JFK: "American Experience" documentary. 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday on PBS.
Almost all of the TV films and news specials planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy focus on that tragic November weekend in Dallas.
One of the exceptions, however, is also the best of the bunch, "JFK," the two-part "American Experience" exploration of Kennedy's rise to prominence and the accomplishments and failures of his abbreviated presidency. It will air in two parts, Monday and Tuesday on PBS.
Producer-director Susan Bellows understands that JFK's legacy isn't only about his assassination, and that's reflected in the stunning four hours of "JFK," enriched by contributions from writers, historians, politicians and others such as Robert Caro, Evan Thomas, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, John Seigenthaler, Andrew Young, Jean Kennedy Smith, Julian Bond and Sally Bedell Smith.
Inevitably, the Kennedy mythology plays a role in the film. But "JFK" places all of the myth and hype in context with warts-and-all facts and analysis. Ironically, deflating the mythology enables us to come away with a clearer admiration for what he accomplished, a better understanding of the failures and perhaps a sense of what he might have accomplished had he lived.
Kennedy was ambitious and impatient, and only one of those qualities was admired in the world of Massachusetts politics when he retuned home after World War II, already a hero because of the PT 109 incident. Despite his youth, he won the House of Representatives seat being vacated by James Michael Curley, who had succeeded Kennedy's maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, as mayor of Boston.
Boston politics was often dynastic, and the Fitzgerald dynasty would precede the Kennedy dynasty that continued with JFK's youngest brother, Ted, Robert Kennedy's son Joe, and Ted's son Patrick in Rhode Island and Robert's daughter Kathleen in Maryland, among others.
Ambition drove JFK to run against incumbent Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952 - a true dynastic political battle between the Irish Catholic Kennedy and the Protestant Republican Lodge, grandson of a U.S. senator.
JFK's brashness and ambition earned him some friends in Washington, but Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson wasn't one of them. LBJ was perhaps too dismissive of the green young man from Boston, which contributed to his inability to stop Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.
Yes, Joe Kennedy Sr.'s money and influence played a major and continuing role in his son's political career, but JFK was learning to stand on his own two feet. One of the most humiliating missteps in his presidency was to believe the CIA and the military brass when they told him that an invasion of Cuba would spark a revolution that would inevitably topple Fidel Castro.
The Bay of Pigs disaster was humiliating, but it taught JFK to make his own decisions and to be skeptical of so-called experts.
"The presidency is the ultimate source of action," we hear JFK say in a number of Dictaphone entries.
Looking for info
When he gathered his Cabinet and other advisers, he was no longer looking for consensus but just for information to enable him to make the decision.
JFK became a hero to many African Americans, but he had to learn about that issue as well. As Julian Bond says, events such as the bombing of a Freedom Riders bus in Alabama in 1961 were getting in JFK's way, making it difficult for him to pursue his domestic and foreign policy agenda. He was wary of risking the support of powerful Southern Democrats by intervening in civil rights disturbances in Alabama and elsewhere. Seigenthaler quotes him as complaining about "this goddamned civil rights mess."
But while others were urging him to play it politically safe, Kennedy was rethinking his position on civil rights. One thing that helped change his mind was that the often bloody confrontations in the South were being shown on TV news. In a 1963 speech at American University, Kennedy proposed federal civil rights legislation. He would not live to see it passed, but the following year, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
Kennedy was always fascinated by world affairs, and as a true student of history, looked to previous successes and failures, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, to forge his own position. Communism was seen as a major threat in the 1960s and Kennedy was willing to go head to head with Nikita Khrushchev, who dismissed him as a neophyte. But in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy stood his ground and the Soviets blinked.
Kennedy believed the best course for the U.S. was to avoid major conflicts, such as Korea, and opt instead for smaller, more easily contained skirmishes to contain communism.
One of those was taking place in a small Southeast Asian country called Vietnam. There is no absolute way to know what JFK would have accomplished in his final year in office, or in a second term. But "JFK" shows how much he had grown and how much he learned from both his successes and mistakes.
His assassination will always guarantee a significant spot for JFK in U.S. history, but careful, informative work such as "JFK" enables us to consider his presidency on its own merits.