Thurston, Welcome to the Lake.

Teddy, Thank you for Hosting tonight’s Salon.

Please join me in welcoming Thurston Clarke back to FireDogLake. Please take unrelated conversations to the previous FDL thread or other FDL venues, so that we can focus on this effort to capture The History Channel’s attention about the right-wing and ahistoric slant of their Joel Surnow-produced miniseries on The Kennedys.

Thanks!

I’m readiny to answer comments. Thurston

While readers take a moment (or eleven) to watch the movie atop this post, I’ll start off with this question — I was struck by your mention of the JFK anniversary. Do you think there are other efforts afoot to discredit the Kennedys?

Welcome Thurston and thanks for hosting Teddy. Born in ’65 so I am glad you old timers are here to straighten things out. *s*

Not yet. I think they will increase in 2012, which will be a presidential election year. Assuming that Obama runs again, and given his support from the Kennedy family, I think we can expect more efforts to discredit JFK

Welcome to Firedoglake!

Which brings up an excellent point — people get their history from television nowadays, not from history books or community elders as in the olden days. That makes this History Channel project especially loathesome, due to its prurience, fiction-based narrative, and right-wing slant.

Who owns history? Who owns History? Who can lay claim to an honest effort, and who can condemn dishonest efforts?

We old-timers need to protect you youngsters from the mischief-makers among us who bring their own agenda to bear on the ‘history’ they want to tell.

Thanks. I think one of the reasons that the American public is so susceptible to films like the one under discussion is that the knowledge of the Kennedy years is broad but not deep, particularly among those born in the last 30-40 years.

The scene you discuss in the clip above — JFK as controlling president forbidding his wife Jackie from leaving the White House to go to Cape Cod — is false on its face, as you describe their travels that year. How is it possible for a screenplay to so blithely discard the historical record?

Can you please talk about the kinds of sources that are available to disprove the screenplay? For instance, are there contemporaneous accounts of the First Family’s travel? Or are there logs now available from the Secret Service?

Exactly. Generations born after Dallas are more likely to get their history thorugh television and film. A few lines of clever dialogue and an arresting image can have more effect than a written biography or history.

You go online to the Kennedy library website and access JFK’s daily desk diary that shows his movements, and often those of his family. The Kennedy library has the White House gate logs and other record. A simple search of the New York Times and other newspapers will show that Jackie was in Cape Cod during the summer of 1961, and JFK was flying up on the weekends.

This is, I think, because JFK’s presidency is the first for which there exists extensive actual television footage — it was the first televised presidency at the time, and it is the first to be extensively re-broadcast as well. For instance, I don’t recall anymore whether I actually saw John Jr salute his father’s casket in November 1963 or whether my memory is from seeing the photos and footage from that day, over and over (I was nine).

Maybe because we’ve based our understanding and memory of JFK (and RFK) on evidence from that time, we are susceptible to newly created imagery that presents it in new settings, with newly invented dialogue, with new actors portraying the central characters.

Also, of course, history isn’t taught so much anymore, it’s watched.

The History Channel? I’m still sometimes surprised that people are baffled about why mainstream media catapults right wing propaganda. I remember when the History Channel was acquired by Disney (I believe). One of the first decisions they made was that they would no longer show, “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” despite it being one of their highest rated shows, and best selling DVD collections. Instead they show a right wing, biased program like the one we are talking about. And this is all surprising, given the past 20-30 years?

So that scene simply falls flat, as a complete falsehood. As do the scenes when Ted Sorensen was present, and actually has dialog in the mini-series; he says he never said those things and other ‘characters’ never said those things in his presence.

But I wonder what is the screenwriter’s basis for the conversations between RFK and JFK, about women and about their wives? I can’t imagine men of that era having discussions like that with servants present, or even Secret Service. Is there any real sourcing for the more prurient allegations acted our in the clip?

Given the recent comments of the History Channel PR people I imagine that they’ll eliminate some of the most striking innacuracies from the final script. Even so, the basic premise of the script, that the Kennedy presidency amounted to little more than promiscuous sex and painkillers, will still be there — unless they ditch the entire script and hire another writer.

Given its name and presumably wanting to protect the integrity of their brand, why would the History Channel “limbaugh” lower like this?

Ronald Reagan was rescued from — well, not really obscurity, but certainly a clear-headed evaluation by historians, by Grover Norquist’s Reagan Legacy Project. They sought to have a street or a school in every American county named for St Ronnie. Are you aware of any other president for whom such an organized effort was mounted?

It seems to me we ought to let the judgments of historians play out naturally, but these huge new ‘centers’ founded by presidents instead seem to be about preserving (and buffing) a legacy while furthering ‘ideals’ as the GWB mausoleum will.

If there are blatant untruths in the film is there any legal recourse? Must the film makers acknowledge what is true and what is not. Is this a docudrama?

Good question. I have no clue. Perhaops the people who green-lighted this project are either very young, or know little about JFK or the period, or think that a film showcasing and exaggerating these subjects will create controversy (which it has) and attract a big audience … or perhaps a combination of the above.

I’m not sure it’s surprising, but it is important to push back on these right-wing efforts. People get their history from The History Channel in America nowadays, and if wrong-headed history is presented, that is the history folks will remember. This is especially true if captivating actors are chosen to portray the characters, and if a salacious theme permeates the script.

We need to try to hold them accountable, even if only to provide a counter-narrative to their eventual product, don’t you think?

I guess that the historic revisionists at the “History” channel don’t want to concede that the legacy the Kennedys left us in the political realm was substantial, positive, and long lasting. They fear people of genuine intellect and compassion like John F. Kennedy that had the audacity to say the following:

“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

The “History” channel seems to have more in common with the slimy Texas textbook revisionists that decided to just remake history in their own vision rather than render an accurate portrayal.

Of course, what do you expect from a channel that thinks that the soap operatic “Ax Men” is somehow related to history? Clear cutting forests is history? Really?

I’m not a lawyer but I think it’s possible that people like Ted Sorensen might have a case, and he has intimated this in an interview. He has already said that not one of the conversations that he is purported to have had with Kennedy in the script ever happened. Kennedy’s friend Charles Bartlett is also in the script, and he is still alive.

What I’d like to know is where all these so-called historians are coming from? Did they all get their degrees from some Christian college in the sticks? Or is it the producers with a programme? History channel is starting to look as bad as NPR.

It wasn’t? I thought pretty much summed it up! Painkillers and women seemed to be every male member of the Kennedy’s greatest claims to history.

Not sure how much truth exists anywhere about JFK or any of the other Kennedys. Two were killed, so nothing ever bad is written about them. One is lionized to this day about his healthcare reforms, that for some reason after decades in office, he never got passed.

It’s great to have heros, but after awhile the idea of a political hero seems a tad naive at best. None of these people became all powerful leaders by looking out for anyone but themselves and their big moneyed friends.

Thurston – first, thanks for being here.

Second, sorry, but a very dark thought occurred to me watching the clip above. It seems the characterization of JFK is so loathsome as to marginalize the assassination.

That is truly vile.

My impression was that Ted Sorensen expects to do battle with them over the scenes they portray where he is present, and portray things he says he never said or heard. That sounds to me like a good start; if the program ends up with a disclaimer that it’s fiction and not based on any actual people (like Law & Order sometimes does) that might be a good result.

Sorensen seemed quite serious about warning them to obtain legal representation; he sounds like he’s coming after them, as he should. He sees himself as a keeper of the flame, I believe. As well he should.

Good evening, Mr. Clarke, and thank you for mounting these efforts.

Another factor to be aware of might be next year’s Reagan birth centennial (Feb. 6). There’s likely to be a faction that is not satisfied to sing their own hero’s praise, or simply to disregard his own marital history for the occasion.

I was too young to vote for Kennedy, and I can’t say that I could list many of his accomplishments. But I will not ever forget the Marilyn happy birthday singsong. I had a deep sense of “whoa!” and figured there was something unseemly about the whole group. And Jacqueline’s breathy tour of the White House left me wondering ….. I mean, I don’t like fake history, but i doubt we’ll ever get the real history either.

The interesting thing about the screenplay is that in the four hours that I read there is almost nothing poisitive about JFK. Even the Peace Corps, one of his lasting accomplishments, is presented as a hurried response to the Bay of Pigs debacle, a way of drawing attention away from it. No matter that JFK signed Peace Corps into law six weeks BEFORE the Bay of pigs.

Anothr hilarious touch is having Kennedy meet Bill Clinton at the White House in May 1961. Clinton is identified as being among the first group of Peace Corps volunteers.

Here’s what’s wrong with that:

-Clinton met Kennedy in the spring of 1963
-Clinton was never in the Peace Corps.
-In 1961 he would have been fifteen.

To present a history of the Kennedy administration without mentioning the Cuban Missile Crisis seems a little unbalanced, wouldn’t you say? We do know now that the press either covered up or was kept from knowing the extent of JFK’s health issues and womanizing. But putting on a bio-pic about his presidency without mentioning a critical time for it, and for the planet, seems wrong.

Well, that’s way off base.

But I’m not sure Bill Clinton would object even to a documentary that presented him as JFK’s adopted son. So I wonder what support we can expect from that quarter.

Nevertheless, the screenwriters’ arbitrary disregard for quite well documented historical facts is amazing.

The arrogance of these people is indeed amazing. My father was inspired to enter politics by JFK’s altruistic call to public service as a responsibility of every concerned citizen. He spent nearly 45 years in public service in many capacities at the local and state level and I know of many, many others that were also inspired by the Kennedy’s leadership model of altruistic service to the public.

How about this for a legacy:
The Apollo Space program.

The 1963 Civil Rights bill, passed by the Johnson administration in 1964.

The immigration act of 1965. First proposed by Kennedy in 1963 and passed as a tribute to him two years later. The reason why we have been able to attract some of the brightest third world scholars, engineers, computer programmers etc. to this country. Before 1965 it was virtually impossible for Indians or Chinese to come to the US.

Saving the world from a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile crisis.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty. The end of atmospheric testing is one of the reasons why children in coming years weren’t cursed with high levels of radiation.
And proposing a large tax cut, again passed after his death. (I suspect you might like this accomplishment the most).

Balance this with taking painkillers and extramarital sex.

Good point. Khrushchev was convinced that JFK was a naive and weak leader that could easily be intimidated by a blustery authoritarian like him. He was so wrong. Kennedy played his cards exactly right by ignoring the war hawks that demanded they bomb Cuba and taking a more measured but assertive approach with the blockade—which ultimately won him Khruschchev’s respect and spared us the holocaust of nuclear war.

Thanks for refreshing my memory.

Imagine the outrage of the Right if one were to create a Reagan mini-series out of whole cloth; claim Ronald was schizophrenic, Nancy really ran the joint with a secret cabal of wizards and that Mike Deevers was on acid all the time.

I would never ever be aired, and the fact that this Kennedy smear-fantasy is even entertained to be on the air AT ALL, much less the History Channel is beyond disturbing.

There’s many more tarnished legacies than JFK’s that this bio-pic has as its goal, I think. The legacy of public service that his presidency fostered is anathema to right-wing corporatists; we’re supposed to be consumers now, not citizens.

There is nothing wrong with taking painkillers. But if the History Channel is messing with history then they would be willing to imply drug abuse or impairment. Did Kennedy ever show any signs of drug abuse?

Womanizing is another thing but only if you are a democrat and it is after 1980ish.

There was a Reagan mini-series kerfuffle, of course, and his partisans succeeded in getting it moved off CBS onto one of Viacom’s high-number cable venues. The primary objection, as I recall, was to some hard truths told unvarnished — that kind of discussion about St Ronnie isn’t permitted.

The right, of course, is getting very confused about tax cuts since Obama’s. Craig Shirley and Donald Devine decided that Rove and Bush weren’t really conservatives, since JFK initiated the idea of a middle-class tax cut.

It makes me wonder how dizzy they must get.

Oh, and the Peace Corps! I guess Surnow’s screenplay mentions the Peace Corps, even if only in the Bill Clinton error-ridden context.

Indeed. An engaged and informed citizenry is dangerous to the authoritarian corporate class. Better we should just mindlessly obey and trust their benevolent intentions and let the benefits of their “work” trickle down to the serfs as our just reward.

Dr. Clarke, thanks for joining us at FDL tonight and for the strong work you’ve done for so long. Thanks also for letting FDL’s readers know how the History Channel seeks to pervert the historical record.

You’ve set forth powerful reasons for us to demand the HC abandon the script that perverts the documented history of JFK’s administration. (and for what it’s worth, I completely agree with everything you’ve said tonight).

In their Narrative Analysis of Power, the genius trust at SmartMeme would call this an intervention at the point of assumption:

However, beyond the physical connections and institutions of power, business as usual also relies on the dominant stories that normalize and justify the status quo. These are the stories that buttress the current global system with denials, excuses and claims that there is no alternative. To challenge and transform these stories our efforts must ripple beyond the physical points of intervention to impact the point of assumption: the underlying parts of a story that you have to accept in order to believe the larger narrative.

The SmartMeme folks describe other points of intervention. As the HC and the cable providers they depend upon all rely on advertisers, might targeting the ad base – attacking the point of consumption – serve as a force multiplier?

Consumer boycotts and markets campaigns spring up at the point of consumption, where products made from exploitive processes are sold.

I almost wonder if we’re going to need to do a counter-program on FDL TV!

We live in a rural area, and wonderfully had no TV between 1985 and 2006. I had two long hospital stays though in 1994 and 1996, so watched the “History” channel from my bed. What a misnamed outlet they were then. I called it the “Hitler” channel because of all the 3rd Reich sensationalist crap they showed. Again and again. Must have gotten good ratings.

We’ve had satellite since 2006, and I tried watching that channel a few times, hoping it might have gotten better. It has gotten worse. Every single WWII special I’ve watched there was either shallow, chock full of inaccuracies, or both.

How did you come to focus on the Kennedy accomplishments in your own work, sir? I’ve been reading up, and you write very extensively about the Inaugural. Of course, there’s also your RFK book, the title of which made me do a double-take: only 82 days?

I thought that was a great contrast to Schlesinger’s book, A Thousand Days.

No. There is no sign that the medications he took for Addison’s, his bad back, and his intestinal problems impaired his abilities. We know this because the tapes of many of the most important White House meetings have been released and they show that in almost every situation, Kennedy was the smartest man in the room.

I am currently writing “JFK: The Last Hundred Days.” The title is self-explanatory, a narrative account of the last 100 days of Kennedy’s life. It will be published by Penguin press in August 2013.

I also live in a rural area (the Adirondacks) and we don’t have cable or a dish so I don’t get the History Channel, but i have seen it while traveling and visiting friends.

The History Channel has bastardized and demeaned actual historic facts into sensationalized and propagandistic garbage designed not to inform, but to generate ratings and return for their stakeholders. Who needs the truth when money is king?

I will look forward to that, and hope you’ll make a date to come on FDL Book Salon to talk about it with us! I don’t think Bev books dates three years in advance, but please get in touch with her as we get closer to your publication date. That sounds like a fascinating time, as there’s been so much debate about those days relative to Vietnam, the political need for the trip to Dallas, their baby, etc.

I have a friend who met with JFK in early October (he ran Strategic Hamlets in VN) and came away with the impression that the tide was swinging away from further intervention. The meeting is documented in David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest.

I’ll look forward to this as a nutritious alternative to the unhealthy junk food served up by the History Channel and other revisionists.

Well, I think that the point of the Brave New Films effort that Thurston Clarke contributed to — we need The History Channel to undertake some responsibility and accountability for who they pretend to be. If they want to be The Hitler Channel, call themselves that. Or if they want to be The Prurient American Heroes Channel, call themselves that. But they have a lock on the American imagination as The History Channel, and they need to live up to that.

Don’t they?

Yes. It’s a great p[eriod, when Kennedy was finally hitting his stride. He signed the Limited nuclear test ban treaty in October. There was the March on washington in late August. In November he sketched out his plans for major anti-poverty initiative in his second term . He planned to run on two issues in 1964: peace and ending poverty.

He wanted to link the anti-poverty measures to the tax cut.

As for Vietnam. It was in early October 1963 that he ordered a draw down on 1000 US Advisors by the end of the year, a plan that was quietly shelved by LBJ.

The Bobby baker scandal also burst open in October of 1963.

I have serious doubts that he would have run with Johnson in 1964. I’ve recently found some documents in the Kennedy Library that confirm Evelyn Lincoln’s contention that several days before going to Dallas he told her that he was considering replacing Johnson with Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina.

I briefly met RFK in May 1968. A friend and I took a few days off from college in Seattle to campaign for McCarthy in Eugene OR, and we went one afternoon to hear RFK. After listening to him and seeing him up close, we switched sides and were rooting for RFK, even though McCarthy won in OR. We planned to volunteer in Seattle for RFK once he got the Dem nomination.

The night he was killed, we watched on TV, celebrating the CA primary win. They actually carried his speech live on Seattle (possibly national) TV.

We were toking up, drinking Rainier beer and taking huge hits of nitrous oxide from a giant trash bag, when we realized the stuff on TV was going very, very wrong. I’ve never sobered up so quick in my life.

Did you cover RFK’s Oregon campaign trip in your book?

Wow, that LBJ/Sanford swap is a compelling hook!

We often hear rumors about presidents planning to drop their Veep when running for a second term; there was lots of Cheney’s-out chatter at one time. Of course, Nixon viewed Agnew as his impeachment insurance. But I think it takes a special kind of person to admit the error of the original choice, probably the kind of president who was also beginning to see the errors in Vietnam.

What a different world it would have been if those Texas Democrats hadn’t needed calming down that November!

Thanks very much everyone. This has been a very stimulating 90 minutes

Yes I did.

Here’s a link to buy the RFK book — it will really take you back, ET, it did me.

Agree 100%. Contrast their mostly questionable offerings to genuine quality like Ken Burns’ The Civil War. I guarantee you will remember the latter a lot longer than the former.

Thanks very much for your time this evening, Thurston Clarke.

I hope everyone will take a moment to sign the Brave New Films petition to The History Channel here.

And if anyone wants a great read about the 1968 RFK campaign, I can’t recommend Thurston Clarke’s book too highly. It was a different era of political campaigning, off-the-cuff and with the candidate losing his cufflinks, but it’s worth understanding what happened that summer in America long ago.

Signed the petition. Mr. Clarke, how many historians are united in this effort?

I watched this too when I was 12 years old. My dad was a Kennedy delegate in 1968. I was horrified and shocked when I learned what had happened and could not bear to wake up my dad with the news, thinking that maybe things would just turn out Ok.

I had heard the reason Mc Carthy won OR was that there weren’t enough dispossessed people there–RFK genuinely and sincerely connected with those people like no other politician I ever knew.

And thank you so much Thurston for your time and efforts–please keep up the good work!

Oregon was the first election any Kennedy had ever lost, if you discount JFK’s failure to be nominated as Veep in 1956. It shaped RFK in ways we will never know. But it was an important step in his road to becoming his own man.

Indeed. It took a long time for RFK to step out of his brother’s shadow and establish his unique identity. Once he did, he showed what a remarkable and compassionate champion he was. The Kennedys had an amazing string of successes but nobody is exempt from occasional failures, which as you say were learning opportunities. For JFK, in retrospect it was probably fortunate that he did not win in 1956 as it may have hindered his political career.

Hello, Mr. Clark.

I’m late to the party and I’m sorry I missed this one. Especially as THC has often proven that it will present, and thus implicitly back, shows with severe accuracy problems just to have something, anything, to air.

And then when you add the rather obvious political slant to such a ready disregard for accuracy it goes past the point of being ridiculous. It isn’t funny when people you know innocently take these inaccurate presentations as actual history lessons. There’s a real desire for knowledge among the viewers of THC and the reichwing is perfectly happy to feed that desire with their home-grown delusions.

And of course the oligarchs and their corporate footstools are not at all loath to take advantage of that channel of attack when it suits them and their enablers in both parties are equally guilty.

Historical truth, as always, is for sale… but after decades of not-so-subtle enforced ignorance has it ever been more vulnerable in America?