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 Chappaquiddick 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 scene 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.
Source: Pajama’s Media
If you are not familiar with the history of the Kennedy’s this miniseries is a good place to start. There are presidents and leaders, in general, who inspire us to become better and who are are larger than the office they hold. In modern times, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan fill that place in American history, in spite of their personal flaws. Even though they were of different parties and different in many ways, Kennedy and Reagan were also the same in many ways that matter! They were both Irish descended Americans who loved America and the opportunities she gave to their families and to all legal immigrants; they loved the Constitution and knew it was their job to uphold the law and keep America safe; they were excellent inspiring speakers and they were strong in their convictions, ideals and leadership abilities. They made the tough decisions and then took responsibility for the outcome of their decisions! They both also had strong wives, Jackie and Nancy, who supported them and filled their roles as First Ladies with style and grace.
The re-writing of history and minimal focus on our true history, both good and bad, is what had made us weaker.
“He who does not learn from history is destined to repeat it!” and America has sadly done a poor job of teaching her children…
Related:
Camelot Fights Back: Who Killed ‘The Kennedy’s’ Miniseries?
–> JFK on Taxes and the Economy <–
Kennedy United States Notes actually circulated shortly
We Choose to go to the Moon
Resources on the Kennedys:
America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House
Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
Jackie, Ethel, Joan : Women of Camelot
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty he Founded
Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died
LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination
American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party's Soul
A Nation of Immigrants by JFK
Kevin Costner’s JFK - Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition)
The Kennedys miniseries
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