Ok, I know this may be a little out of date but I must have been sleeping at the time.
Anyway, in this Gallup poll of February 18th, 2008, John F Kennedy was voted most wanted president, living or dead, to lead the country through the next few years.
No surprise to the folks at KINGKENNEDY!
KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells the fascinating story of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and gives some moving insights into the political climate of the sixties. Unlike other feature films, in KINGKENNEDY actual archive material tells the story. See the pre-release trailer now.
“The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die” – Ted Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, 1980
Ted Kennedy was constantly fighting for equality and fought particularly for the poor, minority and women’s rights and for health reforms. As a senator for 46 years, he made Congress his forum by which he achieved his policy goals.
His life was peppered with controversy, particularly his younger years. He was twice expelled from Harvard for cheating and while he was attending law school at the University of Virginia, he was cited 4 times for reckless driving. It was his involvement in the Chappaquiddick
affair, when he was involved in the death of a campaign worker whom he was driving home from a party in July 1969, that effectively ended his Presidential ambitions. He steered his car off a bridge and into the water at Poucha Pond. Although Ted Kennedy himself escaped by swimming to shore, his companion was drowned.
However , during his last 40 years as a Senator, he authored more than 2500 bills of which several hundred have become Public Law and in this way Senator Edward Kennedy was responsible for many laws that have made a big difference to the quality of life of many Americans.
KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells the fascinating story of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and gives some moving insights into the political climate of the sixties. Unlike other feature films, in KINGKENNEDY actual archive material tells the story. See the pre-release trailer now.
It is alleged that Marilyn Monroe stayed in President Kennedy’s hotel with him after performing ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ for him at Madison Square Garden on May 18th 1962. They then embarked on a brief affair. When Marilyn Monroe died on August 5th the same year, the coroner recorded the cause of her death as ‘acute barbiturate poisoning’ resulting from a ‘probable suicide’ but many theories have continued to circulate about the circumstances of her death . Some theories have implicated John and Robert Kennedy personally, while other theories have suggested CIA or Mafia involvement in her death.
This video contains some extremely rare footage of Marilyn rehearsing for the Madison Square Garden birthday party and travelling to the venue, before giving the now infamous performance.
JFK with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders at the White House
John F Kennedy was both an ambitious politician and a pragmatist. As such he voted against Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act. He was aiming to stand in the 1960 election as the Democratic nomination for president and the Democrats were almost completely united in voting against the Act. However, in his campaign speeches for the nomination JFK stated that racial discrimination ’stained’ the reputation of the United States and after his nomination he made it clear in a number of speeches that he was an enthusiastic supporter of civil rights.
In 1960, after Dr Martin Luther King was incarcerated and given 6 month’s hard labour for a minor traffic violation, Kennedy called his wife Coretta to offer his support – an act reckoned to have helped him achieve 70% of the black American vote in the forthcoming election. Soon after this Dr Martin Luther King, was released.
After becoming president, JFK didn’t immediately act on civil rights. He judged that improving health care was a more important issue in the minds of the electorate and oversea affairs meant that he had insufficient time for other domestic issues. However, Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill was brought before Congress in 1963 and Kennedy gave a TV speech on the bill on the 11th of June 1963 (videos below). The passage of the act was interrupted by Kennedy’s assassination but it was finally passed by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, amongst other things, made racial discrimination illegal in any public place. It also required employers to provide equal employment opportunities.
Want to find out more about JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr? KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells a fascinating story of these three great men using genuine archive film material of the time. See the pre-release trailer now.
The Grassy Knoll showing the fence behind which the gunman fired at President Kennedy
JFK and ‘grassy knoll’ are terms that will be forever linked in the minds of most people. It is now accepted by many that shots were fired at the president, including (most likely) the fatal shot, from the grassy knoll on downtown Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
Yet the Warren Commission, which was called to investigate shortly after the assassination to investigate the facts surrounding it and which ran for 10 months,
concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of Kennedy. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the make up of the Warren Commission, which included US Senators and Representatives (one of whom was Gerald Ford who was later to become President of the USA) and a former director of the CIA, led to a deliberate attempt to cover up and obscure the true facts surrounding the assassination.
The 1979 government enquiry – the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) – found both the original FBI investigation and the Warren Commission Report to be seriously flawed, while a later study by the National Academy of Sciences (NSA) questioned the accuracy of the evidence used by the HSCA to support its findings.
In an article published in 2001 in ‘Science and Justice’, a quarterly publication of Britain’s Forensic Science Society, a more scientific analysis of the events of that fateful day in 1964 was undertaken. This included an analysis of the sound tracks and film evidence available. The author of the article, D.B. Thomas, concluded that it was more than 96 percent certain that there was a shot from the grassy knoll to the right of the president’s limousine, in addition to the three shots from a book depository window above and behind the president’s limousine.
Who had reason to assassinate President John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr? KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells the fascinating story of these three great men but, unlike other feature films, KINGKENNEDY uses actual archive material to tell that story. See the pre-release trailer now.
Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was delivered on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
It was one of the most iconic and influential speeches of the 20th Century and became the centrepiece of the Civil Rights movement.
Today the principles of equality for all people of all races, religions and creeds that Martin Luther King Jr espoused have become embedded in law in all civilised countries throughout the world.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells the fascinating story of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and gives some moving insights into the political climate of the sixties. Unlike other feature films, in KINGKENNEDY actual archive material tells the story. See the pre-release trailer now.
“This film is extraordinarily gripping; even though we are familiar with these world-changing events and tragedies, the glimpses into the build-up and background are chilling.”
“It works brilliantly without commentary or over-view; it is history, subtly edited, speaking for itself”.
When Susan Albert Loewenberg, the director of L.A. Theatre Works, wanted to put on a new play about Robert F. Kennedy, focussing on his increasing interest in civil rights issues over the last eight years of his life, she teamed up with writers Murray Horwitz and Jonathan Estrin. The result is “RFK: The Journey to Justice,” a new docudrama now touring the country, performed by California based L.A. Theatre Works. Previously, the company has been best known for staging and touring radio-theater versions of new and classic plays.
“In 1960, neither [RFK] nor his brother were very involved with civil rights,” Loewenberg said. “They thought it was an important issue, but also something that had to be managed politically, because it was fraught with danger for them with regard to the Southern Democrats, whom they did not want to alienate. They were very focused on getting John elected. Civil rights was a problem.”
But as time went on, RFK evidently shed his reservations. Among other acts, as attorney general, he worked to enforce the integration of the University of Mississippi and secure the safety of the Freedom Riders, and he teamed up on the effort that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, as a senator from New York, he strove to combat poverty and disenfranchisement. His fervor for such matters fed into his presidential campaign.
“By the end, he was a true believer,” Horwitz said. “It was not just politics.”
KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells the fascinating story of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and gives some moving insights into the political climate of the sixties. Unlike other feature films, in KINGKENNEDY actual archive material tells the story. See the pre-release trailer now.
In 1953 John F Kennedy was elected Senator of Massachusetts. Apart from a 2 year gap from 1960-62, the Kennedys have occupied the US Senate seat for Massachusetts from 1953 to 2009. Yet in 2010 the seat is no longer occupied by the Kennedys and, in fact, has been lost to the Democrats altogether.
Massachusetts, the only state that has some kind of humane and popular healthcare system, votes to deny the extension of that system to the rest of the country. The most grisly irony of all, of course, is that the special election that is now billed as having ‘killed’ health care reform was brought about by the death of the most ardent and honoured and tireless promoter of that reform – Edward M. Kennedy.
KINGKENNEDY is a unique feature film which tells the fascinating story of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and gives some moving insights into the political climate of the sixties. Unlike other feature films, in KINGKENNEDY actual archive material tells the story. See the pre-release trailer now.
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