‘More to JFK than sex in the pool’ say critics

Joel Surnow, the TV producer best known for bringing the game-changing 24 to our screens, has stirred things up again in Hollywood. And this time he's making enemies even his protagonist Jack Bauer would have trouble sorting out.
 
Surnow, a right-wing misfit in generally liberal Hollywood, and well known for his outspoken political views, raised Democratic hackles when the news emerged in December that he was behind The Kennedys.
 
Now the former Kennedy adviser Theodore C Sorensen and filmmaker Robert Greenwald have seen the scripts for The Kennedys and say Surnow's series unfairly emphasises the family's sexual misdemeanours at the expense of their political and social achievements. There are also are factually inaccuracies, they say, which make the series quite inappropriate for the History Channel where it is destined to be broadcast.
 
Greenwald, a noted left-wing documentary maker, who has even shot a 13-minute video compilation of criticism of The Kennedys from scholars and former associates of JFK, said: "There is not a lot that shocks me, but I read [the scripts] and I was really shocked. [Surnow] has such a clearly overt agenda ... It is an effort to defame and destroy the achievements of President Kennedy".
 
The scripts suggest that urgent national security messages were ignored while the young President Kennedy had sex in a swimming pool. On another occasion Kennedy declares: "If I don't have some strange ass every couple of days, I get migraines."

Critics says the scripts contain a dozen sex scenes yet barely mention the Cuban missile crisis. "Every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened," claims Sorensen.
 
In defence, Stephen Kronish, scriptwriter for The Kennedys, which has yet to start shooting, told the New York Times: "We do not go into this with an agenda other than to be factually accurate and entertaining."

According to Kronish, all of the events retold in the scripts are drawn from non-fictional works available on the Kennedy family and if he is wrong, then respected journalists such as Seymour Hersh and David Talbot are wrong too. ·