Word: mcginniss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Oliver Stone was attacked for stretching the facts about the Kennedy assassination in JFK. Author Joe McGinniss is getting slammed for inventing thoughts and dialogue for his new biography of Ted Kennedy. If no similar outcry greets Marilyn & Bobby: Her Final Affair, it is because tawdry "fact- based" TV movies have become too common to get riled over. This one, moreover, inoculates itself with a disclaimer at the outset: "A fictionalized account inspired by the public lives of Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy." None of which can entirely excuse this USA Network movie from responsibility for breaking new ground...
...MCGINNISS...
...When McGinniss does focus on him, it is only to say obvious things with superficial evidence: that he carried the burden of having bigger-than-life brothers (one sign: his face twitched when McGinniss broached the subject years ago), that he felt left out of the family, and that he had a lousy childhood and marriage. The book seems obsessed with debunking the Kennedy myth, as if it needed debunking. And nowhere does it explain Ted's fundamental paradox: that a man so self-destructive stuck so willingly to the daily tilling of the legislative field and left such...
There is a name for writers who claim privileged access to the inner workings of people they describe. The name is novelist. And it is impossible to read the released portion of McGinniss's book without feeling set adrift in a muddled and decidedly fictional realm. The introductory chunk purports to follow Ted Kennedy from the assassination of his brother John, on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, through the President's funeral and burial the following Monday. The events of these four days were exhaustively rehearsed in William Manchester's The Death of a President (1967); McGinniss acknowledges his indebtedness...
...beyond draping his story across Manchester's framework, McGinniss poses as an all-knowing narrator who jumps in and out of people's heads -- usually, but not always, Teddy's -- according to his mood of the moment, and plausibility be damned. Here is the account of Teddy's thoughts as he meets young Caroline Kennedy in the White House on Friday afternoon: "She did not yet know that her Daddy was dead and that her mother, even then, was flying back to Washington wearing a dress still stained with his blood and with flecks of tissue from his brain...