There is a deeply black comic remark made in the 1960s that on 22 November 1963, two New England men were killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. The second was Vaughn Meader. To put it in context, comedian Lenny Bruce, a week after the assasination, apparently opened his show with the line “Vaughn Meader is screwed!”

Vaughn Meader was THE JFK impersonator during Camelot, and as you can see here, he was genuinely funny. He had previously recorded a JFK based comedy album, The First Family, which was one of the biggest selling records of 1962/63, and which President Kennedy supposedly gave out as Christmas gifts. When asked as to whether he was “mad” about the impersonation, Kennedy remarked:  ” Well, eh, I think it actually sounds more like Teddy, so now he’s mad!”   

When the president was murdered, Meader’s career went off a cliff. He was a talented comedian and mimic, but the public, and the television networks could not seperate him from the memory of President Kennedy, and he was effectively barred from television, eventually becoming a country and western singer in his native Maine, dying in 2004.