medium and get more people into theater seats. Kennedy watched 30 color feature films during his time in office, roughly half of all the full-length movies he’d see.

It appears President Kennedy watched a couple of films more than once, if the Fischer logs are accurate. Kennedy watched The Guns of Navarone (1961) twice, first on June 15, 1961 and then again on June 21, 1961. Kennedy also watched West Side Story (1961) twice, first by himself on April 7, 1962 and then with the First Lady on April 28, 1962. I note that the Fischer logs may not be completely accurate, only because there are a number of occasions where it’s explicitly noted that the president watched longer movies over a couple of nights. The Guns of Navarone and West Side Story are both over 2.5 hours long.

Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president in the U.S. and opponents tried to insist he would be beholden to the Catholic Church, and specifically the Pope, if he made it to the White House. So it’s interesting to see that Kennedy watched at least two movies the Church officially condemned, including the Italian film La Dolce Vita (1960), directed by Federico Fellini. While the movie is widely considered to be one of the greatest ever created, it was essentially forbidden for any practicing Catholic to watch over controversy surrounding religious symbolism—Fellini was denounced as everything from an atheist to a Communist, though the film is open to interpretation. And that didn’t stop President Kennedy from watching it at the White House on April 25, 1961. Kennedy also watched the French New Wave classic directed by Francois Truffaut, Jules and Jim, which the U.S.-based Catholic organization Legion of Decency condemned as being prohibited for all Catholics to watch. While not explicit in any way, the film features a love triangle and relationships that would be considered unconventional by the church.

Who’s Watching With the President

The Paul Fischer logs contain notes on who was watching movies at the White House, which you can see as they were written at my website. And while it’s mostly filled with movies the President and First Lady watched together, often with friends or members of the White House staff, there are a few notable screenings where it’s just Kennedy alone. For example, President Kennedy watched The Lion (1962) alone on Sept. 29, 1962. The Lion stars William Holden as a man visiting East Africa where his ex-wife and young child now live on an animal reserve with her new husband, a former big game hunter. The president’s official daily diary ends at 3:05 p.m. that day, only noting that Kennedy was spending the rest of the day conferring with the Attorney General about the segregationists at the University of Mississippi who were trying to keep a Black man, James Meredith, from enrolling at the school.

There is also one notable movie screening where Kennedy watched a movie at the White House theater with a mystery guest. On August 19, 1961, Kennedy watched an early British rock ‘n roll movie titled Expresso Bongo (1959) with “1 guest” as it’s noted in the Paul Fischer logs. Typically, the guests have their names in the logs, but this time it seemed like Fischer wanted to protect the president’s privacy. The First Lady was out of town that night and Fischer would take that secret to the grave, refusing to spill the identity of the “guest” to a documentary crew in the early 2000s.

President Kennedy had major back problems and often preferred sitting in a rocking chair, which can be seen in some photos from the White House theater held by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. What you can’t see in those photos is the orthopedic bed that was reportedly placed in the screening room that also gave him comfort.

Sometimes, the movies played at the White House were used as a way to treat old friends, like when Kennedy had the crew of his patrol boat PT-109 over on Feb. 17, 1961 to watch Make Mine Mink, a comedy about a group of criminals stealing mink coats. Kennedy served on the PT-109 during World War II, which was sunk during battle with Japanese forces in the Pacific Ocean. Kennedy and his crew were stranded on an island for days waiting for a rescue, a story that would get the Hollywood treatment during his time in office.

The First War Film About a Sitting U.S. President

I conducted research at the Warner Bros. archive at the University of Southern California, which holds invaluable papers about the production of PT-109. From the archives at USC we can see that the White House was very sensitive to the idea that PT-109 might be receiving special treatment from the government because the movie was about a sitting president. But that didn’t stop Kennedy from getting screen tests of possible stars to play the president sent directly to the White House.

It’s also fascinating to look at the changes demanded by the Production Code Administration, the chief censor at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The censors read the script and in a letter to Jack Warner, dated Aug. 29, 1961, made note of several banned words, including “jeez,” “hell,” “damn,” “helluva,” and “hell.” The word “nuts” was even excised from the script, though it’s not clear what the context was.

President Kennedy watched Marines Let’s Go (1961) on February 23, 1962, because director Raoul Walsh was being considered to direct PT-109 for Warner Bros. Kennedy hated the movie and reportedly didn’t even make it through the whole thing, frustrated with the head of the studio, proclaiming, “Tell Jack Warner to go fuck himself.” The director ultimately chosen for PT-109 was Leslie H. Martinson, who primarily worked in TV, including popular Western series like “Maverick” and “Cheyenne.”

PT-109 was, as Time magazine put it at the time, a “wide-screen campaign poster” for the 1964 presidential campaign, even if the White House didn’t want to admit it. It’s filled with the heroics you’d expect, like the real-world story of Kennedy saving the life of a crew member during the long 3-mile swim to land after the torpedo boat is split in half by Japanese forces. But the running joke of the movie—the disrespect shown to Kennedy when only the audience knows it depicts a future president—wears thin. As Time noted, at least the man picked to play Kennedy, Cliff Robertson, wasn’t forced to try that signature Kennedy accent nor adopt the “single hand-stabbing” mannerisms of the future president.

Kennedy watched PT-109 for the first time in its entirety at the White House on January 29, 1963 and watched it again the next day with members of White House staff, including 35 people, according to the Fischer logs. Curiously, Craig McNamara, the son of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, would write that he saw PT-109 at the White House when he was just 13 years old in June 1963, but no such screening shows up in the Fischer logs. McNamara writes in his 2022 book that he remembers the screening “as if it were yesterday,” but it seems likely he’s possibly misremembering the month it happened.

Interestingly, the Fischer logs note that kids John Jr. and Caroline watched PT-109 at the White House on May 22, 1963 with about 60 people in attendance—presumably a group of school children or maybe the screening McNamara attended, though neither the President nor the First Lady were marked as in attendance. Despite being a movie about war, it was clearly deemed sanitized enough for kids.

In the end, PT-109 is a bland and ultimately uninspiring piece of movie history, likely made that way in no small part because Kennedy himself was helping steer the story. But PT-109 wasn’t the only movie that Kennedy actually helped get made. The Manchurian Candidate, based on a book of the same name, almost didn’t get produced because the subject matter involves killing a presidential candidate. Kennedy gave his blessing to his buddy Frank Sinatra, who both starred in and produced the picture, and the filmmakers felt more comfortable making a movie so controversial for the time.

Even though The Manchurian Candidate was long rumored to have been pulled from release after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, that myth isn’t true. The movie had run its course by the time Kennedy was killed, naturally falling out of circulation as movies do since its first release a year before, and was never banned.

Kennedy watched The Manchurian Candidate at the White House on August 29, 1962, and the Fischer logs indicate Kennedy’s Attorney General (and brother) Robert Kennedy was in attendance with six or seven other people who weren’t named.

Movies as a Window to the World

Movie screenings can function as a form of international diplomacy. Just as President Dwight Eisenhower attended a screening of a film about Gandhi with the Indian ambassador during his time in office, President Kennedy attended a public screening of The World of Apu (1959) on Feb. 16, 1961 with India’s ambassador to the U.S., M.C. Chagla. Kennedy also invited the ambassador from Pakistan to watch a USIA-produced film titled Invitation to Pakistan at the White House on July 2, 1962, which was all about the First Lady’s trip to the region.

President Kennedy also watched another USIA film titled Invitation to India at the White House on June 13, 1962, though there weren’t any dignitaries in attendance. But both Invitation to Pakistan and Invitation to India were tremendously popular around the world. The films were translated into 29 different languages and distributed by the USIA in 78 countries around the world. The response was so overwhelming that USIA had trouble keeping up with the requests that they were getting overseas for the films. The First Lady was a popular figure and global audiences often loved seeing her on the big screen.

White House movie screenings can also serve as a way to sit down with friendly politicians. We can see from the Fischer logs that the Kennedys invited Democratic Rep. Torbert H. Macdonald from Massachusetts along with his wife and kids to a screening of the Disney-produced documentary The Horse With the Flying Tail on April 20, 1961. The First Lady was a fan of horseback riding and kept a stable in Upperville, Virginia.

There are also some strange coincidences that pop up in the movies President Kennedy watched. For example, in the film La Dolce Vita there’s a line early in the film where passersby talk about someone being more wealthy than Onassis, a reference to the wealthy Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis. First Lady Jackie Kennedy would eventually marry Onassis in 1968, five years after the president’s assassination.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the foreign films Kennedy watched it’s not clear if the president always watched the U.S. version, which was often sanitized, like in the case of Blood and Roses (1960), which the president watched on Sept. 20, 1961. The lesbian vampire movie was heavily edited before being released in the U.S.

The movies in the Fischer logs also include the U.S. titles of the many British movies Kennedy watched. For example, the Peter Sellers movie Mr. Topaze was released as I Like Money in the U.S. And Kennedy watched Loss of Innocence (1961), which was originally titled The Greengage Summer in the UK, based on the book of that name.

Kennedy certainly watched a number of foreign films that would’ve been considered too arty for mass audiences, including No Exit (1962), based on the play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. But Kennedy also watched more mainstream movies like Lover Come Back (1961), the second of four romantic comedies pairing Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Another popular Doris Day comedy the president watched was That Touch of Mink (1962), which co-starred Cary Grant. Even some of the foreign films Kennedy watched had broad appeal, like Carry On Constable (1961), a slapstick British comedy from the extremely popular Carry On series with its heyday in the UK in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Kennedy also watched a popular comedy movie called The Pleasure of His Company (1961), which starred Bing Crosby as a globetrotting father who comes to see his daughter, played by Debbie Reynolds, get married. Crosby’s character frustrates his ex-wife and her husband, an upper crust couple from San Francisco—a story which has some interesting similarities to a popular movie at the White House during President Lyndon Johnson’s tenure, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. However, where the latter movie is about race, The Pleasure of His Company deals more with social class, a fitting distinction between the efforts of the two presidents and how they exercised their political capital.

Another mainstream comedy Kennedy watched during his time in office was The Facts of Life (1960) with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. Hope was a perennial staple of the White House in the second half of the 20th century, and while he was a Republican who would often make jokes about high taxes in his early films, he got along with Democrats like Kennedy on a personal level. Hope once told an interviewer that he visited Kennedy six times at the White House.

Aside from watching a high number of foreign films, relative to his small number of days in office, Kennedy’s movie habits differentiated him from other presidents in the kinds of movies he didn’t watch. Baseball movies have been tremendously popular at the White House, but Kennedy didn’t watch a single baseball film.

John Ford, The Presidents’ Favorite Director

But one way that Kennedy was much like other presidents is that he watched movies directed by John Ford, a film legend known for his Westerns and probably the most popular director at the White House. Kennedy watched Ford’s Two Rode Together (1961), starring Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark, and Ford’s How the West Was Won (1962), starring Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Gregory Peck. From a political perspective, it’s interesting to note that both of John Ford’s movies here had a mix of leading men with very different political views. Jimmy Stewart was a longtime Republican, while Richard Widmark was a lifelong liberal. And John Wayne was a longtime conservative, while Gregory Peck was a liberal who would even narrate a government-produced propaganda movie about Kennedy’s vice president and successor in the White House, Lyndon B. Johnson.

John Ford was a great admirer of President Kennedy for a number of reasons, not the least of which involved Kennedy’s existence as an Irish-American Catholic ascending to the highest office in the country. Ford, the director of the classic film The Informer (1935) about the struggle for Irish independence, went so far as to say that watching Kennedy in the White House was the first time Ford felt like a “full-fledged American,” according to a biographer of Ford.

“I loved Kennedy. He was a fantastic man, humorous, intelligent generous. His assassination was a terrible blow to America,” Ford said in 1966, according to the book Searching For John Ford.

But Ford was no fan of Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“[Lee Harvey] Oswald was a wretched fool who caused the country immense harm, what with Johnson being such a despicable man. He is a murderer,” Ford reportedly said.

Horrors and Heroism at War

While President Dwight Eisenhower didn’t watch a single movie about World War II—the war that would allow the General to become a household name and enter politics—Kennedy watched plenty of World War II movies. Kennedy watched The Great Escape (1963) and The Password is Courage (1962), both movies following Allied soldiers in Nazi prison camps with an almost light-hearted tone. The president also watched The Longest Day (1962), a star-packed war movie starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda, among plenty of others, that lived up to its name with a 3-hour runtime. So it’s no surprise that Kennedy watched the film across two days, on Oct. 4 and Oct. 7, 1962.

Kennedy also watched The Guns of Navarone (1961), another war movie with huge stars, including Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and British actor David Niven. This movie, however, didn’t document any real action from World War II, unlike The Longest Day which depicted the reality of D-Day. Another World War II-themed film Kennedy saw in the White House was Generale Della Rovere (1959) an Italian film loosely based on the real underground resistance to Nazism in Italy in 1944.

The presidential daily diaries made available by the presidential libraries are also an invaluable resource because they sometimes include notes about whether the president watched an entire film. For example, Kennedy started watching The Ugly American, starring Marlon Brando, on Feb. 20, 1963 but left after about 15 minutes. Sometimes the job of being president takes priority. Kennedy had to ditch the screening because two Cuban fighter jets had buzzed a shrimping boat from Florida roughly 60 miles north of Havana. Newspapers from the time characterized the incident as an “attack.”

The daily diaries also note some screenings the White House projectionist wouldn’t have been aware of. For example, Kennedy watched the Marlon Brando western One-Eyed Jack on March 30, 1961 after playing golf with his father and Peter Lawford in Palm Beach, Florida. A few days later on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1961, Kennedy had a similar day, starting with church, then more golf and finishing the day with a movie. This time it was All in a Night’s Work (1961), with Dean Martin, Shirely MacLaine, and Cliff Robertson.

Sex and Sin on the Big Screen

The vast majority of the films Kennedy watched were new and in theaters when he watched them, but there were a couple that came out before he was in office. Kennedy watched the 1956 film High Society, starring Grace Kelly, for example, spread out over two nights on October 1 and 2, 1962. The president also watched Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn, which originally came out in 1954, on Oct. 30, 1962. Kelly had lunch at the White House with President Kennedy and the First Lady on May 24, 1961, and Kennedy is rumored to have had an affair with Hepburn.

Kennedy watched a number of movies that included Peter Lawford, who became Kennedy’s brother-in-law when he married the president’s sister Patricia. Lawford’s connections as an actor also reportedly served as Kennedy’s way to meet and sleep with Hollywood starlets. President Kennedy watched some of Lawford’s films with Lawford, including Sergeants 3 (1962), which, along with Lawford, starred another personal friend of the president, Frank Sinatra.

Perhaps Kennedy thought he was in for a lusty good time when he sat down to watch The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) on April 24, 1963 but he was almost certainly disappointed. The film is achingly boring, despite its title. Kennedy would’ve had more luck in that department watching the French movie Seven Deadly Sins (1962), as he did on Feb. 27, 1963, which includes some nudity during a segment on lust. Another French film, Dangerous Liaisons (1959), which the president watched at the White House on Jan. 31, 1962, likely scratched that itch.

There are a couple of movies on the list that I’ve never seen and don’t even know how to find a copy of them. No Exit, the 1962 film (not the 1964 version done for the BBC) seems impossible to find. The trailer for the film, which is on YouTube, does look pretty trippy, to say the least. Kennedy watched that one on Feb. 13, 1963. And The Purple Hills, a western from 1961 that Kennedy watched on Nov. 29, 1961, also looks like it’s never gotten a home video release.

Selling America at the Movies

The president also watched a number of government-produced films, including Five Cities of June, which was created by the United States Information Agency (USIA), the country’s foreign propaganda arm that was founded in 1953 under President Eisenhower and closed up shop in 1999. In fact, Kennedy watched Five Cities of June at least three times while in the White House.

Narrated by Charlton Heston, Five Cities of June is a 25-minute film essay of five cities around the world in June of 1963. The film looked at a civil rights battle in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the election of a new Pope at the Vatican, President Kennedy’s famous speech in West Berlin where he declared “ich bin ein Berliner,” anti-Communist forces fighting in Ben Tuong, Vietnam, and the launch of the first woman in space in the Soviet Union.

The space launch in the Soviet Union was reported as an advancement during the Space Race of the 1960s, which normally would’ve been an embarrassment to the U.S., but the narration noted that footage was only made available through official channels and journalists weren’t allowed. Viewers were told we don’t even know which city held such a momentous event, a dig at the closed society of the Soviets. The segment also included previous space launch films provided by the Soviet Union, all identical, yet another opportunity to ridicule the ways in which the Communist country had complete control over the information presented to the public.

USIA was an enormous force in shaping public opinion around the world in the second half of the 20th century. Edward R. Murrow was head of the USIA under Kennedy from 1961 until 1964, when he was working with the CIA to use radio to stir activity by political dissidents in Cuba against Fidel Castro, a chapter in the newsman’s history that’s often overlooked in popular history. But those USIA films were used to spread pro-American messages around the world, especially in non-aligned countries during the Cold War. And the president loved the work they were doing. Kennedy reportedly wrote to Murrow that Five Cities of June was “the best documentary I ever saw.”

But some southern conservatives disliked USIA’s approach to foreign propaganda, especially because segregationists were clearly the bad guys, as was made clear in the Alabama segment of Five Cities of June. George Wallace, a segregationist Democrat, can be seen in the film opposing integration at the University of Alabama.

Five Cities of June was directed by Bruce Herschensohn, whose conservative politics may have made him an odd choice as the liberal president’s favorite government filmmaker. But both men were clearly working with some shared ideals. In fact, Kennedy wanted Herschensohn to produce the president’s reelection film for the 1964 Democratic National Convention. On a phone call with his political advisors in the fall of 1963, Kennedy said they had to get Herschensohn.

“Steve, on this question of the films and who’s going to do them. I thought that film Five Days or Cities in June was—have you seen that film? The guy who wrote the music was called Vershon or something, but God it’s good. Why don’t you get it from George Stevens. Five Cities in June. Look at it. I think the guy’s fantastic,” Kennedy said, according to White House recordings from 1963.

What Kennedy didn’t know at that point was that Herschensohn had already agreed to make a film for the man who would become the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. After President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, the First Lady and her children retreated to Florida for Christmas. Having watched Five Cities of June with Jack at least three times, she now sat down to the film by herself.

Another USIA film the president watched was Progress Through Freedom, titled “Progress Through Liberty” in Fischer’s logs. The film follows the President and First Lady’s trip to Mexico in June 1962. Curiously, I found a telegram in the CIA’s archive dated June 21, 1962 that indicates the agency was monitoring the reactions of Mexican moviegoers to Kennedy’s visit. Ten Mexican federal security police were tasked with watching the audience reaction to newsreel shots of Kennedy in Mexico City, and “audiences were indifferent,” according to the CIA.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The most critical weeks of Kennedy’s entire presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, nearly set the stage for World War III and nuclear horrors beyond our comprehension. The Soviet Union had parked missiles in Cuba to deter a potential invasion of the country, which the U.S. had already failed at during the Bay of Pigs fiasco near the start of Kennedy’s presidency.

On Oct. 27, 1962, arguably the worst day of the crisis, which saw the U.S. and Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear apocalypse, Kennedy watched a double feature including the 1962 short movie An Answer, narrated by Kirk Douglas and produced by the Navy, along with the feature film Roman Holiday. By the morning of Oct. 28, 1962, the Soviet Union announced it was withdrawing the missiles from Cuba following secret negotiations by the White House that promised NATO would pull missiles out of Turkey.

The Last Days to Dallas

Kennedy invited over his friend Ben Bradlee to watch the second James Bond movie From Russia With Love at the White House on Oct. 23, 1963. But unlike Bradlee’s explanation about the president having a bed brought in to watch Lonely Are the Brave, there’s no special seating accommodation mentioned this time.

“The movie was James Bond, and Kennedy seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality,” Bradlee would write in his 1975 book on the president derived from contemporaneous notes about his interactions with Kennedy over the years.

Robert Kennedy, the president’s younger brother and Attorney General, was also at the screening with his wife Ethel, and Robert was “dressed like a Brooks Brothers beatnik,” according to Bradlee. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, five years after his brother.

President Kennedy would sometimes make trips to “the big house” as he and his siblings called it, which was his parents’ home in Massachusetts on the cape. There the family would sometimes watch movies, and while those screenings aren’t in the Fischer logs, we know from the president’s sister Jean, who spoke to PBS for a 2013 documentary, that Kennedy loved a movie of his trip to Ireland in 1963 so much that they watched it three nights in a row.

The last film Kennedy watched while in office was 55 Days at Peking, a historical epic about the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, which the president watched with the First Lady and some unnamed guests on Nov. 10, 1963. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963. And while the Fischer logs include a note that Kennedy watched movies in the White House on Nov. 29, 1963, we can assume that was an obvious error in record-keeping.

Fischer’s White House Movie Logs

The list below includes most of the movies President Kennedy watched, though there are a couple of titles that I couldn’t make out. I’ve included scans of those titles rather than guessing what they may have been. For example, on Nov. 2, 1962, the logs indicate Kennedy watched a newsreel and there’s another word that might say “viking.” There was a French-Italian movie released in 1961 titled The Last of the Vikings, but it’s hard to say definitively whether that’s the movie the president saw. The much more popular movie Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas, came out in 1958—which should illustrate why it’s difficult to make a definitive call in a situation like this without more information.

I’ve also excluded TV episode screenings and home movie screenings that took place in the White House screening room and were noted by Fischer in his logs. There were also a number of movie screenings at the White House attended by members of Kennedy’s staff without the president. For example, it appears that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a special advisor to Kennedy, was often hosting screenings of 20 or more people at the White House theater. One notable screening was Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) which was screened on April 14, 1962 for a group of 25 people that included Schlesinger and Edward R. Murrow, according to the Fischer logs. A similar group watched The Music Man (1962) on May 5, 1962. Kids John Jr. and Caroline also watched movies in the White House theater without the President and First Lady present, including the Disney classic Pinocchio (1940), The Sword in the Stone (1963) and the live action horse movie Misty (1960).

White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger also watched a U.S. Department of Defense film all by himself in the White House theater on March 17, 1962, according to the Fischer logs. The title of the film is simply listed as “Worldwide Fallout.” And while I don’t know for certain whether it was a film about nuclear war, the title certainly suggests it was. The Cuban Missile Crisis was just seven months later.

After Kennedy was assassinated there seemed to be only one man who could properly make a documentary that would pay tribute to Kennedy’s legacy. The USIA commissioned Bruce Herschensohn, the man who created Five Days of June, to direct Years of Lightning, Day of Drums.

Spartacus (1960) – February 3, 1961

Generale Della Rovere (1959) – February 3, 1961

The World of Apu (1959) – February 16, 1961

Make Mine Mink (1960) – February 17, 1961

The Misfits (1961) – February 18, 1961

Tunes of Glory (1960) – March 1, 1961

It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958) – March 3, 1961

The Facts of Life (1960) – March 14, 1961

One-Eyed Jacks (1961) – March 30, 1961

All in a Night’s Work (1961) – April 2, 1961

The Horse with the Flying Tail (1960) – April 20, 1961

The League of Gentlemen (1960) – April 20, 1961

La Dolce Vita (1960) – April 25, 1961

The Alamo (1960) – May 9, 1961

The Pleasure of His Company (1961) – May 10, 1961

The Guns of Navarone (1961) – June 15, 1961

The Guns of Navarone (1961) – June 21, 1961

Love and the Frenchwoman (1960) – June 29, 1961

Force In Waiting (Navy) – August 7, 1961

Attila (1954) – August 14, 1961

Two Way Stretch (1960) – August 17, 1961

Two Rode Together (1961) – August 18, 1961

Expresso Bongo (1959) – August 19, 1961

The Devil’s Eye (1959) – September 12, 1961

Splendor in the Grass (1961) – September 13, 1961

Circle of Deception (1960) – September 18, 1961

Blood and Roses (1960) – September 20, 1961

The Hustler (1961) – October 18, 1961

The Queen of the Pirates (1960) – October 25, 1961

Loss of Innocence (1961) – November 3, 1961

Carry on Constable (1960) – November 28, 1961

The Purple Hills (1961) – November 29, 1961

One, Two, Three (1961) – December 2, 1961

Lover Come Back (1961) – December 11, 1961

Paris Blues (1961) – December 11, 1961

Dangerous Liaisons (1959) – January 31, 1962

Marines, Let’s Go (1961) – February 23, 1962

Test of Evan McCord [for PT-109 casting] – February 23, 1962

Walk on the Wild Side (1962) – March 2, 1962

Test of PT-109 – March 5, 1962

Sergeants Three (1962) – March 5, 1962

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – March 7, 1962

Test of PT-109 – April 7, 1962

West Side Story (1961) – April 7, 1962

West Side Story (1961) – April 28, 1962

That Touch of Mink (1962) – May 1, 1962

An Answer (1962, Navy) – May 17, 1962

I Like Money (1961) – June 8, 1962

Invitation to India (USIA) and Invitation to Pakistan (USIA) – June 13, 1962

Jules and Jim (1962) – June 21, 1962

Invitation to Pakistan (USIA) – July 2, 1962

“K”s [Kennedys?] in Mexico – July 25, 1962

Progress Through Liberty [aka Progress Through Freedom?] (USIA) – August 14, 1962

Friendly Neighbors (Mexican) – August 15, 1962

People in Service – August 24, 1962

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – August 29, 1962

The Lion (1962) – September 29, 1962

High Society, first half (1956) – October 1, 1962

High Society, second half (1956) – October 2, 1962

The Longest Day (1962) first half – October 4, 1962

The Longest Day (1962) second half – October 7, 1962

An Answer (1962, Navy) and Roman Holiday (1953) – October 27, 1962

Sabrina (1954) – October 30, 1962

Newsreel and [unreadable title] – November 2, 1962

Phaedra (1962) – November 20, 1962

Lonely Are The Brave (1962) – November 27, 1962

Dr. No (1962) – November 28, 1962

The John Glenn Story (1962, NASA and Warner Bros.) – December 17, 1962

Waltz of the Toreadors (1962) – January 20, 1963

PT-109 (1963) – January 29, 1963

PT-109 (1963) – January 30, 1963

John Paul Jones (1959) – February 5, 1963

Hud (1963) – February 7, 1963

The Password is Courage (1962) – February 11, 1963

No Exit, aka Sinners Go To Hell (1962) – February 13, 1963

The Ugly American (1963) – February 20, 1963 (Pres. only saw about 15 minutes)

Seven Capital Sins [Seven Deadly Sins?] – February 27, 1963

[unreadable movie title] – March 3, 1963

How the West Was Won (1962) – April 3, 1963

How the West Was Won (1962) – April 5, 1963 (reels 8-9)

Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) – April 24, 1963

The Great Escape (1963) – April 26, 1963

Five Cities of June (1963, USIA) – October 18, 1963

From Russia With Love (1963) – October 23, 1963

In the French Style (1963) – November 1, 1963

In the French Style (1963) – November 2, 1963

Five Cities of June (1963, USIA) – November 2, 1963

Johnny Cool (1963) – November 9, 1963

55 Days at Peking (1963) – November 10, 1963