Liberals Protests Prompt History Channel To Ax Kennedy Movie
It was timed to air during the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy presidency. The film is “inaccurate” claims critics, but more likely it was because one of the producers on the project, Joel Surnow, is a conservative.
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — A controversial miniseries on the Kennedy family will not air on the History Channel because the completed multimillion dollar project does not fit the “History brand,” the network said.
The eight-part series drew criticism during its production from figures such as former Kennedy administration aide Theodore Sorensen, who attacked the scripts as inaccurate. The role of producer Joel Surnow, a political conservative, also drew suspicion from fans of the Kennedy family.
“We have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand,” the network said in a statement late Friday. The decision was first reported Friday by the Hollywood Reporter. …
It’s not clear who made the decision to pull the plug on “The Kennedys,” given the joint ownership. A top Disney executive, Disney-ABC Media Networks co-chairwoman Anne Sweeney, is also on the board of directors for the Special Olympics, the organization started by the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver, President Kennedy’s sister.
Liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald was behind a petition drive to get the movie shelved. A website, stopkennedysmears.com, was set up with a short film that attacked the miniseries.
According to the article, at least one version of the script had President Kennedy describing to his brother RFK why he felt the need to have sex with multiple women. There’s no evidence that this scene made it into the final film, and certainly there’s no historical record of such a conversation, but JFK was almost certainly a serial adulterer. His presidential womanizing is the thing of legend, second perhaps to only Bill Clinton who had to actually fess up to getting off in the Oval Office with someone other than the First Lady.
So why all the fuss? My guess is that this film might have been a bit more accurate than liberals like their JFK biopics. Kennedy died young, and like all celebrities who die young he’s been romanticized. The truth about JFK isn’t likely to sit well with modern liberals who view him as a saint for progressiveism. ” Had he lived and been re-elected, the anti-war crowds would have been chanting, not “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” but “Hey, Hey, JFK….” said Christopher Hitchens reflecting on the Kennedy mythos back in 2003.
That JFK started the much-maligned Vietnam is an inconvenient truth. As was Kennedy’s espousing of supply-side economics. “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now,” said Kennedy back in 1962. “Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”
That’s not exactly in keeping with modern liberal economic thinking.
Liberal opposition to a JFK movie probably had less to do with worry over character assassination (I don’t think there are many salacious details from the “Camelot” era the public isn’t well aware of) but rather concern over the modern American public being introduced to the real JFK as opposed to the JFK of popular culture.
Tags: censorship, history channel, john kennedy
