The producers of The Kennedys, the justly maligned drama that debuts Sunday in Canada, seemed to listen too much to Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of America’s foremost political dynasty. “It’s not what you are,” he tells his eldest sons, Jack and Joe Jr., in the opening episode. “It’s what people think you are.”
Old Joe, who made some of his fortune among the dream-weavers of Hollywood, knew the difference between illusion and reality. The makers of this miniseries do as well, which is why they’ve spent an estimated $30-million to create their own version of the House of Kennedy, a kind of historical fiction.
Fortunately for history, they’ve stumbled; having commissioned the production, the History Channel refused to broadcast it in the United States. (In Canada, The Kennedys is airing on History Television in the company of Swamp People and Ice Road Truckers, which are to history what Don Cherry is to philosophy.)
Still, the hostility to The Kennedys shows the perils of presenting the past in the digital age. What’s the right balance between truth and drama? Can we marry history and fiction to create a teachable moment? And how do we manage the tension between reality and perception in a way that offers lessons to posterity?
By most accounts, the original screenplay was calumny. This wasn’t the saga of the iconic Irish-Catholic family in 20th-century America, blessed with beauty, wealth, grace and power, and shaded by tragedy and treachery. It was a soap opera of sex, drugs, infidelity and scandal, without subtlety or sympathy.
In disgust, Robert Greenwald, a liberal filmmaker, mounted a campaign on the Internet (StopKennedySmears.com) to kill the show. Among the company of critics was Theodore Sorensen, John Kennedy’s speechwriter, who said after reading the script: “Every single conversation with the President in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”
The campaign worked. The series went through “a major rewrite” before it went into production in Toronto last summer.
What emerges is more sad than bad. Call it part falsehood, part verisimilitude. The drama invents dialogue, condenses time and recycles rumour and gossip.
What is particularly disingenuous is that The Kennedys offers a patina of truth. There’s enough here, such as JFK’s meeting Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna or the dubious injections he took for his back pain, to look credible. There are enough quotes, accents, venues (the Kennedy homes were actually shabbier), period clothes, coiffures and archival footage. It’s roughly, even recognizably, true. And that’s the problem.
Yes, Joe Kennedy did muse memorably about human nature to his sons, but it’s unlikely that he said: “This country is ours for the taking.” And yes, while he was an anti-Semite and an appeaser, he quit as ambassador to Britain before Franklin Roosevelt could fire him. While he had aspired to be president, he was certainly no “shoo-in” in 1940. While he did try to buy his son his seat in Congress in 1946, the reason Jack won 40 per cent of the vote in a 10-man race was more his stature as a war hero, a bestselling author and a glamorous Kennedy.
It’s open season on the truth: JFK’s generals didn’t bully him during the Bay of Pigs. He didn’t berate governor Ross Barnett at the University of Mississippi. Jackie didn’t leave JFK during the Cuban missile crisis. Bobby didn’t call his brother “Jack” in public, and he wasn’t “on the verge” of winning the Democratic presidential nomination when he was assassinated in 1968.
So what isn’t here? Ted Kennedy is absent. So are the space program, the Peace Corps and the first modern election campaign. Missing, also, are Jack’s wit, eloquence, intellect and, most of all, any sense of this emerging profile in courage, who late in life broke with his cautious past on civil rights and his hawkishness on nuclear arms, knowing both would anger conservatives and threaten his re-election.
Bad enough that many will think this is how it happened. Worse is the lost opportunity to break new ground, to see this iconic family without tears or leers and ponder its enduring appeal in the age of Barack Obama.
Ultimately, The Kennedys isn’t what the Kennedys were. It’s what some want people to think they were.
Andrew Cohen, the founding president of the Historica-Dominion Institute, is an author, journalist and professor. He is writing a book on the Kennedy administration.
