I've watched a good number of documentaries covering the life and times of the United States' youngest and most charismatic president, but this one seemed the most comprehensive yet. Yes, it felt somewhat biased in its choice of talking heads commenting mostly favourably on different aspects of his political career, culminating of course in his presidency of just over 1000 days, which was of course, cruelly cut short by an assassin's bullet in Dallas, November 1963, but I will state at the outset that whilst I am a U. K. citizen, I do find my own politics roughly in alignment with Kennedy's, even, as is made clear, when he was seen to be more reactive than proactive to events occurring around him.
This can be said in particular with his initial reluctance to intervene over the burgeoning Civil Rights movement especially in the Southern states, but in other matters he did take a lead, notably his leading the American space-race against the U. S. S. R., his state visit to West Berlin and especially his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis which may just have averted a nuclear Armageddon. The spectre of Vietnam of course hangs over his legacy and just how he would have handled that particular situation, had he lived, is open to question, but nevertheless, it seems from my perspective that he was certainly coming into his own as he approached the end of his first term and would have been up to the challenges of a second-term, which I'm confident he would have won convincingly.
To this eight-part series then, which while naturally covering familiar territory sought to do so with some intensive research into his early years when he grew up in the shadow of his older brother Joe, the one originally anointed by their wheeler-dealer father Joseph Sr. For a political future, but who instead became a casualty of war, thus thrusting JFK into the limelight. I personally was unaware of the reported homosexual fixation on him by his best friend at college, or his passionate affair with a free-thinking young Swedish woman, but his story really kicks into gear immediately after World War II, when he enters politics for the first time.
Making use of contemporary news footage and numerous press-clippings as well as audio tapes of private conversations, the series pilots us through Kennedy's life in chronological order, leading up of course to his killing in 1963, so soon after his triumphant visits to Berlin and Ireland and indeed one is reminded of his popularity by the footage of the size of the public turn-out even in the South in Dallas the very day of his assassination. Although mention is made of his extra-marital womanising, it's odd to hear no mention at all of perhaps peripheral but certainly interesting figures in his life like J Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra or Marilyn Monroe while other important figures like Martin Luther King and British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan are also marginalised one feels.
Still, I was engaged throughout by the inexorable sweep of the forward-moving narrative. Yes, a more politically balanced take on events might have brought some interesting counterpoint to some of the events recounted here, but nevertheless this looked and felt like a fitting tribute to an initially conservative but later more liberal and dynamic leader tragically deprived of the opportunity to fully define his presidency.
