The Myth of John F. Kennedy in Film and Television

Audio-Visual Culture vs. Academic Culture

As demonstrated by the official commemorations in November 2013, which accompanied the fiftieth anniversary of his death, President John F. Kennedy continues to cast an enormous shadow on U.S. politics, despite the relatively short duration of his tenure. There have been numerous historical accounts, biographies, kiss-and-tell stories, and revelations about his indiscretions, his brothers, and his extended family.¹ More broadly, his impact on American culture, history, and society is far from settled, with liberals wondering, for example, whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam and would have sustained the cause of Civil Rights and with conservatives wondering how his personal character would have played out politically and whether his gun-shy approach to the military would have subverted American hegemony.

In film and television, which has been driven less by analysis and more by myth-making, Kennedy presents a relatively consistent image of aristocratic promise. in the multiple television mini-series that chronicle the family as a whole, such as The Kennedys of Massachusetts (Lamont Johnson, 1990), glamour and sophistication attend nearly every character, and so each death or the fall from grace is tragic. The Kennedys are shown as righteous, noble heroes facing down malevolent adversaries in Blood Feud: The Kennedys vs. Hoffa (Mike Newell, 1983) and Hoover vs. The Kennedys: The Second Civil War (Michael O’Herlihy, 1987). While the villains differ, films that chronicle John F. Kennedy’s assassination, its origins, and its aftermath are typically conspiracy thrillers that view the fallen president as the handsome prince who was leading the nation towards a brighter, more peaceful and tolerant future before he was cut down by malevolent forces working in the shadows: Executive Action (David Miller, 1973), The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979), and JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991).

Some accounts in film and television have broken from the grand myth and have joined the darker or seedier accounts available in print. The television miniseries The Kennedys (Joel Surnow, 2011), for example, emphasised Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s involvement with the mafia, along with and JFK’s sexual escapades and addictions to prescription drugs. But the programme was met with such vociferous criticism that many of its more incendiary allegations were ultimately muted or removed altogether, revealing the extent to which American visual culture has been contesting academic culture. John F. Kennedy remains iconic, the ideal visual representation of an American president, the man whom Norman Mailer described in 1960 as America’s ‘romantic dream of itself…the image in the mirror of its unconscious’.

Using as two case studies the television mini-series Kennedy (Jim Goddard, 1983), which addresses Kennedy’s entire presidency, and the feature film Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000), which addresses the president’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, this essay examines (1) the audiovisual means by which the mythologised version of Kennedy is enacted, (2) the elements of his life and presidency that are foregrounded by film and television, and (3) how the aspects that cast doubt upon this mythological conception are handled. Through these discussions, I want to demonstrate how and why cinema and television have functioned as the ‘custodian of the national myth’ of Kennedy (Walker 1993: 13–14).

The Teeter-Totter of Left and Right

Kennedy remains, in the eyes of many, a martyr to the liberal cause in the United States. Speculating on what he might have achieved had he not been assassinated has been something of a preoccupation in the fifty years since his death. As Thomas Brown (1988) has explained, left-leaning Kennedy scholars have sought to establish the incremental progress made by JFK during his presidency as indicative of a man growing into the moral responsibilities of the job and becoming increasingly bold in his handling of both domestic and international affairs. ‘The Growth Thesis’ suggests that Kennedy was becoming radical in the months preceding his death: economically (his clash with U.S. steel), militarily (the test-ban treaty and promises of a pullout in Vietnam), and socially (his embrace of a...