Posted on 04/11/2011 6:22:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
Jack Kennedy was shot on my twentieth birthday.
I was a Dartmouth student, getting ready to drive down to Skidmore to celebrate with my girlfriend, when the news ricocheted around the dormitory. I went down to Skidmore anyway, spending the weekend in a Saratoga Springs motel room, watching the TV coverage, including that astonishing moment when Ruby shot Oswald in front of our eyes in living black and white.
Does this mean I have more insight than others into the Kennedy assassination? No. But that coincidence did give me an extra frisson when the date “November 22, 1963” was superimposed at the beginning of Episode 7 of the new The Kennedys miniseries.
I spent the last couple of days watching all eight episodes of the series, courtesy of the production company. It was certainly a trip down memory lane. Like so many of my generation, my life had intersected with the Kennedys in the world of political imagination and sometimes even in reality.
I had been in the audience, close enough to shake his hand, for an East L.A. speech of Bobby’s two days before he was shot, the largely Chicano and Mexican crowd yelling “Viva! Viva!” as if the California primary voters were about to elect him dictator, not president.
And then, a few years later, I had a literary agent who, it turned out, was one of the six young women at that Chappaquiddick reunion party for RFK’s campaign the fateful night Ted Kennedy took his chauffeur’s car keys to drive the late Mary Jo Kopechne home himself. The agent never spoke of what happened. (This hugely dramatic incident does not appear in the series, nor is there even a mention of Ted Kennedy. More on this later.)
So what did I think of the miniseries? No one could mistake it for Citizen Kane — television political biopics tend to the humdrum and stilted, as most of us know — but it is nowhere near as bad as the fulminating critics would have us believe. Their major objection seems to be that the series emphasizes the soap opera aspects of the Kennedy lives — Jack’s parade of women that would make Bill Clinton envious, his and Jackie’s amphetamine cocktails from “Dr. Feelgood,” the Mafia connections via Giancana, Sinatra, and Judith Exner, Joe Sr.’s having his troubled daughter (Jack’s younger sister) lobotomized, not to mention the patriarch’s infamous flirtation with the Third Reich, etc.
Well, why not? These things are the stuff of drama (cf. the House of Atreus), not endless discussions of policy. The latter are much better handled in a book. But never mind. When the early drafts of the screenplay leaked out, JFK’s speechwriter, the late Ted Sorenson — among several others — joined a campaign organized by filmmaker Robert Greenwald aimed at preventing the film from being made and attacking it as a right-wing hit piece led by that known conservative attack dog Joel Surnow of 24 fame.
But here’s the surprising thing — and I should put this in bold because it is the linchpin of this article — The Kennedys (made by right-wingers though it may be) is tremendously respectful of JFK as a president. Indeed, the JFK it portrays is arguably one of the best presidents of the post-war period, if not of all time.
In the three key events dramatized in the series — his taking personal blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, his steadfastness in supporting racial integration at the University of Mississippi and, of course, his resolute behavior in confrontation with Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis — the Jack Kennedy of The Kennedys is a superlative and courageous decision maker.
This makes the miniseries — unlike the fuddy-duddy Greenwald site — oddly modern and heroic and pro-JFK. The Kennedys filmmakers have respected their audience and allowed them to reflect on the fascinating question of how someone so lacking in his personal life could achieve so much good in his public life. (Missing from this film is another positive action with a contemporary twist — JFK’s cutting of tax rates to stimulate the economy.)
That question — the relationship of doer and deed — is as old as drama. Shakespeare reveled in it. Nevertheless, as many of you know, the series was rejected by the channel for which it was originally made, the History Channel. It was eventually sold and is now showing on the lesser-known Reelz.
I had assumed the History Channel was to blame in this but, in an interview with Lionel Chetwynd and me, Joel Surnow said the rejection came from a higher corporate source. The History Channel is owned by AETN, A&E Television Networks, which is a joint venture of The Hearst Corporation, Disney-ABC Television Group and NBC Universal.
Some unknown person or persons in the upper reaches of these huge media companies apparently succumbed to pressure and suppressed The Kennedys. This pressure most likely came from the Kennedy family (Caroline?) and friends. The family has been quite successful over the years in their attempts to keep their detractors quiet.
I have no way of knowing, but they may have succeeded inside the making of The Kennedys as well as outside. Curiously, “The Lion of the Senate” and youngest son of Joe and Rose Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, is never seen or even mentioned in any of the eight episodes of the miniseries. What is the reason for this extraordinary omission?
The aforementioned Chappaquddick incident is easily the most extreme case of Kennedy personal malfeasance. Jack may have been a serial adulterer, but he was never involved in death from his dalliances, nor did he leave the seen of a fatal accident. Teddy did and got away with it.
There has been some debate about the extent of his culpability, but how do you dramatize this event in any way without making him look really bad? And how do you tell the story of Ted Kennedy without Chappaquiddick? It becomes an almost comical whitewash. So Teddy is a non-person in The Kennedys, the man who was never there. I don’t know if this was true in earlier drafts, but it is in the series as it is being broadcast.
So whoever really killed The Kennedys is out hiding somewhere in an impenetrable corporate tower. I’m not into conspiracy theories, so I’m not going to pursue it further.
But I will say this. Whoever did this has conflated politics and religion. The Kennedys are not religious icons. They are highly fallible human beings. To show them as they were is the duty of the artist as well as the mission of America, that is freedom of speech. Surnow and company had their speech temporarily eclipsed. That was not good for them, but more than that, it is not good for our country.
“when after all, it was you and me”
Who’s suppressing it?
Here’s a thought!!!
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_Jimmy_Carter%27s_mother_Lillian_secretary_to_Kennedy
Symapathy for the Devil
And then, a few years later, I had a literary agent who, it turned out, was one of the six young women at that Chappaquiddick reunion party for RFK’s campaign the fateful night Ted Kennedy took his chauffeur’s car keys to drive the late Mary Jo Kopechne home himself.
No, it means that you wasted a perfectly good weekend at Saratoga Springs watching TV instead of enjoying Saratoga Springs and the company of your girlfriend.
The Kennedy Klan was nothing more than third rate Irish mafia.
My first thought...
Spent much of Sunday watching “The Kennedys” and found it to be well done. The wife asked several times about Teddy and I had no answer other than it seemed as though they concentrated on Joe, Jack, and Bobby with almost no mention of any of the other children.
“The Kennedys... the JFK it portrays is arguably one of the best presidents of the post-war period, if not of all time.”
THAT is industrial strength BS! As if-Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson… etc. did not exist. PLEEEEAAASE!!!
• He fubar’d the Bay of Pigs (apologizing for it does not UNDO it)
• Walked into the first interview with Nikita like a lamb being shorn, and Nikita had him for breakfast
• I live in a steel town …what JFK and his brother Bobby did to the steel industry America still rankles.
Sheesh.
Irish mafia? They weren’t that high in the chain of intelligence. They were barely at the level of Five-Points Irish thugs.
When it happened in 63 a fair number of my friends at the time believed along with a lot of their parents that Johnson had a hand in it.
if you are into punk, the dead kennedys are pretty good
An utter attempt to perpetuate a MYTH and a LIE! Owing to a 'martyr' ending of a young President.
President Kennedy, by one single action (on APRIL 14, 1961), began a 'tumbling domino effect', that put this country on a course of national peril and national psychosis for generations to come:
- On April 14, 1961, just three days before the invasion, Kennedy called Bissell to ask how many planes he would use in the operation. Bissell told the president the CIA planned to use all sixteen of their B-26s. “Well, I don’t want it on that scale,” Kennedy replied. “I want it minimal.”
- 1961 Bay of Pigs failure (Castro is not over-thrown / becomes stronger)
which brought about...
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (Guarantees Castros/Communisms survival in our hemisphere)
which 'spooked' Kennedy Aministration into
- 1962 Vietnam War entry (escalated to 12,000 in Vietnam by 1962)
which caused a long-lasting national psychosis that affects everyone till this day.
Damn it, you beat me to it!
My very first thought when I saw the title of this thread.
Oh. So it's a work of fiction. I see.
I had little respect for John Kennedy; however, considering the Democrat Presidents who came after him, he's beginning to look downright not-quite-so-bad.
The entire Kennedy "Camelot" drama was of comparable quality to the musical comedy, and its admirers about as intelligent as the admirers of the comedy.
Jackie-O was no exception, but I did get a kick out of her intelligence. If I had known her personally, I probably would have like her--perhaps Jack Kennedy too--but the public personae were less than inspiring, and the fawning shallowness of their worshipers was (is) enough to turn the stomach of the most stalwart of the truthful and intelligent.
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