Living with Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, must have been tough — and repetitive. According to the controversial new $30m mini-series The Kennedys, every conversation with the controlling patriarch ended with him growling (accompanied by a menacing orchestra):
“Your name is Kennedy, and Kennedys never come second, ever.” Or: “This family is not going to disappear, I’ll make sure of that.” Britain’s Tom Wilkinson plays him with a bullying bravado, although his performance is given a pantomime edge by an accent that veers from Irish to B-awwston to, most alarmingly, Home Counties.
Given that the Kennedys are America’s ultimate political dynasty, with an enduring hold over the public imagination, it was only a matter of time that they would be given the Dynasty treatment.
It’s not news that Joe Kennedy was controlling of, and ferociously ambitious for, his children, and that he was a philanderer; nor that JFK inherited the same priapic gene. But certain surviving Kennedys reportedly felt this portrait was insulting and inaccurate enough to lobby against it going out on the History Channel in the US (although it will in the UK, from this week, and is due to arrive on BBC Two next month).
It seems that the power of Camelot persists. In January, A&E Television Networks (AETN), which owns the History Channel, said it would not show the series. Instead, the ReelzChannel will run it in the US, and it says it has already seen its audience figures double in advance of the event.
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A bizarrely paced but engaging saga, The Kennedys opens with one strand in the “present day” of the 1960 presidential election in which JFK was victorious, and another detangling the family history that led him to power. What takes shape is part history lesson (“There’s this place called the Bay of Pigs”) and part (the better part) cheesy soap opera, with Katie Holmes so miscast as Jackie that each of her scenes ends with the viewer not sighing: “Wow, international style icon!” but cackling: “What a terrible wig!”
Still, who cares when you’ve got (imagined?) confrontations like the one between Joe and Jackie in which he says that she will destroy her husband’s electoral chances if she divorces him for adultery. Instead, Joe suggests, he’ll give Jackie $1 million in a divorce deal if JFK, played by Greg Kinnear (who looks like him and knows how to furrow his eyebrows), loses the election.“You really think everyone can be bought,” Jackie says. In one of his Irish moments, Joe answers: “I haven’t met the exception.” “Well you have now,” she says, killing a great soapy line dead with her passivity. Holmes’s Jackie is nothing more than her Joey Potter from Dawson’s Creek, with bigger eyelashes.
So why did the History Channel dump the series? The official, rather opaque line is that, while The Kennedys “is produced and acted with the highest quality, we have concluded that this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.” However, a senior source at the channel told The Times that an article in The Hollywood Reporter alleging that the series had been “killed” because of lobbying by Caroline Kennedy, JFK and Jackie’s only surviving daughter, and Maria Shriver, JFK’s niece and the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, was “100 per cent true”.
If so, how might they have done this? In September Caroline is to publish a book with Hyperion, a division of Disney, one of AETN’s controlling companies, which will include excerpts from unpublished interviews that Jackie Kennedy gave in 1964. (At the time of the show’s axeing, Caroline Kennedy’s office told The Times she had no comment to make.) Shriver is alleged to have lobbied executives at NBC Universal, where she once worked. NBC is another network partner in AETN.
The Kennedy family’s alleged concern over accuracy may be understandable but The Kennedys is a drama, not a history book. The script is respectful, even tame. The opening titles feature the characters’ august profiles set against fluttering American flags. The family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, is presented as the ultimate home-office, with a living room that is also a campaign headquarters; where Joe’s secretary feels bold enough to kiss him in full view of his wife Rose, who seems anaesthetised to the humiliation. Joe lays out his feelings for Rose: he admires her but doesn’t understand her Catholic faith. Rose tells Jackie she should accommodate Jack’s philandering.
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JFK, we are shown, inherited the political mantle by default, from his dead brother Joe Jr, his father’s chosen one. While campaigning in his first congressional election, Jack complains that he wanted to “teach history and chase girls” at Harvard, not be a politician; that he’s not running against his opponent but “a ghost”. However, he finds his mojo talking to a group of women who have lost loved ones in war, as his mother did with Joe Jr. The best-drawn and acted characters are Robert and Ethel Kennedy (Barry Pepper and Kristin Booth): he the brother calmly embracing his lesser family role and fighting in vain to resist his father’s tyrannical ambitions; she his fun, boisterous wife. Presumably Holmes will freak out in a pink suit in the JFK assassination scene but, in the early episodes at least, the producers seem too deferential to their subjects. If I were Caroline Kennedy I would be protesting against the presentation of my mother’s hair, but that’s all.
The Kennedys, History Channel, Thur, 9pm; it is due to air on BBC Two in May
All the President’s men: The Kennedys depicted on screen
Kennedy (1983)
Martin Sheen was Hollywood’s go-to guy for liberal politicos decades before The West Wing. He had already played Robert Kennedy in the 1974 TV film The Missiles of October (William Devane had been a toothy JFK), before stepping up to play JFK in this epic mini-series — full of historical soundbites as it depicts his presidency in flashbacks from the day of his assassination. White House whitewash? A flattering view of Camelot — what do you expect with Sheen on board? — with JFK largely a paragon of family values and pithy one-liners.
JFK (1991)
Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theory opus, turning JFK’s assassination into a kind of multiple-choice whodunnit — was it the CIA, the mafia, Cubans or other shady forces setting up what one character calls a “coup d’état with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings”? White House whitewash? With the spotlight on those who wanted JFK dead, it reminds us how reviled he was by the Right. Which simply puts more emphasis on him as a martyred hero, on the verge of halting the Vietnam conflict.
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Thirteen Days (2000)
The world on the brink, in a tense, who’ll-blink-first depiction of the Bay of Pigs crisis. JFK’s Kevin Costner is the senior aide, Kenny O’Donnell, advising Jack and Bobby (Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp, both exceptional) through the perilous, high-stakes mind games. O’Donnell was a minor figure, not quite the all-American war-room hero seen here — but hey, this is Kevin Costner. White House whitewash? Nothing about JFK being more worried by political consequences than human ones. Here the Kennedy boys resist the hawks in the room, thus averting nuclear war; and not a single Marilyn scandal in sight.
Bobby (2006)
Emilio Estevez’s all-star melodrama portrays the day of RFK’s death in June 1968, played out through the stories of various guests and employees at the hotel where the presidential hopeful would make his final speech. White House whitewash? Resolute faith in the Kennedy cult. At 5, Estevez shook RFK’s hand while sitting on dad Martin Sheen’s shoulders, and has said: “The killing of Bobby was the death of decency, the death of hope ... The Kennedy family belongs to all of America. We share an affinity with them because they have been forced to grieve on such a national level. We forgive all their foibles. I do anyway.” James Jackson