Jay Leno was in school. Jane Fonda was shooting a movie in Paris, and Jimmy Carter was hauling peanuts and grain on his tractor.
NBC News compiled more than six hours of interviews with celebrities and historians detailing their memories of Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
See also: JFK Assassination: National Archives Reveal Another Side to the Story
The interviews discuss not only Kennedy's assassination, but also his presidency, his personal life and the era as a whole.
"The legacy of the Kennedy family has this emotional connection that still holds today," Gregory Gittrich, NBC News Digital's vice president of news and product and executive editor, told Mashable.
The collected clips are from interviews conducted by Tom Brokaw as NBC prepared “Tom Brokaw Special: Where Were You?” The two-hour feature will air 9 p.m. Friday on NBC. Through the interviews, actors, politicians and other notable figures explain how the assassination touched them. Tom Hanks, who was in grade school art class, remembers his teacher crying when she heard the news.
"To be 7 years old and see any adult that is overcome with emotion and that is weeping — it's an upsetting thing ," he said.
Some of the interviews explore facets of Kennedy's life the public didn't get to see during his presidency. Chris Matthews, MSNBC host and Author of Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, explained how the wealthy Kennedy family hid his chronic pain and ongoing illnesses.
"This guy was so close to the edge of life all the time, and I think that sort of explains his sort of carpe diem behavior with women, his 'hell's a-poppin', let's have some fun' attitude about everything in life," Matthews said.
Other interviews look at what Kennedy and the assassination meant for the nation as a whole. In one clip, filmmaker Stephen Spielberg explains that Kennedy's death inspired an entire genre of film. Conspiracy theories fueled the production of political movies such as "Three Days of the Condor" and "The Parallax View."
"People were more open to looking at, you know, the unseemly side of the democratic process," Spielberg said. “It’s the whole kinda paranoid cinema that I think was spawned by the Kennedy assassination."
The NBC interactive includes 275 short clips that users can organize by topic and speaker.
"People who know history and know the Kennedy story will love it," Gittrich said. "But new audiences who might not know the legacy are also using it."
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