'RFK': moral 'vision' and murky history

Television

By David Zurawik

Sun Television Critic

Originally published August 25, 2002

 

 

In brief: Like JFK, a problematic but powerful mixing of Kennedy fact

and fiction.

 

The reordering of American history, our history, our shared memory -

that's what really matters about RFK, the made-for-television movie

about the life and death of Robert Kennedy premiering tonight on the

FX cable channel.

 

There is, of course, added regional interest and discussion about the

film because Robert F. Kennedy's eldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy

Townsend, is involved in what is shaping up as a close race for

governor in Maryland. Given the state of talk radio these days, there

are sure to be those on the airwaves who will question the timing, if

not see some sort of liberal conspiracy afoot between Hollywood and

the Kennedys with the film airing now.

 

Let me be frank: Such thinking is crackpot.

 

There's nothing crackpot, though, about the impulse to question how

such history-based television programs like RFK affect our lives.

Such a question seems especially relevant now, in fact, as we are

about to be deluged with programming about last Sept. 11 and trying

to reorder that traumatic piece of history in a way that makes it

more palatable to the American psyche.

 

History is a big word with lots of definitions, but there is nothing

more important when watching a prime-time docudrama like RFK than

reminding yourself that at best it qualifies as pseudo-history - a

story shaped to fit the demands of a multimillion-dollar

entertainment environment rather than any notion of truth. It's the

past re-imagined for the midway rather than the museum.

 

We are reminded of that at exactly 13 minutes and 31 seconds into

RFK, when Bobby (Linus Roache) is shown late at night trying on the

presidential flight jacket of his brother Jack just after JFK's

assassination in Dallas. The image of the dead president (played by

Martin Donovan) appears in the mirror and says to Bobby: "It's a

little big in the shoulders. But I suppose you could grow into it."

 

Bobby replies that he doesn't know if he wants to "grow into" being

president.

 

"Things don't make sense any more, Jack," he says. "I don't know what

to believe in."

 

It is the first of many conversations that Bobby has with his dead

brother during RFK, and I abandoned any great hopes I had for the

film the moment I saw it. (I still have not gotten over the scenes in

Elvis, the 1979 ABC docudrama starring Kurt Russell as Elvis Presley,

which featured the singer talking to his twin brother, Jesse, who

died at birth. The producers used a shadow on the wall to signify

Jesse's presence, but it was almost as nutty a choice.)

 

Advice from JFK

 

Did Bobby Kennedy have such Banquo-like visitations from his dead

brother at key moments in his life? Such conversations are at the

heart of the drama here, with Jack suggesting in one highly

emotional, late-night conversation that Bobby's over-zealous

political attacks on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, gangster Sam

Giancana, union boss Jimmy Hoffa and others were in part responsible

for Jack's assassination.

 

Ultimately, Jack serves as a moral guide in this story of the last

five years of Bobby's life, pointing his younger brother to the hero

quest on which he must embark to redeem himself and the American

political system. The great moral choice he must make is in

renouncing the Vietnam War during his 1968 run for the Democratic

presidential nomination. The big battle he must fight is with the

dragon known as Lyndon Baines Johnson, who succeeded Jack as

president of the United States.

 

But wait a minute, didn't another cable docudrama earlier this

summer, HBO's Path to War, say that Johnson wasn't really such a

monster, after all, and that his aides were greatly responsible for

leading him and us deeper into Vietnam? And wasn't one of those aides

speechwriter Richard Goodwin?

 

Yes and yes, and one of the most powerful moments in Path to War had

Johnson telling Goodwin that he and other aides, like Bill Moyers,

had the "blood of dead Marines in Vietnam" on their hands, too.

 

But in RFK, Goodwin is as much a moral guide as the dead JFK, popping

up time and again to urge Bobby to listen to his better angels.

Goodwin is, in fact, the very person who pushes Bobby to renounce the

war.

 

Confused by the contradiction? Maybe this will help: Richard Goodwin

is the "executive consultant" on RFK. See what I mean about the way

prime-time "history" can be shaped by production considerations that

have nothing to do with truth?

 

Major moments of life

 

Lawrence E. Mintz, professor of popular culture in the Department of

American Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, says

that films like RFK are among the most problematic when it comes to

national memory.

 

"The films like Rambo that try to reorder the Vietnam experience in a

way that makes us winners don't really worry me, because they are so

obviously fictional that I don't think too many reasonably

intelligent people would take them as history," says Mintz.

 

"The ones that concern me are films like JFK [the Oliver Stone

feature film starring Kevin Costner] because it mixes enough fact and

research with pure fiction to the point where I think even a fairly

sophisticated viewer could confuse the two," he adds.

 

Which is exactly what happens in RFK - and is what ultimately gives

it such emotional power at the end, despite the silliness of the

cooked-up conversations between a living Bobby and a dead Jack

throughout the film.

 

RFK not only re-creates the major public moments of Bobby's life

leading up to his assassination in 1968, but, like Stone's JFK, it

mixes actual news and documentary images from the time with its

fictional images. I don't care how phony the film feels, when you

hear Bobby's morally charged oratory ring out as real images of his

funeral train roll across the screen, you may weep. I did anyway. It

felt as if not only the war, but the debasement of public life and

the madness of political assassination in this country were all

somehow redeemed by the moral journey Robert Kennedy successfully

navigates in the film.

 

It felt so real, so important, so true. It felt like the ending to

another political, historical docudrama of recent vintage, HBO's

George Wallace, with Gary Sinise as the former governor of Alabama.

That film ended with the longtime racist, now laid low by age and

illness, coming to an African-American church to ask forgiveness of

its congregation. It was another fabulous moment of prime-time

redemption.

 

There was only one problem: It never happened. But it made for good

entertainment and the great lie that as a nation, we are constantly

moving in the right moral direction.

 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun