American dynasties/The Kennedys – PBS
PBS produces outstanding documentaries and I have particularly enjoyed the one broadcast this week on the Kennedys.
There have been innumerable films and documentaries on President Kennedy’s assassination so it’s interesting to see all the Kennedys in context.
Joe Kennedy the patriarch was fabulously wealthy and ambitious.
As an appeaser he did not last long as the US Ambassador to Britain so his ambitions transferred to his sons.
The eldest – Joe – died in a wartime plane explosion and Jack was involved in a collision in his naval gunboat with a Japanese warship.
He swam to safety with a crew member on his back, becoming a war hero – rather than criticised for the positioning of his gunboat.
The Kennedys’ ambitions suffered as they were prominent Catholics and America had never had a Catholic president.
The Kennedys were never far away from disaster.
Daughter Rose had a botched lobotomy, rendering her mentally incapacitated, and another daughter Kathleen – known as “Kick” – died with her fiancée in a plane accident.
Jack was always sickly, with a congenital bad back requiring a corset, Addison’s disease and malaria.
Like his father he was an incorrigible philanderer though he often stressed his family life. He moved into politics as a Democrat after the war, aided by the Kennedy family wealth and contacts.
In 1960 he became America’s youngest president.
There was always a question mark as early returns indicated a Republican victory in favour of Richard Nixon but Chicago Mayor Daley delivered Illinois to the Democrats.
The first years of Jack’s p
residency did not go well.
There was the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; the Cold War at its peak was not lessened by a summit meeting with Kruschev in Vienna; and his brother Bobby as Attorney General masterminding a campaign against the Mob was hardly helped by the Chicago mobster Sam Gymkana and Jack Kennedy sharing the same mistress Judy Campbell. Further the South was in tumult over civil rights.
Kennedy was gutsy and a supreme orator and engaged all these problems.
His wife Jacqueline was glamourous and renovated the White House but she must have known of her husband’s womanising,
She also suffered mentally and physically after her baby son Patrick died shortly after his birth.
Nonetheless she was a great asset to a beleaguered President.
The main contributors to this excellent series are historians and, of those in the Kennedy camp, Bobby and Ethel’s daughter Kathleen is especially articulate.
