TV REVIEW : Patriarch Dominates ‘Kennedys’

Even the congenial host of “The American Experience” series, David McCullough, admits he had his doubts about “The Kennedys,” the massive, four-hour WGBH-Thames Television co-production launching the new “Experience” season. What more, he wonders, could be said about the well-documented political family?

“The Kennedys” tries valiantly to add more to the record, exhaustively detailing the rise and fall of patriarch Joseph Kennedy and the most prized siblings of his brood of nine: sons Joe Jr., John, Robert, Ted and daughter Kathleen. Yet as all-encompassing as this telling seems to be, it remains incomplete.

It airs in a pair of two-hour installments, on both Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 7 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.

Just as “old man Joe” loomed over the family like a loving autocrat, he dominates and frames the film. So when Ted failed in his 1980 presidential primary campaign against Jimmy Carter, it’s the end of the road as far as this story is concerned. It’s as if there were no more Kennedys left, when in fact the new generation (barring an in-law like William Kennedy Smith) appears to be handily carrying on the family name.

Just as unaccountably, it virtually ignores Joe’s other daughters--Patricia, Eunice and Jean--except for mentally retarded Rosemary, whose tragic incarceration in a hospital after a botched lobotomy remained a secret until after her father’s death in 1969. Wife Rose, still alive into her 100s, is virtually invisible.

This was a man’s family, and this is a story of men. The irony that courses through “The Kennedys” is how the image of Irish-American virility, from John’s World War II adventure on PT 109 to Robert’s climbing of the never-climbed Mt. Kennedy, clashes profoundly with one case history after another of human frailty.

While “The Kennedys” shies away from investigating Joe’s ties to organized crime or how he allegedly rigged elections for his sons, it chronicles how his prized siblings politically matured far past his limited vision.