JFK: American Experience

[RainDog]

available online for 4 weeks.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/jfk/player/

[CountAllVotes]

1. Thanks!

They've got a lot of great programs on PBS.

I'll have to watch this one soon!

Thanks again!

[RainDog]

3. welcome! n/t

[KurtNYC]

2. Perhaps the most divided Whitehouse of the 20th Century was

the combination of JFK (+ RFK) and LBJ. Their contempt for each other is legendary and littered with most violent and derogatory comments yet exchanged by POTUS and VP. LBJ had exposed Jack's health condition and forced his way onto the 1960 ticket. 4 years later, the feud continued right in front of the casket containing JFK's murdered body, and beyond:

Jackie Kennedy had refused to take off the dress stained with her husband’s blood for the swearing-in photos. She said, “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.” Perhaps Bobby believed his very presence would brand Johnson for the usurper he was.
...
Johnson told Pierre Salinger, a Bobby loyalist who would get word back to him, that John Kennedy’s death was “divine retribution” for his role in the assassinations of Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. God, he said, puts his mark on those who do evil. So the killing in Dallas “might very well be God’s retribution to President Kennedy for his participation in the assassination of these two people.” Needleess to say, these words did get to Bobby, who told Schlesinger they were “the worst thing Johnson has said.” His own sainted brother was evil, was destroyed by God for his vices?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/24/americas-nastiest-blood-feud/?pagination=false

[RainDog]

4. history is always more complicated than we know

at the time...

[KurtNYC]

5. "truth is stranger than fiction" so it has 2 advantages over fiction

1 - more interesting, and 2 - it's true.

I think that is part of my fascination with the early 1960s; it is so dynamic and so many things were in play in ways they haven't been before or since. It is old enough to be novel and nostalgic but new enough to still hold relevance to the present.