Keeping Camelot Alive

The History Channel has pulled the plug on a recent TV miniseries about the Kennedy family. ”Liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald was behind a petition drive to get the movie shelved. A website, stopkennedysmears.com, was set up with a short film that attacked the miniseries. The decision was reminiscent of CBS’ 2003 decision not to air a miniseries based on the life of President Ronald Reagan, which had also attracted political controversy prior to airing. …. [Greenwald’s] YouTube film quoted Sorenson, a former adviser to Kennedy, calling a script he had seen of “The Kennedys” vindictive and malicious. Sorenson said scenes in the script that depicted him meeting with President Kennedy did not occur.”

According to stopkennedysmears.com, “The script for the upcoming “The Kennedys” miniseries on The History Channel is right-wing character assassination, not “history.””

I suppose it would be assassinating Kennedy’s liberal character to expose him as a supply-sider? I say that any honest account of the Kennedy family would be filled with nothing but “smears.” (Naturally this excludes any film directed by Oliver Stone.) This week, the plot has thickened: “America’s most iconic political dynasty is at the centre of a censorship scandal after a TV network suddenly dropped a multi-million dollar series giving a warts-and-all look at the lives of the Kennedy clan. Those behind the project believe members of the family “bullied” The History Channel into axing The Kennedys after objecting to the way the drama portrayed the private life and sexual escapades of assassinated president John F Kennedy.”

I defer to Christopher Hitchens for historical commentary on the goons that comprise the Kennedy family: “Had [JFK] lived and been re-elected, the anti-war crowds would have been chanting, not “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” but “Hey, Hey, JFK….”

For one thing, he would never have dared tell his tyrannical old father, who had paid for his entire political career and was probably the source of the family’s connection with organised crime. For another, as innumerable members of his court have attested, the intervention in Indochina was a test, as he thought, of the young Kennedy’s own masculinity. And we know how fragile a plant that was.

He tried to create panic among voters when he first ran in 1960, accusing President Eisenhower of allowing a “missile gap” to develop between the USA and the USSR. It was, as Kennedy well knew, a precisely false description of the real balance between the two superpowers. And the same dangerous rhetoric necessitated, when in office, a crazy invasion of Cuba and a later confrontation which nearly took the world over the nuclear brink. … Of course, among his worshippers JFK gets credit for avoiding the crunch that he helped to precipitate. He didn’t destroy the human race after all! Well, thanks a lot.

I wonder what the liberals would say if George Bush was to appoint his brother as Attorney-General, as JFK did. Actually, I know there would be much angry talk about dynasties and hereditary privilege. But even today, the star-struck Kennedy fans refer breathlessly to them as “America’s royalty”. And this brings me to another aspect of their eclipse.

There are too damn many of them, and many of them are not much damn good. It really is uncomfortably like the House of Windsor, in other words.”

Thankfully, when you’re a Kennedy, there’s a nice cushion of money that makes sure you’ll never fall. Apparently Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver led the march on the series. When your success essentially hinges on your relation to one name, I suppose it’s rational to throw everything at preserving it’s glory…

Assuming the proposed miniseries did actually expose Kennedy’s less-than-stellar record, I truly doubt it is possible to change popular opinion on “America’s royalty.” I say anyone who wants to learn American history should forget the Kennedy biopics, and read a book by Amity Shlaes.