For the 60th Anniversary of Dallas: On Some Portrayals of President Kennedy

Nov 22, 2023

6 min read

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It’s the date we tend to think of when honoring this President. No one remembers his birthday (May 29). They remember the assassination. I was born two years after it happened, but have always been obsessed with it. This national trauma seems to have displaced the soul of the nation in some permanent, fatal way. (That was the thrust of my piece on the 50th anniversary here) Where I grew up, New England, JFK’s murder cast a special pall. Half my close friends were Irish, Catholic or both; they had photos of him hanging on the walls. Jack married Jackie in Newport, just across the bay from where I lived. I was 13 when the JFK Library opened up in Boston, my friend’s mom brought us there, almost as a kind of pilgrimage. I read Profiles in Courage,Teddy White’s The Making of the President 1960 and Arthur Schlesinger’sA Thousand Days when I was still a teenager. By the time I was 21, I was but two degrees of separation away from the martyred President.

My father, an arch-conservative of paleolithic vintage, had told me the assassination had so upset him he almost lost his job. He stayed home for days. It haunted everybody who lived through it. Baby Boomers who’ve obsessed about in their work have included Oliver Stone, Stephen King (11.22.63) and Bob Dylan, whose epic 2020 song “Murder Most Foul” was his best work in decades. My generation is equally transfixed. It’s one reason I leapt at the chance to be in Jason Trachtenberg’s musical about the assassination back in 2018.

Kennedy’s story happens to hew more closely to our ordinary show business terrain than most political figures. His father Joe had an affair with Gloria Swanson and is even more notable (here, anyway) for being the guy who killed vaudeville by buying up the Keith circuit (and later the Pantages circuit) and folding those theatrical assets into his new cinema concern RKO. JFK had affairs with Gene Tierney,Marilyn Monroe, and Marlene Dietrich.

Today we thought we would flip it, and take a look at the depictions of Kennedy in film and television, as we have previously treated of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,Abraham Lincoln,Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, and will probably do with some others (FDR, for sure!) For sanity’s sake, we leave out impressions by comedians, like Vaughn Meader, whom we already wrote about here. Although we will observe that one of the hallmarks of the “Kennedy bio-pic” subgenre, of which there are many examples besides these, is terrible Massachusetts accents. The Kennedys, much like the Beatles, have inspired a million terrible impressions. The better treatments of the characters seem to steer clear of that pitfall. Even so, portraying this particular President seems a thankless task in most cases, and the job usually falls to B list actors, the bigger names clearly staying away from the part for fear of looking (and sounding) ridiculous.

Cliff Robertson, PT109 (1963)

A case in point! Cliff Robertson was very good casting for the WWII era JFK, commanding his ill-fated PT boat in the Pacific era. He was lean and good looking, and radiated his own wealthy background (though he was a WASP and not an Irish Catholic). Robertson spoke with a western accent, and to his credit, he didn’t even try to talk like a Kennedy. Ironically, Robertson would play a character based on Kennedy again in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (1964) — that one is a less heroic depiction.

William Devane, The Missiles of October (1974)

Devane was my first screen Kennedy and the one I have watched the most times, having seen this made-for-tv movie at least a half dozen times. Devane is a creepy and weird looking dude, yet something about his simian leer seems right for JFK, and feels more appropriate than the numerous pretty-boys who gave worse performances in the part in later decades. (Although we howled with laughter when he put his spoon back in his bowl and said, “Good chowdah!”) Based on a memoir by Bobby Kennedy, this taut thriller is basically a moment-by-moment breakdown of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the human race has ever come (yet) to an actual nuclear war. The play’s title is a riff on Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, about the start of World War One, which Kennedy had read shortly before the crisis. And I’ve always particularly loved it because it is a veritable convention of character actors, including Martin Sheen as Bobby, Ralph Bellamy as Adlai Stevenson, Michael Lerner as Pierre Salinger,John Dehner as Dean Acheson,Dana Elcar as Robert McNamara, James Olson as McGeorge Bundy, and John Randolph as George Ball. On the Russian side there are Howard Da Silva as Krushchev, Nehemiah Persoff as Gromyko, and Harris Yulin as Alexander Formin. Every other shoot in Hollywood must have gone on hiatus that month.

Sam Chew, Young Joe, The Forgotten Kennedy (1977)

Sam Chew was very present in pop culture in the ’70s, both in TV guest starring roles, and in films like Earthquake (1974) and Rattlers (1976), which was just my kind of fare as a tween. In 1977 he found himself in the rare circumstance of being cast as two Kennedys in two separate TV movies. He was Bobby in Tail Gunner Joe (about Joseph McCarthy), and Jack in Young Joe: The Forgotten Kennedy. Peter Straus played Joseph Kennedy Jr, the main character (his dad’s original pick for President). These movies were big TV events, and probably Chew’s high water mark in terms of public recognition.

Martin Sheen, Kennedy (1983)

Okay, let’s face it Martin Sheen wants to BE a Kennedy. He played RFK in The Missiles of October; later he played the Kennedy-esque Jed Bartlet on The West Wing (1999-86). This mini-series was timed for the 20th anniversary of the assassination, and therefore has just turned 40 years old itself. I watched this when it first aired and at least once subsequently. For some reason, I found several of the supporting cast memorable, such as E.G. Marshall as Joe and Vincent Gardenia as J. Edgar Hoover.Geraldine Fitzgerald played Rose — who herself was a Fitzgerald! Also in the cast a pre-Cheers Kelsey Grammer and a young Frances Conroy.

Robert Pine, Hoover vs. The Kennedys (1987)

This four part mini-series was shot in Toronto. Jack Warden as the controversial FBI director and blackmailer; Robert Pine (of CHiPs) as JFK. Like the Kennedys, Pine was also from a dynasty: he was the son-in-law of Anne Gwynne and the father of Chris Pine (not the last Star Trek tie-in here either).

Steven Weber, The Kennedys of Massachusetts (1990)

This Emmy winning 3 part mini-series was based on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s epic The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys : An American Saga. Steven Weber was co-starring with Timothy Daly in the sitcom Wings when this show premiered (flash forward to the fate of JFK Jr). The cast also has Charles Durning,Pat Hingle, Annette O’Toole, Campbell Scott and others.

Patrick Dempsey, JFK: Reckless Youth (1993)

The brain surgeon dude from Grey’s Anatomy plays Jack during his young playboy days, when did a lot of indiscriminate screwing! It ends with him running for Congress with grandpa Honey Fitz (Malachy McCourt) advising.

Bruce Greenwood, Thirteen Days (2000)

Bruce Greenwood has a ton of credits but in this connection we’d especially like to point his role as Christopher Pike in the Star Trek reboot. Gene Roddenbury poured a lot of Kennedy era ideals into the architecture of his sci fi universe, not the least of which where his Kennedy-esque starship captains. This film is about the Cuban Missile Crisis and focuses especially on an adviser played by Kevin Costner, who had starred as Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991).It’s not very memorable.

Greg Kinnear, The Kennedys (2011)

This critically panned TV series was knocked for being trashy and taking too many liberties with the truth. I’d add to its sins the casting of goofy looking Greg Kinnear as JFK. When it comes to bio-pics he was more suitably employed a decade earlier as Bob Crane in Auto-Focus (2002).

James Marsden, The Butler (2013)

As I’ve written before, I regard this popular movie as an exercise in preposterous silliness, so the casting of the guy from 30 Rock and Dead to Me is merely par for the course.

Rob Lowe, Killing Kennedy (2013)

Like Marsden, Rob Lowe is too pretty for the role by half — looks like a Ken doll. And his impression is terrible. And it’s based on a Bill O’Reilly book.

Special bonus: we extend our gallery with a few examples from the “Jackie” sub-genre: