“We were the tail of the kite”: did Frank Sinatra play an unwitting role in the JFK assassination?
Not many celebrities rub shoulders with presidents and organised crime syndicates (allegedly), but Frank Sinatra was equally comfortable in the company of politicians as he was (again, very allegedly) criminals.
‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ was one of his era’s biggest stars, selling millions of records and winning an Oscar as he expanded from crooner to actor. Throughout it all, his personal life generated as much publicity as his professional one, which gave rise to plenty of urban legends.
One of the most curious was the suggestion that Sinatra, despite his friendship with John F Kennedy, inadvertently played a role in his assassination. It all stems from the 1954 movie Suddenly, which sees Sinatra playing a deranged would-be killer who kidnaps a family and uses their home as the perfect vantage point to take out the commander-in-chief with a sniper rifle.
The similarities with the JFK assassination are there for all to see, and whispers began emerging after that fateful day in Dallas that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched – potentially even studied – Sinatra’s Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate, which is also about a political assassination, before he gunned down Kennedy.
In former Kennedy staffer Priscilla Johnson’s book about Oswald, she relayed a story claiming that he and his wife watched Suddenly on TV around a month before he killed Kennedy. While it was never corroborated, the whispers grew traction when another rumour suggested that Sinatra had pulled both films from circulation in the aftermath of the assassination.
As often tends to be the case, though, the truth wasn’t quite as salacious. There’s no real evidence that Oswald used Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate as homework, even if it wasn’t entirely inaccurate that the latter was quietly phased out of cinemas following the president’s death.
“The climate of the times was such that having an assassination picture floating around seemed to be in grotesque bad taste,” screenwriter George Axelrod told the Washington Post. “Particularly since Frank had been friends with the president. The decision was Sinatra’s, with our agreement. We were the tail of the kite, really.”
Then again, The Manchurian Candidate‘s author, Richard Condon, disagreed. “Ridiculous,” he flatly stated. “I don’t think it was ever actually pulled from release. It had begun to peter out and play on late-night television. I know Sinatra has a very high regard for it. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he put the film away, as one does, as an anchor to windward.”
Did Sinatra play an unwitting role in the JFK assassination? Well, it depends on who gets asked. According to the people involved in The Manchurian Candidate, absolutely not. It seems unlikely that Oswald used a pair of the star’s pictures as inspiration, but certain rumours have a habit of taking flight regardless of where the truth lies.
