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Synopsis
Many of today’s public figures, well-known journalists and just ordinary people bring John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s legacy to the forefront of today—in this dazzling, thought-provoking documentary. Is he relevant 45 years after his death? Absolutely!
There have been more documentaries and movies made about the 35th president than any other, yet Chuck Workman’s “In Search of Kennedy” brings a new insight and perspective into his life and what he means today, as the country goes through the most important presidential election of this century.
“In Search of Kennedy,” filmed in many parts of the world over a three year period, comes out at a time when his speechwriter Ted Sorensen is publishing a book on the Kennedy years, when GQ and Vanity Fair feature JFK on their covers, and, as we see in the film, when every presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, is comparing him or herself to the 35th president.
John Kennedy’s charisma and mystique is captured in archival footage, some of it iconic, some rarely if ever seen before. It is also captured in the eloquent words of those who knew him, including his surviving brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking in an exclusive interview.
Actors Alec Baldwin and Elizabeth Peña eloquently voice the words of well-known authors who have written about him.
Writer/director Chuck Workman made the film in five parts because Kennedy was indeed a man of many parts and for so many people he still is a myth, a president, a call to the future. In the first part “The Myth,” we visit an auction of Kennedy souvenirs, talk to people in Berlin and Boston, look at the way Kennedy changed both style and substance in American politics, and see the moment in time that changed the world forever—assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. As fellow documentary maker Michael Moore says in the film, since then everything has been “a copy of a copy of a copy,” with 40 plus years of scandals, cynicism and disillusion.
Of course JFK was no stranger to scandal himself and the film has a clip of Judith Campbell Exner admitting her “close personal relationship” with the president, plus footage of a playful Marilyn Monroe. But, as the documentary makes clear, in a sequence where today’s alternative media takes a look at JFK, it was a different time and the public knew nothing about his amorous adventures, nor little about his poor health.
Hopefuls in the 2008 presidential campaign were among those interviewed for the documentary and speak glowingly of JFK and his legacy.
At the same time, bartenders and customers in an Irish pub in Boston, most of them not yet born when he died, speak with pride of their hometown hero, longing for a time they never knew, despite the scandals.
In part two “The President,” Kennedy admits his failure with the infamous Bay of Pigs misadventure and, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., says “this is the week I will earn my salary,” when faced with the Cuban missile crisis. He did earn that salary, avoiding nuclear war without a shot being fired. The film also looks hard at Kennedy’s involvement with Vietnam and civil rights.
The heart of “In Search of Kennedy” is in part three, “The Present,” which shows the effect the 35th president has on the current presidential campaign, offering comparisons, favorable and unfavorable, with today’s candidates, including the frontrunners and those who have since fallen by the wayside.
In one sequence a painting of Kennedy wearing a bemused smile, appears ghost-like in the background as various candidates speak, comparing themselves to him.
Another sequence follows a mock campaign for JFK in ’08, with the slogan “Bring Back Jack.”
In part four, “The World,” Workman’s cameras travel to such places as Venezuela, Sierra Leone and return to Berlin, where John Kennedy’s name still reverberates today, recalling a time America was respected by people of other nations, and implying, in comments by Ted Sorensen and others that this might not be so true today.
The final segment deals with “The Legacy,” where a new generation speaks of its call to duty, and young people talk about their need for a new leader with courage and authenticity. A revealing sequence on the Kennedy family since JFK’s death takes another look at his legacy. In talking of what might have happened had Kennedy lived, Bill Clinton says, “Instead of asking ‘what if,’ we should ask ‘what now’?”
Alec Baldwin, quoting Schlesinger, says, “He transformed the American spirit.”
And from broadcaster Chris Matthews comes the simple phrase, “He was the real thing.”
In addition to those already named, Workman interviews dozens of ordinary citizens and a number of public figures including James Carville, Al Franken, Senator Tom Hayden, Tim Shriver, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Arianna Huffington, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Garrison Keillor, Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Norman Mailer.
Chuck Workman
Producer/Writer/Director
 Chuck Workman has been involved in filmmaking for more than 30 years as a director, writer, editor and producer.
His film “Precious Images” won an Oscar® for Best Live Action Short (1986) and was shown at numerous festivals. It is the most widely shown short in history, one of five of his films in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Workman directed the documentary “Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol,” which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. “The Source,” about the Beat Generation, premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, and had a broad theatrical release. His history of the movies, “The First 100 Years,” appeared on HBO. His film on the presidency and pop culture, “The People’s President,” was shown on PBS. He is now completing a film on Jonas Mekas and avant-garde cinema.
Chuck Workman directed three independent dramatic films, including “A House on the Hill.” Sequences he made for Oscar® shows have been nominated seven times for Emmys®. “Words,” produced for the Writers Guild, was at several festivals, including New York and Denver, where it won the Best Short Award. In response to September 11 he created the short “The Spirit of America,” which played in 10,000 theaters. “A Tribute to Charlie Chaplin” was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. A short on politics and the movies opened the 2007 White House Correspondents’ dinner and he has made other shorts and compilations for several sponsors and clients.
His video work has been in London’s Museum of the Movie Image, San Francisco’s Exploratorium, Barnsdall Museum and the Oakland Museum of Art. Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Times called him one of the three most influential editors of the past 50 years.
Workman is a former president of the International Documentary Association, a former Santa Monica Arts Commissioner, and taught at USC Film School. He is a lecturer at major arts centers and has contributed articles on filmmaking to several magazines.
The Making of "In Search of Kennedy"
by Chuck Workman
I first met with producer Steve Kern to discuss another movie, but he mentioned he wanted to do a film about John F. Kennedy. He felt that basically what the younger generation knows about JFK is that he was assassinated and that he ran around with a lot of women. But they don’t know to what a great extent he was such an inspirational figure to people of our generation, or why.
We started with a historical look at JFK, a lot of stock footage at first, and then a look at how Kennedy would have fared in today’s media, and a determination of what kind of president he would have been had he not been killed. We shot in certain iconic places in Kennedy’s story: Dallas, the Vietnam Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, and all over Boston, where he had grown up.
But we realized as we worked on it that the subject had a lot of relevance to today. People kept bringing this up, this “search for Kennedy” whatever the name Kennedy meant to them, a figure with flaws but with a tremendous strength of character, a strong leader who could bring us hope. I wanted to look closer at that in a contemporary context, so we started going where younger, politically active people were gathering, and asking a lot of questions. We interacted with a lot of people and found they were really interested in the subject, and in their way were looking for Kennedy too.
This was phase two, shooting in America, Europe, Africa, Venezuela, mostly interacting with young people, but also with people who were contemporaries of Kennedy, talking about Kennedy today.
The third phase came about when the current political race began. We actually held the film for a few months to wait for the campaign to heat up, but never imagined how hot it would get. We covered a lot of the conventions, debates and got on-camera footage with all of the many candidates. Of course as the campaign was changing we were changing, reacting to the frontrunners, following the race, trying to determine where the spirit and legacy of JFK fit in.
So these three elements became the meal that we serve up: a 21st century look back at Kennedy, his impact among younger generations, and his impact on politics today.
In the middle of the film we show the contemporary politicians, Obama, Hillary Clinton, McCain and others, and we see Kennedy kind of smiling at it all. You begin to get the feeling that Kennedy is there somewhere, watching it all, kind of bemused. In the film, Michael Moore says, “We’ve lost so much since then. Politicians today seem like a copy of a copy of a copy.”
Many observers compared Obama to JFK, and we devoted some time to that, but virtually every campaign spinner compared their candidate to Kennedy, be it Richardson or McCain or Hillary or Tom Tancredo. But I didn’t feel, and I don’t feel yet, and I think this is the crux of the film, that any of the candidates, including the most Kennedy-like, who is Obama, is quite up to those standards that we expected from Kennedy. For all I know Obama is searching to be Kennedy and has not achieved it yet, although one political expert says Obama is “not the new Kennedy, he’s the new Obama” and James Carville says that at the time we didn’t know Kennedy was “Kennedy” either. To wrap up that section we have a satirical commercial for JFK as a contemporary presidential candidate, complete with websites and phone numbers.
I learned that the story of the film is not that we’re in search of Kennedy and we found him, but we’re in search of a figure like Kennedy and we’re still searching. But this film is not a Kennedy whitewash. Every scandal is in there and we put them in a present day perspective. How would the gossipy Internet sites handle it? We even have a mock sequence where that’s happening, and we have a fictional news show after Kennedy’s “second term.” We go into the things that might have happened, using a lot of historical evidence and what he might have done. There’s some new material that came out about Cuba and about the Bay of Pigs that’s in the film, and reconsiderations about Vietnam.
There are dozens of movies and videos just about Kennedy and we use clips from many of them; all of this media is with us probably because he was assassinated. Because of this and his looks and his youth and his beautiful young wife we look at his story harder in a way. We look at him through this rosy looking glass, but we also look at him through a microscope. This man was probably the most important figure of the past fifty years so it’s worth another investigation.
We interviewed historians and biographers as well as contemporary politicians on the subject at length, but the most interesting people we interviewed for the film were the non-politicians, the non-experts: students, bartenders, people at the Vietnam memorial, those at the sixth floor museum in Dallas, those everyday people who themselves had a lot to say. Plus a lot of the Kennedy family are involved in the film, and they were really very frank.
And then there were people who remembered him from their own youth, or who were witnesses to the time, like Tom Hayden, who distrusted Kennedy at first. He wasn’t radical enough for him in the sixties. And then Hayden turned around, mostly through Bobby, who was very important in the way we look at John.
We interviewed Norman Mailer about three months before he died, and he had a great deal of insightful and often funny things to say about Kennedy, personal and political. Garrison Keeler is featured quite a bit in the film. He felt that Kennedy was an authentic figure. He says that politicians today are “kind of fake.” And then there’s Chris Matthews of TV’s Hardball, a Peace Corps veteran who is a Kennedy fan, but honest about his shortcomings. Still, he calls him “the real thing.”
The hardest interview to get was with Senator Edward Kennedy. We had to work our way one step at a time through the cautious but always helpful Kennedy gatekeepers. You could see by the careful way he spoke about it that, surprisingly, his brother’s legacy today wasn’t something he was used to talking about at length anymore, and he wasn’t that glib or political about it. One of the things he said is that John Kennedy would be restless today. He’d want things to happen and things aren’t happening. He liked action.
I never wanted to make simply another Kennedy biography, although the biographical facts are there. What is different I hope in this film is not necessarily in the images of Kennedy we see or hear about, it’s in the way the images are used, the way the story and the new sequences are conceived and stitched together, the way the facts and opinions interrelate, and possibly bring us some new insights.
Kennedy was somebody we not only wanted, but he’s somebody we needed. We needed change. Now we just have people all saying “change,” but we need change in the right direction. I think Kennedy brought a new perspective on politics and government and America’s place in the world and the role of the President. He led America into a positive and confident attitude that we might have lost. This film is meant to be nonpartisan, and I want the audience to make up its own mind about Kennedy, but I certainly hope that audiences understand that there may be a need for his kind of inspiration today.Stephen Kern
Stephen Kern
Co-Producer
 Stephen Kern has been involved in the filmed entertainment business for the past 30 years as a producer, executive and consultant. He was the Chief Financial Officer for Atlantic Entertainment Group, at the time the largest privately held motion picture producer/distributor in the country. While there, he was involved in securing third party production financing in excess of $100 million for successful films such as “Valley Girl” and “Teen Wolf.”
Kern acted in a production capacity on two award-winning theatrical documentaries: “The Panama Deception,” which won an Academy Award® in 1993, and “Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol,” directed by Chuck Workman. Stephen Kern was supervising producer on the syndicated television series “Here Comes the Bride.”
In 2004 he formed Verite Productions to finance and produce documentaries for theatrical release and television broadcast.
Paul Puskar
Co-Producer
 Paul Puskar has over fifteen years active experience in the film/television industry in sales, marketing and post-production. Beginning in 1984 at Hal Roach Studios, he was a junior executive in the television syndication sales department selling "Laurel & Hardy" shorts, classic RKO and Hal Roach films, and newly colorized films like "It's a Wonderful Life." His syndication sales career continued for a number of years at Qintex Entertainment and New Line Television in senior sales executive positions responsible for films like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Nightmare on Elm Street," first run and off network series offerings like the original and new versions of the "Leave it to Beaver" show, "Rollergames" show, and the "Lonesome Dove" miniseries.
Mr. Puskar spent two years in post production sales management, as well as two years as head of product acquisitions for L.P. Productions, acquiring product for Pacific Rim countries such as the "Supermodels" series and from companies like Icon Films.
Honorary Board
We are pleased to have received the approval and support of several prominent individuals who have graciously accepted our invitation to become a member of our Honorary Board of Advisors. They will assist our director, Chuck Workman, in assuring that the finished movie be historically accurate and truly depictive of that extraordinary time and place in American history. Below is a list of our members, and by clicking the name, you can access a biography of that individual.
 Benjamin C. Bradlee
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee (born August 26, 1921) is the vice president of the Washington Post. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1942. He started working for the Washington Post in 1948 as a reporter. As a reporter in the 1950s, he became close friends with Senator John F. Kennedy, who lived nearby. He became vice president and executive editor of the Post in 1968.
As managing editor of the Post from 1965 to 1991, he challenged the federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon papers. He became famous for overseeing the publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's stories documenting the Watergate Scandal. For decades, Bradlee was one of only four publicly known people who knew the true identity of Deep Throat, the other three being Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat himself.
Bradlee retired as executive editor in September 1991 but continues to serve as vice president of the paper. Bradlee published an autobiography in 1995, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. He had an acting role in the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy Born Yesterday. He also appears as a character in the 1976 film All the President's Men, where he is portrayed by Jason Robards.
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Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley is Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization at Tulane University. He earned his Ph.D. at Georgetown University in 1989. Brinkley's recent publications include the "New York Times" bestseller Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation with Stephen E. Ambrose. He lives in Houston with his wife, Anne, daughter, Benton, and son, Johnathan.
Neil W. Horstman
Neil W. Horstman is the president of the White House Historical Association Board of Directors. Mr. Horstman has served as executive vice president since 1994.
Mr. Horstman has focused his career on helping communities and historic sites manage and achieve their preservation goals. Before entering the field in 1976, Mr. Horstman held several positions in city and regional planning. He has directed private preservation organizations in Louisville, Kentucky, Kansas City, Missouri, and Savannah, Georgia. From 1987 to 1994, he was Resident Director of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the owner and steward of Mount Vernon, George Washington's home, since 1853.
The White House Historical Association, a non-profit organization founded in 1961, publishes educational materials on White House history, supports ongoing scholarship, sponsors national education programs, and financially supports the conservation of the public rooms of the White House and its incomparable collection of fine and decorative arts. Since its founding, the association has contributed more than $18 million for the preservation of the White House.
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Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of ten books. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in Economics. At twenty-one she became President of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union. In 2003, she ran for governor as an Independent in California's recall election. Her populist grassroots campaign was widely praised for putting the media spotlight on the corrupting influence of special interest money on American politics.
Her first book, The Female Woman, on the changing roles of women, was published in 1974 by Random House and translated into eleven languages. In 1978 she published After Reason, a book on political leadership and the intersection of politics and culture. Her biography of Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend, published in 1981 quickly became an international bestseller. Her fourth book, The Gods of Greece, celebrated the power of myths as guides to forgotten dimensions of life and ourselves, and has been republished by Atlantic Monthly Press, with paintings by Francoise Gilot.
Her biography of Pablo Picasso, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, published in 1988, was a major international bestseller, translated into sixteen languages. The book was reissued by Avon Books to coincide with the release of a feature film based on the book, produced by Merchant-Ivory for Warner Bros. and starring Anthony Hopkins as Picasso. In 1994, she published The Fourth Instinct on the longing for meaning in a secular world. Her seventh book, Greetings From the Lincoln Bedroom, a book of political satire, was published in 1998 by Crown. How To Overthrow The Government, on the corruption of our political system and the need for reform, was published in 2000 by Regan Books (Harper Collins).
Her New York Times bestseller, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America, was published in 2003. Her latest book, Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America (April 2004), offers both a scathing portrait of our contemporary political landscape and a bold, inspiring, yet practical approach to restoring America to the promise envisioned by our greatest leaders.
During Campaign '96, Arianna teamed up with Al Franken to provide political coverage for Comedy Central during the Republican and Democratic conventions, as well as on election night. She and Franken also appeared in a point-counterpoint segment, Strange Bedfellows, for Politically Incorrect.
She has made guest appearances on numerous other shows, including Larry King Live, Oprah, Nightline, Inside Politics, Charlie Rose, Crossfire, Hardball, Good Morning America, the Today Show, The McLaughlin Group, and The O'Reilly Factor.
She serves on several boards that promote community solutions to social problems, including A Place Called Home that works with at-risk children in South Central Los Angeles. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Archer School for Girls, the advisory board of the Council on American Politics at George Washington University, and the board of the Reform Institute that works on campaign and election reform issues.
Arianna Huffington lives in Los Angeles with her two daughters.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. died recently after having been, along with good friend Ted Sorensen, the major supporter and defender of the JFK legacy. He was the author of sixteen books, a renowned historian and social critic. New Deal historian and intellectual-in-residence at Camelot, Schlesinger stood not only as a preeminent American scholar but as a lion of liberalism. Schlesinger's extensive writings on the Roosevelt administrations remain a foundation for New Deal historiography.
He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1946 for The Age of Jackson and in 1966 for A Thousand Days. He is also the winner of the National Book Award for both A Thousand Days and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1979). In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal.
Hugh Sidey
Hugh Sidey died recently after serving as an important nurturing force in the genesis of In Search of Kennedy. He was the first one we called when we began the project, and, as always, instantly and enthusiastically volunteered his time and energy to help something he believed in.
Hugh Sidey wrote about the American Presidency for more than thirty years. He began covering Dwight Eisenhower for the weekly LIFE Magazine in 1957, and later became TIME's political and White House correspondent. He was the author of TIME's column "The Presidency," which he started in LIFE in 1966.
Bill Clinton was the ninth President Sidey knew, and he was the only reporter George Bush allowed on the plane when he left Washington in 1993. Sidey reported on Eisenhower in the U-2 crisis, followed Kennedy to the Vienna Summit with Nikita Khrushchev and was travelling with Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas. Sidey roamed the world with Lyndon Johnson, and was on board when Richard Nixon jetted into China in 1972. He reported on Nixon's exit from Washington two years later. Sidey journeyed to Vladivostok with Gerald Ford and wrote about Jimmy Carter and the Camp David accords with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.
Sidey grew up in Iowa listening to the Big Ten football games broadcast by WHO Radio's ace sportscaster "Dutch" Reagan. Years later, Sidey was one of the few reporters to whom Reagan talked regularly during his eight years in the White House, confiding his feelings about the emergence of the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, and expressing his bitterness over the Iran-Contra scandal.
Sidey was a fourth generation journalist and son of a country editor. He was reared on the family's weekly paper in Greenfield, Iowa. He received a B.S. in journalism from Iowa State College and began his career on newspapers in Council Bluffs and Omaha. He joined the staff of LIFE in New York in 1955 and came to TIME in 1957. He has authored or contributed to five books on Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Ford and was a panelist on television's Inside Washington (formerly Agronsky & Co.) for more than twenty years.
Sidey was Chairman of the White House Historical Association and served as advisor and narrator of their new film with Chuck Workman, The People's President.
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Roger Wilkins
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished professor Roger Wilkins was born in 1932 in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, a business manager with a prominent black paper, The Kansas City Call, died when Wilkins was a child and the family moved to New York and then to Michigan, where Wilkins spent most of his formative years.
Wilkins attended the University of Michigan, receiving his B.A. in 1953 and his J.D. in 1956, interning with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. Following graduation, Wilkins worked in several capacities as an advocate for justice. Beginning his career as a caseworker in the Ohio Welfare Department, Wilkins went on to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development and then as assistant attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Wilkins' interest in legal issues and equality stems partially from his family's background. His uncle, Roy Wilkins, was executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 to 1977.
In 1972, Wilkins began writing for the editorial page of The Washington Post just as the Watergate scandal was breaking. His critically informed editorials about the issues leading up to President Richard Nixon's resignation won him a shared Pulitzer Prize, along with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoonist Herb Block. He then moved to The New York Times, where he served as the first African American on its editorial board as well as a columnist. Subsequently, Wilkins worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, The Washington Star, National Public Radio and CBS Radio. He continues to be a major commentator and analyst on American public policy and social justice issues.
Today, Wilkins is a history professor at George Mason University. He is also the author of several books, including A Man's Life (1982), Quiet Riots (1988) with Fred Harris, and Jefferson's Pillow (2001). In addition, Wilkins is the publisher of the NAACP's journal, Crisis.
Contact Us
Verite Entertainment
162 South Orange Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323)932.9895 (T)
(323)965.8660 (F)
info@insearchofkennedy.com
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