'Vindictive' Documentary on Kennedys Ignites Furor

Right-winger's History Channel biopic blamed JFK for Berlin Wall
By Jane Yager,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 17, 2010 7:13 AM CST
'Vindictive' Documentary on Kennedys Ignites Furor
In this 1962 file photo, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, center, poses with his brothers U. S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, left, and President John F. Kennedy at the White House in Washington.   (AP Photo, File)

A History Channel miniseries on the Kennedy family that won't be aired for nearly a year has already raised the ire of Kennedy historians and liberal critics who call the series' script a historically inaccurate hatchet job that portrays the JFK presidency salaciously. The Kennedys is being produced by Joel Surnow, a well-known Hollywood conservative, the Huffington Post reports.

A biopic that glosses over the Cuban Missile Crisis in favor of more than a dozen sex scenes should have been called The Sex Lives of the Kennedys, one historian said. Another historian, objecting to a scene of patriarch Joe smashing a crucifix, said the film "is not only extraordinarily anti-Catholic but it is anti-Irish in a way that I haven't seen in a long, long time." Surnow says the script is a work in progress and claims to have removed some of its historical inaccuracies, such as the claim that JFK proposed building the Berlin Wall.
(More JFK stories.)

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