Greg Kinnear Transforms into JFK

We’ve been watching the Kennedy miniseries on Reelz all week, despite the negative reviews, because we’re cool like that. Besides we get the impression that 90% of those reviewing the film negatively really only watched the trailer or just read someone else’s negative review. Here’s one by staff writer Dara Kelly, on Irishcentral.com, that just puts up the trailer on and reports on The Hollywood Reporter’s “paint-by-number” review. Weird.

As for us, we”re just blown away by Greg Kinnear’s transformation into John F. Kennedy and want to give him his props. He is just amazing in the role. Yes, we know that lots of people don’t like their legends to be human, so they don’t want JFK painted in any unflattering lights, but much of the stuff in the mini-series is, or should be well-known by now.

From “The Dark Side of Camelot” (1998) by Seymour M. Hersh:

“No two men could have emerged from backgrounds more different than those of Jack Kennedy of Hyannis Port and Palm Beach and Sam Giancana of Chicago. But the men had much in common. Each was obsessed with women; each was fascinated by Hollywood and was found fascinating in return; each learned how to operate in secrecy; and each could rigorously compartmentalize his life. Giancana was a foul-mouthed Mafia murderer who took on a top-secret mission for the CIA in 1960 and 1961 and never talked publicly about what he did. Kennedy was a brilliant politician could openly espouse the idealism of a New Frontier and the Peace Corps while being deeply involved in a world of secret escapades that could destroy his career.”

Whatever its flaws, it has it all: Joseph Kennedy, the domineering ruthless patriarch; his long-suffering wife, Rose, the archetypal Catholic mother in public, deeply religious but, some said, cold and detached in private (who also seemed to be pretty good at compartmentalizing). This is one aspect of the miniseries that we find fascinating as you see the Kennedy brothers’ love-hate relationship with their parents. It’s so Irish Catholic. Then there’s Rose’s contemptuous attitude toward Jackie; and both women’s acquiescence to their husbands’ infidelities:

From An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy (1993) by Robert Dallek

[Jackie Kennedy] had no illusions about her husband’s behavior. At the end of their visit to Canada in 1961, while the president and Jackie were saying good-bye to people in a receiving line that included a “blonde bimbo,” as JFK’s military aide General Godfrey McHugh described her, Jackie “wheeled around in fury” and said in French to McHugh and Dave Powers standing behind her, “Isn’t it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!” One day, as she escorted a Paris journalist around the White House, she said to him in French, as they walked past “Fiddle” [a White House secretary], “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” … Jackie made a point of keeping Kennedy’s staff informed about her absences from and returns to the White House so that … the president could get his “friends” out of the way. This is not to say that Jackie approved of her husband’s infidelity. It obviously made her angry and unhappy, but she chose to live with it.”

So ask not what percentage of the “The Kennedys Miniseries” is historically accurate. We will never know for certain whether John F. Kennedy really told Bobby Kennedy to kiss Lyndon B. Johnson’s ass, or if Bobby replied: “That big old hairy thing?”

Accept it, look for historical accuracy in your local library, and sit back and enjoy the fine performances in “The Kennedys” miniseries.

“The Kennedys” stars:

Greg Kinnear as John F. Kennedy
Barry Pepper as Robert F. Kennedy
Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy
Tom Wilkinson as Joseph Kennedy
Diana Hardcastle as Rose Kennedy