Very Special Episodes: JFK's Forgotten Summer as a Journalist (with Rob Reiner)

Who Killed JFK?

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, History, True Crime

4.4 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

(If you loved Rob Reiner + Soledad O'Brien's WHO KILLED JFK?, perhaps you'll enjoy this story from JFK's early years. Thanks for Rob Reiner for joining the Very Special Episodes podcast to help us tell it.)

Eighty years ago this summer, a young John F. Kennedy took a job as a journalist for Hearst newspapers, filing dispatches in the final days of World War II. His columns capture the mood of a changing world. In today's Very Special Episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Fred Logevall and legendary director Rob Reiner join us to explore the forgotten summer that helped shape Kennedy's worldview.

For more Very Special Episodes, follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Go see Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in theaters this September!

Check out Fred Logevall's excellent book: JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. Very Special Episodes is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Produced and edited by Josh Fisher, Jonathan Washington, and Mary Dooe. And thanks to our JFK voice actor, Tom Antonellis, for nailing another role.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.2	In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herrera was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
0:11.4	No suspects.
0:12.5	No witnesses.
0:13.5	No justice.
0:14.5	I would ask my husband, do you want me to stop?
0:17.0	He was like, no.
0:17.8	Keep fighting.
0:18.8	After nearly a decade, a breakthrough changed everything.
0:22.5	This is Cold Case Files Miami, stories of families who never stopped fighting. Listen to
0:28.0	Cold Case Files Miami on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:34.2	I'm Robert Evans, and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our
0:38.5	worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking
0:44.0	about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was
0:49.2	like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity
0:55.0	Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy.
0:59.3	But yeah, I'll just get into it here.
1:00.7	Like nothing you just said makes sense.
1:02.3	That doesn't sense.
1:03.0	Right.
1:03.6	But that's the beauty of cults.
1:05.1	Listen to Behind the Bastards on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	...

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