President John F. Kennedy
The Speeches of John F. Kennedy(1990) Fine video extracts from JFK's presidential campaign and presidency. Surprising highlight: Harry Truman bluntly questioning the qualifications of candidate Kennedy.
Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years(1997) This Peter Jennings ABC News special ranks among the most astonishing investigative reporting that I have ever seen. It documents, often with participants being interviewed on camera for the first time, almost unbelievable aspects of President Kennedy’s private life including: Joe Kennedy’s buying of Mafia boss Sam Giancana’a support for JFK, then JFK, through his mistress Judy Campbell Exner, sending cash to Giancana and maintaining a conduit for Mafia efforts to assassinate Castro; fulsome details on JFK’s many love trists, in and outside the White House, with pimping done by various people in Washington and Hollywood; much detail on JFK’s lengthy relationship with Marilyn Monroe; and JFK’s relationship with an East German woman who, after being bought off, was the center of a investigation, abruptly ended after JFK’s assassination, related to communist intelligence.
The Kennedys(1992) When David McCullough, the narrator of the initial American Experience presidential biographies first heard of a possible documentary on “the Kennedys,’ he expressed skepticism about the possible story line. He needn’t have worried. The four-hour American Experience The Kennedys tells a story that would be the envy of even a master fiction storyteller such as John Grisham.
The central character is Joseph Kennedy, an ambitious Irish American in Brahman Boston, who graduated from Harvard (where he was denied membership in a Brahman club) and, at age 25, became the youngest bank president in Massachusetts. He married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston’s mayor and the product of a Catholic convent education. Joe Kennedy was extremely clever and ambitious. He amassed a fortune in the stock market, then sold out before the crash. During prohibition, he greased palms to become a major bootlegger of fine Scotch. While Rose gave birth to nine handsome children, Joe engaged in a string of affairs, including one with Gloria Swanson during his stint as Hollywood movie producer.
Already rich, Joe sought unbridled power as well as social recognition. He bought his way into the Franklin Roosevelt presidential campaign, for which ultimately he was awarded the chairmanship of the newly-created Securities and Exchange Commission. Subsequently he was named ambassador to the Court of St. James. This was an astonishing accomplishment for an American of Irish ancestry. Joe thought this London post would be his stepping stone to the presidency. Instead, he destroyed any possible chance by advocating a policy of appeasement with Hitler and, in a press interview, expressing dim faith in democracy in England and, perhaps, in the United States.
With his presidential ambition shattered, Joe then focused on propelling his son, Joe, into the presidency. When Joe died in a secret wartime mission, father Joe concentrated on making Jack, his second son, president. He spared no expense in this endeavor. From buying Jack a congressional seat, to bankrolling his defeat of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, Joe was scripting Jack’s run for the presidency. At first Jack seemed to be a questionable choice. He concentrated more on womanizing than on his duties as freshman senator. Jack’s ‘most eligible bachelor’ status was lost, at age 36, when he married Jacqueline Bouvier.
At the outset of the 1960 presidential campaign, Jack did not seem a shoo-in as the Democratic candidate. Joe sought to sell Jack ‘like soap.’ With an open check book, as well as links to the Mafia in Chicago, the wheels were greased and Jack was nominated on the first ballot. In the closest presidential election in the 20th century, Jack edged out Richard Nixon and entered the White House. Joe, still pulling the strings, insisted that brother Bobby, whose legal experience was minimal, be named attorney general.
The documentary devotes little time to the highlights of Jack’s abbreviated presidency. It ignores his difficulties in enacting any significant domestic legislation. It dwells on President Kennedy’s womanizing. A major focus is on Kennedy’s foreign successes and failures. Joe, with the Kennedy clan’s active involvement, got son Teddy Kennedy elected to the Senate in 1962. This was a difficult task, since Teddy was far less distinguished than his older brothers. After President Kennedy’s assassination, Joe, now crippled from a stroke, stage managed Bobby’s election as a senator from New York. Bobby, in early 1968, announced his candidacy for the presidency. The documentary suggests that Bobby has matured greatly and was presidential material. Bobby was assassinated the night that he won the California primary.
Joe was grooming young Teddy for the 1972 presidency, when the July, 1969 Chappaquiddick death of Mary Jo Kopechne upset this time table. Teddy declared his candidacy for the presidency in 1980, but could not overcome the memory of Chappaquiddick.
There will never be another American political family like the Kennedys. Father Joe, after his personal ambitions to become president were stymied and his favorite son was killed during World War II, transferred these presidential ambitions to three successive sons. Jack was elected president, then assassinated during his third year in the White House, Bobby was in the running to become president before being assassinated, and young Teddy, the least qualified of his sons, lost the 1980 presidential nomination to President Jimmy Carter.
The story of the Kennedy family and the presidency is a modern Greek tragedy.
Time Machine: False Witness(1998?) This 90-minute History Channel investigative report totally demolishes the Oliver Stone version of Kennedy's assassination presented in JFK. This video pursues all of Stone's allegations. It interviews Jim Garrison's original investigators (who were removed by Garrison, when they reported that there was no case against Clay Shaw). Clearly, Garrison was a compulsive liar who, for whatever reason, dishonored his role as prosecutor. What is sad is that, despite the irrefutable evidence presented in this video, most Americans who saw JFK will believe that Oliver Stone told "the truth."
The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy(2003) This Emmy-winning Peter Jennings ABC documentary is, for me, the definitive rejoinder to the Kennedy assassination conspiracy devotees. At the outset of this 89-minute program, Mr. Jennings starts bluntly that the assassination was not a conspiracy and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
The documentary focuses specifically on the conspiracy charges that Kevin Costner, as Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, presented in his summation to the jury in the Bernard Shaw trial. Frequently the film flashes back to Costner’s conjectures, and then matches it to credible contradictions. What I found most convincing was the use of 3D computer modeling of the assassination scene and the enhancement of the Zapruder film.
The “magic bullet,” that, in JFK, twisted and turned as it struck Kennedy, then Governor John Connally, has a most credible alternative explanation. Through computer graphics and recreation, it seems clear that a single bullet went through President Kennedy’s head, then into Connally. Moreover, the fragments of this bullet were recovered and matched to the gun Oswald used in the book depository.
As far as the shots from the ‘grassy knoll,’ the documentary provides persuasive evidence that undercuts such speculation. It was illustrated that, had there been such shots, they could not have entered Kennedy’s head through the back of the skull. Regarding the motor cycle’s radio that caught what some interpreted to be a fourth shot, the testimony of three scientists, who claimed this had a high probability was refuted, with films from November 22nd as well as an interview with the police motor cyclist.
Much has been made of the impossibility of a single person being able to get off three accurate shots in the time span calculated from the Zapruder film. Enhanced technology demonstrates that there was an 8.3 second span between the first and the third shot. An elderly man demonstrated how he could fire three aimed shots in barely seven seconds. Oswald had been a Marine sharpshooter. His Marine records were displayed. He had scored 49 and 48 out of 50 in two range tests in which he had to hit a head-sized target over 200 yards away. By contrast, President Kennedy was in a slow moving car only 88 yards from the book depository window.
With checklist efficiency, the documentary examined, and then rejected, numerous suppositions. Regarding the Bernard Shaw trial (see The History Channel’s False Witness (1996), based on Patricia Lambert’s book of the same name), new evidence included an interview with the expert who conducted a lie detector test on Perry Russo, Garrison’s principal witness against Shaw. According to this expert, Russo flunked, when asked whether he had seen Shaw and Oswald together. Upon hearing this, Garrison went ballistic and refused to acknowledge that his key witness lacked credibility.
A detailed examination of Oswald’s background and travels strongly indicated that this was a troubled man who sought recognition. Regarding his curious defection to the Soviet Union, then return to the U. S. several years later, an ex-NKVD official (subsequently a defector now under cover in the U. S.), who had dealt with Oswald in the Soviet Union, stated that it was absurd to imagine that NKVD professionals would take an unbalanced Oswald seriously. As far as ‘extended conspiratorial planning,’ according to the documentary Oswald only learned, three days before November 22nd, that the Kennedy motorcade would pass close to the book bindery.
Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, in 1978, was asked whether he had been involved in the Kennedy assassination (the Kennedys had been associated with numerous plans to assassinate Castro). Castro promptly replied “Absolutely not,” adding that would have been the stupidest thing he could have done: it would have given the United States an excuse to invade Cuba.
Regarding Jack Ruby, and his killing Oswald to ‘silence him,’ this seemed most unlikely. Ruby was a shabby strip joint owner who, according to close associates, was on the very fringe of the Mafia. The theory that the Mafia, after being in league with Oswald, now engaged Ruby to kill Oswald, was ridiculed by one of America’s leading Mafia experts.
This documentary draws on the massive assassination-related documentation made public in the aftermath of the JFK movie. It goes far beyond Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993). Under Mr. Jennings’ precise handling, a panoply of ‘conspiracy conjectures’ are subjected to sharp scrutiny and are found to lack substance.
According to polls, about 70% of the American public still believes that the assassination of President Kennedy was a conspiracy that involved others with Lee Harvey Oswald. In the 43 Amazon.com comments on The Kennedy Assassination, about the same number conclude ‘case closed’ as believe that the documentary is ‘garbage’ and that there was a yet-unrevealed conspiracy that killed President Kennedy.
This documentary has superb vignettes suitable for the classroom. Some of the most effective short clips include computer animation of the actual assassination and the discussion of the ‘single bullet’ compared to Mr. Costner’s ‘magic bullet’ trial pyrotechnics.
Great Presidents(2000) A tour de force by Teaching Company professor Allan Litchman, who has written widely on presidents and is a radio and TV political commentator. Litchman selects twelve presidents as great, including James Polk. As a person rather knowledgeable on U. S. presidents, I am constantly impressed by the relevant vignettes and uncommon perspectives that Professor Litchman includes in his two-hour historical assessment of each president. Whatever Litchman’s personal political philosophy (currently he is a Maryland Democratic senatorial candidate), his assessments are admirably even-handed. Also available on CD and with a comprehensive course guidebook, both of which are valuable to both teacher and student.
