JFK

dir - Susan Bellows
prod - Susan Bellows
edit - Jon Neuburger & Glenn Fukushima
writ - Mark Zwonitzer

> Emmy Winner
> American Experience/PBS
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Scheduled for broadcast on the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, this biography provides a fresh look at an enigmatic man who has become one of the nation’s most beloved and most mourned leaders. The documentary explores Kennedy’s childhood years as the overlooked second son of a multimillionaire exploding with ambition, his early political career as a lackluster congressman, his subsequent successful run for senate, and the election victory that turned him into the youngest elected president in U.S. history.

With the benefit of newly opened archives and recently released documents, the film re-evaluates JFK’s strengths and weaknesses in the Oval Office and looks at how he navigated some of the most explosive events of the mid-20th century: the Cuban missile crisis, the escalating conflict in Southeast Asia, and the urgent demands of an increasingly impatient civil rights movement. It also provides new insights into his private life — his relationship with his beautiful, accomplished wife, his obsessive womanizing, his inappropriate friendships, his reliance on his younger brothers, and his deference to the all-powerful father who had helped make him who he was.