keepers of the Kennedy flame no match for the Reaganites
A recent controversy over a “History Channel” biopic on the Kennedys — John and Robert. It’s received its anger and consternation from the keepers of the Kennedy flame. So the atrocities are lay out:
They say the “Kennedys” screenplays contain many factual errors, some benign and others less so. For example, they say the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented and say that Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.
Beyond this, they say the scripts invent scenes that never occurred, like an exchange that suggests Kennedy came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall.
In another scene cited, the president asks his brother Robert, “What do you do when you’re horny?” and tells him that if he doesn’t have sex with unfamiliar women “every couple of days, I get migraines.”
In short, “The Kennedys” “does everything in its power to demean and make them quite disgusting figures,” Greenwald said. “No network or cable channel has ever done anything anywhere close to this, in the way it treats a president.”
Heaven forebid someone treat a president harshly, even hashly.
So the comparisons are out to the Reagan film which was to air on CBS in 2003, but was booted to Showtime due to fervant conservative fury.
The series presents Mr Reagan as being callous towards AIDS victims (“They that live in sin shall die in sin”). It implies that he suffered from Alzheimer’s during his second term, and could not even recognise his national security adviser. It claims that he supplied names to the Hollywood black-list of communists, an assertion that Lou Cannon, his best biographer, says has no basis in fact. Lest you miss the point, it has Mr Reagan call himself “the Antichrist“.
This article, which I would link to but I have lost it at the moment, fails to mention the Reagan series dalliance with Nancy Reagan’s Consultation of Astrology.
For comparison’s sake, though, and maybe this is just because of how early in the going we have the Kennedy production, or maybe we’ve safely gotten past the coinage of a president and can move on while the new coin stampers need to cement their legacy — but the Reagan series was damned every which way, covered by Fox News and the various Conservative Talk Radio Hosts, blared at the top of the Drudge Report, scathed by the bunch of National Review and Commentary — How Dare CBS! To date, I don’t see that same call from the MSNBC triumvirate of Maddow Olbermann Schultz, I don’t see it blasted on Huffington Post in nearly the same way, or the liberal news magazines.
Also it strikes me worth mentioning — Reagan was callous to the new AIDs epidemic, Reagan was losing it in places in his second term, and John Kennedy bedded a lot of women.