The Day Scott Bakula Leapt Into Lee Harvey Oswald

The fifth season of Quantum Leap kicked off with a two-part episode that had a unique premise. It was not only the first occasion the time-traveling scientist Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) leapt into a real life person, it also happened to be a particularly notorious person: Lee Harvey Oswald. Though series creator/executive producer Donald Bellisario (Magnum P.I., JAG, NCIS) had said he’d never have the show deal with real events, let alone go down the JFK assassination rabbit hole, he was inspired to write the episode as an answer back to JFK, Oliver Stone’s 1991 film that fueled conspiratorial fires for a new generation.

And Bellisario could write his script from a unique perspective, as he had a run-in with Oswald as a fellow marine in the late 1950s — an event recreated in the first of the two episodes, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Leaping on a String,” broadcast on September 22, 1992, along with part two, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Leap to Judgment.” The show has Sam and his ever-attendant assistant, Admiral Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell), working to establish the truth about the events of November 22, 1963. And, given that Sam’s leaps in time are to “set right what went wrong,” figuring out just what he’s supposed to prevent from happening on that historic day. “It’s been a while since I thought about the episode, and you kind of reawakened some of my thoughts,” Bellisario said in our phone interview about what he considers a key episode in the series. PS: spoilers!

So, you met Oswald while in the Marines, at a base in Tustin, California.

Yeah, I went into a supply shed to pick up some radio parts, and Oswald was behind the counter. He was sitting on the floor cross-legged, reading Pravda. Now, back then, ’58, ’59, somebody reading Pravda was a no-no.

Yes, I’d imagine so.

I questioned him about it. “What are you reading there?” And we ended up getting into an argument, actually. And it was getting pretty hot and heavy. But before it got to fisticuffs, one of the other Marines took me by the shoulder and said, “Just ignore him. He’s harmless.”

Did it surprise you that they were so dismissive? It seems odd that no one would’ve reported him to somebody.

Yeah. Well, that’s exactly what I said to them; “Why hasn’t one of the officers taken ahold of this guy and dealt with this?” Sitting there reading Pravda and spouting Communist bullshit. And they just said, “Oh, he’s harmless.”

Sounds like they didn’t take him very seriously.

No, they didn’t.

The images I have of Oswald are the later ones from television, that we’ve seen a lot; he always seemed to have this cocky, smirky attitude. It sounds like he was that way with you.

He was. That was exactly the way to describe him, that smirky attitude. Even then.

Where were you when you heard about President Kennedy’s assassination?

I was at Pennsylvania State University. And when I saw Oswald on television, I knew him immediately. I said to my wife, “That’s the guy I got into an argument with!” And she said to me, “Oh, you just think you did.” I said, “No, no, that’s the guy.” I didn’t know his name back then. He was just another Marine that I got in a discussion with.

And you were pretty convinced of his guilt already.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I was also convinced that he was acting alone.

What was it at this stage that convinced you of that?

Well, just the conversation I had had with him and the argument we got into. He was so adamant about his position, and he was by himself on that. His attitude had me convinced that he was the kind of guy that would act alone.

Well, certainly the impression I have from reading about him was that he was a person that could not get along with anybody. So I don’t see him being involved in any kind of conspiracy just on that level alone.

That’s a good point.

What was it like when you lived in Dallas later, in the late 1960s? Did you visit any of the JFK sites? It wouldn’t have been that long after the event, I would imagine people still talked about it.

I did, like everybody else. The story fascinated me. I went to the Texas School Book Depository and took a look. And I went up to the window [where Oswald fired from] and decided that it was not that hard a shot, especially for a marine who has rifle training. It wasn’t that difficult a shot.

I went to Dallas in 2017 to see the assassination sites. And it’s really something when you see the Book Depository for the first time.

It becomes real.

Before Quantum Leap, had you ever thought of dramatizing Oswald’s story?

No, no. But when JFK came out, my son saw it and he was about 14 years old, and he started telling me all this stuff that was in the movie, how there was a conspiracy, and there was more than one shooter. He was absolutely convinced that there were multiple shooters. And I was convinced just the opposite. And I said to him, “That’s not true. Oswald acted by himself.” And it got me so upset that my son was taken in by the film that I decided to make my own film.

Why do you think the idea of conspiracy took hold like that? When JFK came out, I think it crystallized the idea of a conspiracy for people. But certainly the idea of a conspiracy was already out there. Why do you think people cling to that so much?

I honestly don’t know. It’s such a dramatic moment in time that anything about it takes on more importance than it would otherwise.

The episode differed from previous Quantum Leap episodes. You had Sam leap into Oswald, and that’s the first time in the series that he leapt into a real life person. How did you decide to do that?

Well, I always said we can’t do real people because if we do, the audience will know what happened. I never used a real event because you can’t change a real event. But I thought about it and just decided that I could do it. And it worked out pretty well.

When I did the episode, I read as much as I could. Because I wanted it to be accurate. It represents the way I see the thing happening. And as I did it, it seemed very obvious to me that he was acting alone; his personality as much as anything. He was — well, he was just crazy. He was, I can’t think of the word for it — obstreperous.

Well, my impression is that he comes across as a very isolated individual. And especially since coming back from Russia, it doesn’t seem like he really had any kind of inner emotional life; he had no close friends and failed at all his jobs. Just an isolated, lonely individual.

Mm-hmm. That would be as I recalled him. Anyway, I was finishing writing the script, and I couldn’t think of a way to end it. And then it hit me. At the end, Sam says he hadn’t changed anything, and Al says “Yes you did — originally Jackie was killed too.”

Yes; Sam ends up leaping into a Secret Service agent and prevents Jackie Kennedy from being killed. But you were in the midst of writing the episode and you still hadn’t decided the ending yet?

That’s right. It came at the end of my writing.

Lucky inspiration! And how did you decide to put yourself in the episode, recreating your encounter with Oswald?

When I made the series I would always put myself in each episode in some small way.

Like an Alfred Hitchcock kind of thing.

Yes, very much so.

What was the response like when it came out?

I got a lot of comments, written comments on it. The response was pretty, pretty heavy.

In what way? Did you have people saying, “Oh, you were completely wrong!”

No, I never had anybody say that. It’s funny, nobody took that position. They all took the position that I put forth in the episode.

What about your son? Did you change his mind?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. He said that he now understood the way I saw it. I think it convinced him.

How do you look back on that episode now? It’s 60 years since the assassination, and 31 years since the episode aired.

Well, I barely remember the episode…but you know, that’s not quite true. I said I barely remembered the episode, but of all the episodes I’ve done, that one does stick out. So I guess I remember it more than I thought.

When I went to Dallas, I went on this JFK tour. The tour guide thought there was a conspiracy and she also said something really interesting. She said she felt that a lot of conspiracy proponents did not want there to be a solution, because if a solution was ever presented, then all the other conspiracy theories would be shown to be wrong and the people promoting them would lose their credibility. So they wanted it to remain a mystery, so they could still have some cachet. And I thought that was a very interesting take on it. Is that possibly why people don’t want it solved?

When you put it that way, it makes sense. Well, it was such a momentous moment in time that it’s hard to believe that one man could be responsible for it.

Especially someone who was basically a loser.

Right!

Well, maybe this will inspire people to watch that episode again this November 22. 

Oh, that’d be nice. It was probably the most interesting episode I wrote in the series.