ROB AND MICHELE REINER

HOW I WILL REMEMBER THEM

I am shocked and devastated by the tragedy that occurred yesterday. For almost a decade, I’ve worked closely with and been good friends with the Reiners. Rob and I were born the same year, and had both been in high school when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. That terrible day would change both our lives.

I feel I must write about a side of Rob that not many people know about. He was unforgettable, of course, as Meathead in Norman Lear’s classic TV series All In the Family during the 1970s. He went on to make many remarkable films - poignant comedies like Stand By Me and When Harry Met Sally, the powerful drama A Few Good Men, and more. For over thirty years of marriage, Michele was his rock as partner and protector.

At the same time, Rob’s passionate activism emanated from his love for this country and his deep concern that our democracy was being eroded, especially in recent years. His courage was tactile, as well as his counsel with political figures including Obama and the Clintons. He was a fighter unlike anyone else in Hollywood.

And that all emanated from what happened to JFK in Dallas. He and I shared the belief that until the truth came out about the coup d’etat that changed America, the country could never really move forward. We had been on a downhill slide ever since. When we met in the summer of 2016, he was intent on making a TV series that would expose the perpetrators within the CIA, Mob and Military-Industrial Complex. His company optioned my book The Man Who Knew Too Much, brought talented young scriptwriter David Hoffman into the project, and we began meeting regularly.

I well remember the long lunch we had at Rob’s home in Brentwood, where he began recounting how he became “obsessed” with the Kennedy assassination. After he graduated high school, he saw Mort Sahl at an engagement where all the comedian/activist was talking about was the coverup by the Warren Commission. Rob went on to read all 26 of the Commission’s volumes of evidence and many of the books. He wanted to end his career with a TV series he thought of titling "A Coup in America.”

In 2016 Rob had recently dined with Robert Kennedy Jr., who urged him to go ahead and told Rob how his father assuredly would have reopened the investigation had he become president in 1968. Then he too had been killed.

Rob asked me to give him a list of names of key people who were still alive and might cooperate. “Sometimes people will agree to talk to me, I don’t know why,” he quipped.

By January 2018, we had a “pitch meeting” scheduled with the head of Paramount’s TV movie division. Beforehand Rob and I met for breakfast to talk about some new material I’d come across. When the waitress came for our order, she burst out with: “Hi, Meathead!” Rob smiled and graciously extended his hand, then turned to me and said quietly, “Well, that’s the first one of the day.”

The meeting seemed to go well and that spring, along with David Hoffman and a production assistant, we traveled to Dallas to enter a time machine. In Dealey Plaza, we began at the Schoolbook Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald was said to have fired from. One possible escape route for an assassin was the freight elevators, which we learned had been open just as the president’s motorcade passed and from which a killer could have gone out the back. Oswald had maintained he was in the second floor lunchroom.

We stopped outside at the grassy knoll picket fence, then on to view the underpass where a shooter wouldn’t have been visible. The railroad shack where worker Lee Bowers said he’d seen a gunman remained intact. We then had lunch with Buell Frazier, Oswald’s co-worker at the Depository who drove him to and from work as weekends approached. He described the package Oswald carried on the fateful morning, whose size was too small to have held a concealed rifle.

Rob engaged Frazier in small talk about family matters, allowing him space to then open up with a story he’d rarely told. After the assassinaton, he’d gone to a hospital to visit a relative when the police swept in, threw him up against a wall, and arrested him. Frazier was taken to police headquarters and questioned for several hours. Captain Will Fritz, who was also Oswald’s interrogator, even brought in a confession that he tried to force Frazier to sign.

From there we went to Oswald’s rooming house, where a grand-daughter spoke of how Lee loved playing with her younger brother and was her grandma’s favorite boarder. On November 22, she recalled a police vehicle pulling up outside and honking several times, after which Oswald departed. We followed his route to the Texas Theater where he was arrested, today a tourist attraction where a pretty young lady guides visitors.

The next morning, inside a new Sixth Floor Museum in the County Records Building across from the Depository, Rob got into a verbal fight over the curator’s reproduction depicting the tree down below with much smaller branches than existed in 1963, designed to make viewers believe Oswald had an easy opening to shoot through.

It was raining when we arrived at the police headquarters where Oswald was questioned, jailed, and later killed in the basement as he was being transferred. Rob had David and me stand on the spot showing how close Jack Ruby got to him. It felt eerie being down there, more so when we walked up five flights of stairs to the cell where Oswald had been held. The building was going through a multimillion-dollar reconstruction to resemble fifty years earlier and we had to wear hard-hats, gloves and goggles to ascend. The cell, we were told, hadn’t been used since Jack Ruby was put there temporarily after the shooting. Rob and I walked in, standing near the bed beside the small toilet. Stranger still, Ruby had then been housed in the County Records building overlooking Dealey Plaza until he died of cancer in 1967.

In the downstairs entry area where we shed our gear was a list of movies that the prisoners were allowed to watch. One was a Rob Reiner film. I don’t remember which one. Another, he said, was a movie he’d seen the night he met Michele.

Returning to the hotel, we had lunch with Beverly Oliver. She was a cabaret singer who had known Jack Ruby when she was only seventeen. She said she’d seen Oswald in Ruby’s club on several occasions. Ruby had introduced Oswald saying, “This is Lee, he’s with the CIA.” She didn’t even know what the CIA was. Beverly had been on the grassy knoll during the motorcade, completely traumatized by what she witnessed. The film she’d taken had been confiscated by the FBI two days later.

Before we left, Beverly asked Rob if he could clear up a mystery for her. What was that line in the opening to All in the Family that she could never understand? Rob chuckled and, with a big smile, sang her: “Gee, our old La Salle ran great!” This inspired the two of them to do a couple more numbers together, much to the delight of the other diners.

Eventually, the Paramount network committed to the TV series - and then reneged. A couple of years later, Warner Brothers agreed to try for one of their subsidiaries to do it - and nobody would. And this was Rob Reiner! That’s when I realized how afraid Hollywood still was about going against the official lone-gunman narrative.

So Rob ended up enlisting Soledad O’Brien to team with him for a 10-part podcast series with IHeart Radio. David Hoffman scripted it and I was the resident “expert” - enjoying the opportunity to trade lines with the pros. The podcast’s success - more than nine million downloads - led to a book contract for the three of us to work on together. A zoom call had been scheduled for this afternoon to discuss revisions, after Rob’s latest astute edit.

However, the last communication I had with the Reiners happened this past Friday, when Michele sent an email that began: “Guess who butt dialed me? Beverly Oliver!….She said she was cleaning her computer. Whatever. She’s 89.”

“Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end. Those were the days, those were the days…..” - the theme from All in the Family.