What a sickening, sordid little family this was!

I'm old enough to remember when this played out. Everyone knew it was money doing the talking -- that, and the Kennedy name. They owned Massachusetts. Joe Doaks would have been in prison.

In a way this movie tried to portray a Teddy who was torn, confused, begging for daddy's respect. You could almost feel sorry for him -- except his lodestar throughout it all was how to preserve his "legacy."

I've always despised the fact that the general public will believe a movie as petrified fact. If someone comes along and adds outrageous amounts to the Bible, they believe it as gospel -- even people who know their Bibles and know it's not a biblical account. There's something about a movie that seems more real than what they know or could find from history. George C. Scott's performance as Patton has become THE definitive Patton. Spielberg's soppy Lincoln will go down in legend as the real man, whereas the real man was so much more interesting. You know the drill. If you see it in a movie, that's the way it really was. And on sites like this or the late IMDb, you have a fight on your hands if you suggest otherwise.

Well, my guess is that as the "Lion of the Senate" nonsense fades from our collective memory, this will be Teddy's legacy. And for once I'm rather glad people believe movies more than what little they could glean from the papers and newscasts of the time. At the time, the most we could do is not believe their party line. We never imagined this, although something much like it must have happened to have preserved that party line so perfectly, and to have demanded the obvious coverup.