Monday, May 1, 2017 at 9 PM
May 29, 2017, is the 100th birthday of the 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
We Knew JFK is an hour-long radio documentary on the life of John F. Kennedy, told in oral history form, through the first-person recollections of those who knew him. The program is constructed from a remarkable collection of audio interviews, recorded half a century ago and archived at the Kennedy Library in Boston, where they have gone largely unheard by the general public.
We Knew JFK first aired on public radio stations nationwide in November 2013, around the 50th anniversary of the president’s death in Dallas. The program narrator and co-writer is Robert MacNeil, who covered Kennedy for NBC News and was in the motorcade in Dallas. In the tradition of author Studs Terkel, We Knew JFK uses personal remembrance to create a multi-voice, mosaic portrait -- a narrative of a particularly intimate and personal kind. In sharing these stories with the larger world, the program offers listeners a participants' eye view of an extraordinarily eventful time, and of the complex figure at its center.
