This is one of the best miniseries I've ever seen. It is right up there with John Adams and Thornbirds. I rarely give out 10 stars but this series truly deserves it. The DVD's can be found on Amazon.The makeup and hairstyling was better than any film or series I've ever seen. In fact, Kate looked better than Jackie. It was also nice that we didn't have to suffer through overacting and ridiculous forced accents like we did with Martin Sheen on Kennedy. All the actors in this miniseries were so natural and looked so much like the real life persons, I forgot they weren't the real deal. Truly exceptional acting and natural makeup without prosthetics. Tom Wilkinson stole the show as Joseph Kennedy. The Kennedy early years was excellent about the son Joe & Rosemary. I wish we could have seen the others like Kathleen, Pat and Eunice. Teddy is shown in the sequel. But they forgot to include John John.However, whenever there is a foreigner or foreign country involved in a true life historical show like the recent Jackie, (Canada in this case) they inevitably show Oswald as the assassin when all of us who were alive at the time know depict no one as the assassin and just the result... so the lie about Oswald doesn't PO the American Public. Oswald grates through us like chalk on a chalkboard anytime someone shows that ridiculous lie.Then we had the BS with the fake history channel boycotting the film in the US. Read Wikipedia. I hardly believe Caroline's opinion carried that much weight. Especially since she wasn't even alive during the first part and a child during her fathers administration. So she wouldn't know the truth any more than Will and Harry really know how their mother Diana was killed.There is nothing revealed about the Kennedy's or outside of what we know from news articles, so no surprises which should have upset the last of the original Kennedy family so I don't know why they tried to destroy this series before it was even cast or filmed. This was a deliberate premeditated attack before the filming script was even written.Read about Operation Mockingbird if you want a real eye opener how our media has been controlled by the CIA. Think I'm kidding? Look it up. They recruited publishers, broadcasters and filmmakers in every major company to control what we see. People like Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham of the Washington post and Newsweek. CNN, Fox, History Channel, A&E, etc. My brother was a CIA publisher. This is the real deal.Read about Operation Mockingbird on Wikipedia and Ben Bradlee's obit to learn just how free and honest our press, broadcast news networks and filmmakers really are with the CIA involved. Allen Dulles, CIA director fired by JFK along with Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell, is the one who orchestrated the assassinations. Cabell's brother Earl was the Mayor of Dallas in 63. Notice how all the secret servicemen were all standing on the 2nd car following Kennedy and how Kennedy's driver slowed down when the shooting began. Bolton, Kennedy's protection was sent away to keep him out of Dallas and set up to silence & discredit him.JFK's mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer was CIA like her ex husband & brother in Law Ben Bradlee who gave her diary to the CIA. Mary had been assigned to control JFK and his cabinet. Read about her on Wikipedia. She was murdered a year after JFK to silence her. The staged witnesses gave CIA safe house as their address and the other gave phony military identity as they tried to set up a scapegoat for her murder. Bradlee admitted to lying about the diary in his trial testimony. He was Washington post and Newsweek.Dulles was put in charge of the Warren Commission by LBJ to mislead all of the evidence and testimony. Pres Ford & Arlen Spectre were also on the commission and Bush Sr coordinated from the CIA. Witnesses say their testimony was changed and completely altered. Why would LBJ appoint the fired CIA director Allen Dulles over JFK's assassination investigation unless LBJ was involved or knowledgeable of the complicity of Dulles and put him there to misdirect the evidence.I loved this miniseries with the one exception about Oswald. I had to buy it on DVD due to the ridiculous boycott by History channel. So be sure to boycott them. Contact all their sponsors and tell them you will boycott any product which sponsors that network and A&E. I cancelled my service 5 years ago. Isn't it amazing how the UK History Channel aired this series and called it one of the best ever with nearly 3 million viewers there. We are the victims of propaganda and media control.This is an excellent video. Highly recommended.

I did not find this title very entertaining, but I did find it informative. It was interesting to me being able to see what I've learned in class acted out on screen in such a way. I can conclude that the goal of this television show wasn't to entertain but to inform, and I believe that it carried out its' purpose. Kennedy was always one of my favorite presidents but seeing this period in his life versus reading it or hearing it was a good experience for me. It probably also wouldn't be my first choice of something to watch on a Friday Night, but it is useful for those who are trying to get more information on Kennedy and his administration.

This 8 episode mini-series that follows the much examined story of President Kennedy. There isn't much here that would surprise anybody. It's a well-mined section of history, and this series just follow the traditional road.Although there are some in this that's not in the official records, it is already much discussed. And the situations aren't done in a salacious way.What I like most about this series is the acting. Greg Kinnear and Barry Pepper are solid as the Kennedy brothers. Tom Wilkinson has the power of experience. But I was surprised most by Katie Holmes. She was just so well casted as Jackie.

This is an excellent American TV drama series, if one is satisfied with the story of Jack and Bobby Kennedy told from the personal point of view, with little of the politics, and many significant persons omitted (such as Teddy, completely). The series is dominated by the powerful presence of that egotistical monster, Joe Kennedy, the father, who is portrayed magnificently by Tom Wilkinson, in a performance worthy of an Oscar. Everybody in the series is very good except for one person: Katie Holmes was catastrophically miscast as Jackie Kennedy, and no matter how hard she tries, she is just so wrong for the part. She gets everything wrong, plays the waif, and lacks the sophistication and poise necessary. (In fact, it is difficult to think who really could have played Jackie Kennedy.) Greg Kinnear as Jack and Barry Pepper as Bobby are both absolutely brilliant, and they both look and sound like Jack and Bobby. Diana Hardcastle, as their mother Rose, is also a powerful and effective presence on screen. Kristin Booth does very well as Ethel, Bobby's wife, though whether Ethel was really like that I have no idea, not being a Kennedy expert or having met any of them. By coincidence I was in Washington (where I did not live) on the day of Jack Kennedy's funeral. My mother and I stood on the kerb of a street and Jack Kennedy's coffin went by us, covered in an American flag. A black limousine went past us, just six feet away, and inside I could clearly see Jackie and her children in mourning. It was a traumatic event for the whole country and the world. I was incredulous that several American channels refused to broadcast this series, apparently because it challenged the 'Kennedy myth', whatever that is. But really this series goes very easy on the Kennedys and portrays Jack as a hero with only minor blemishes, and Bobby as an even more heroic figure who has no blemishes at all. The only Kennedy who comes in for significant criticism is the father, Joe. The rest emerge relatively unscathed from scrutiny. If American audiences by now cannot face the fact that Jack Kennedy was a compulsive womanizer, then I do truly despair of their naiveté. A woman friend of mine told me in the 1960s that when he was a senator in the late 1950s, Jack Kennedy roared up beside her in a sports car in a Washington street and tried to pick her up as brazenly as that. Are we to suppress this kind of information about historical figures? Why? This series is certainly not historically accurate at all times. For instance, in Episode 3, Jack Kennedy twice engages Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, in conversation in the White House during the Bay of Pigs invasion. But Allen Dulles was not in Washington at the time, so that this could not have happened. Dulles made sure he was abroad when the invasion was launched, even though he was in charge of it due to it being wholly a CIA operation, for the reason that it was designed to fail. The last thing Dulles wanted was for Castro to be overthrown. After all, Castro was needed for the phoney Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year, which in turn was needed in order to ratchet up the public fear level of the Cold War and increase the spending. The Kennedy boys were highly intelligent, and when they began to figure out some of the things that were really going on, and that they were being misinformed and manipulated, by 1963 the assassination of Jack was inevitable. After all, Jack wanted to pull out of a Vietnam War, and he wanted the Federal Reserve to stop printing American currency and have it printed by the Treasury instead. You can't do that! A president who tries that won't live for many weeks, and he didn't. Presidents must never imagine that they are really in charge of anything, for if they make that mistake, they are terminated. It wasn't necessary to assassinate Nixon, because he was easier to frame and shame, and besides, he used too many expletives on his tapes. This series perpetuates the stale myth of Oswald as a lone assassin, which no one believes anymore. The series even shows him firing a cheap bolt action rifle repeatedly at Kennedy, despite the fact that it has been proved conclusively that the rifle found at the Book Depository was physically incapable of being reloaded by bolt action fast enough for the shots which killed the President. We all know there was a conspiracy and that there was more than one gunman, so why pretend otherwise in this series? Also, as far as I recall from the accounts at the time, Oswald did go down to have lunch, and did not remain on the upper floor with a sandwich as portrayed in the series. All of the political background of the Kennedy Administration is sketched so lightly you would barely know it existed, except for the racial integration issues, which are given prominence. And much is made of the fact that Kennedy appointed someone black as a White House security guard. The producers of the series are keen to show Kennedy as a friend of all African-Americans. Doubtless that was true. It is certain that some controversial scenes were cut out of the series. The actress who plays Marilyn Monroe talks in a documentary on the DVD about shooting the scenes where she sings 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President', but these scenes were not included in the series. It appears that attempts were made to soften the series in order to try to get an American broadcaster to accept it. For reasons that wholly mystify me, it still seems necessary in some circles to try to pretend that Jack Kennedy was an angel, and an ideal husband. Let's all grow up, shall we?