Robert Greenwald, bless him, is gathering signatures in an effort to persuade the History Channel to act like a History Channel and not like an adjunct of Rush Limbaugh, distorting history to serve an agenda.
Greenwald sees this as a politically motivated effort. I see something more sinister, as I’ll explain in a minute.
This upcoming miniseries is produced by Joel Surnow, producer of “24” and written by one of his writers on 24, a guy who claims to be a liberal but does not appear to have made any political contributions to any liberal candidates.
Watch the clips here, and then sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
Here’s what actual historians – not all of them fans of Kennedy – have to say about the script:
Here’s what an outraged David Talbot, the creator and former Editor-in-Chief of Salon.com, said when he heard his book Brothers was used as a source for the miniseries:
And here’s a clip of Robert Greenwald talking on MSNBC yesterday about his effort:
I’ll ask again – please sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
I also encourage you to find a copy of the book Jim DiEugenio and I put together. There are a couple of articles in that book by Jim that you can’t find online, including Jim’s seminal essay on “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Because Jim’s essay describes why projects like this our made: if John Kennedy was a horrible person, who cares who killed him? Bottom line, that’s the agenda.
Jim’s article goes into the details of two women most often linked to Kennedy – Judith Campbell “the Government wants me to talk again” Exner and Mary (wife of CIA heavy Cord) Meyer, and shows how flimsy the accusations are that they in any way shaped policy or had any serious influence on Kennedy.
And I can’t help but remember walking by the newsstand one day and seeing another woman claiming to have slept with Kennedy. I burst out laughing, but then felt like crying because I was one of a handful of people in the country who got the joke. The woman was Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a journalist who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald four years before Kennedy was shot, and who wrote a book afterwards titled Marina and Lee that Marina, Oswald’s wife, called a pack of lies. Would it surprise you to learn that Priscilla’s CIA file listed her as a “witting collaborator”?
When I saw that, I began to wonder how many other of Kennedy’s supposed paramours were also CIA assets, perhaps on assignment to smear the man so no one would care enough to look for the CIA’s hand in his death?
So while Greenwald sees this as a political maneuver, I believe this springs less from Joel Surnow’s relationship with Limbaugh and the right and more from his connections to the intelligence agencies in general and the CIA in particular. The strongest evidence in this case points to high-ranking members of the CIA being involved in the plotting and cover-up of the assassination of President Kennedy. (See our book for a plethora of evidence in this regard, presented with solid factual references to actual CIA documents housed at the National Archives.)
But maybe Greenwald is right. Maybe Joel just hates everything Kennedy did and stood for. And maybe his sidekick writer is just gullible enough to fall for all that bogus sex stuff that’s been added to the record. I have a strong suspicion some of his “source” material came from C. David Heymann, whose books are so factually inaccurate I felt the need to expose him in full. See my essay on his fabrications and listen to me talk about him on Black Op Radio.
Either way, the show absolutely is not history. It is fiction. And not even close or loosely adapted fiction, but outrageously wrong, inaccurate, fiction. Do you really think that should be presented by the “History” channel? I don’t.
Please join me in signing that petition. And please stick your neck out a bit and ask your friends to sign up too. No one deserves to have not only their life taken from them, but their legacy as well. That’s a crime against Real History.
So sign the petition already! Thanks for caring. http://stopkennedysmears.com/.