TV REVIEWS : J.F.K. Comes of Age in ‘Reckless Youth’

No presidential limo rolling through downtown Dallas. No sniper followed by chaos. No somber announcement of death. No funeral, no caisson, no drums, no eulogies. No poignant pictures afterward of a graceful widow with her two young children. No talk of single-bullet theories, multiple assassins or conspiracies.

Television’s extensive J.F.K. lore moves forward on a different front with a two-part ABC drama depicting the formative years of the nation’s 35th President, “JFK: Reckless Youth” (at 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

In a sense, the world has never closed John F. Kennedy’s coffin, and the scrutiny continues with this interesting, big-scale treatment, written by William Broyles and directed by Harry Winer. It’s drawn from and faithful to the broad outlines of Nigel Hamilton’s episodic biography of the same title, intriguingly showing the early life experiences that shaped the man whose brief Administration would define a whole generation of Americans and become a hyperbolic symbol of idealism.

J.F.K. histories usually come in two distinctly different flavors, worshipful and disdainful. Neither ponderously reverential nor backlash-revisionist, however, “Reckless Youth” above all is a sex-indulged, coming-of-age-in-affluence-and-war tale. It ends with 29-year-old Jack Kennedy’s successful run for Congress in 1946--his first stab at elected office--after a fitful ripening in which his latent leadership skills surface only rarely.

It’s a hero you see filling the screen just prior to the closing credits, but a flawed hero.

Although not the lanky six-footer that the young Kennedy was, Patrick Dempsey is very good at conveying J.F.K.’s self-deprecating wit and a sense of his playboyish ambivalence and rashness. He zooms aimlessly, lustfully, puckishly, indulgently and rebelliously through his youth in the 1930s, bucking the force-fed scriptures of Choate and Harvard, angering his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr. (Terry Kinney), and competing with his higher-achieving older brother, Joe Jr. (Loren Dean). In fact, the first third of “Reckless Youth” could be titled “Ferris Bueller Meets Hyannisport.”

Only during his tour through Europe, when his father is U.S. ambassador to England just prior to World War II, do serious thoughts seep into his head. And this sobering experience leads him to turn his college thesis into a book, “Why England Slept,” which second-guesses his father’s controversial isolation-appeasement philosophy concerning the Nazi threat.

A relentless female chaser, J.F.K. appears to have found his first true love in a Danish-born newspaper columnist named Inga Arvad (Yolanda Jilot), who reportedly was suspected by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover of being a Nazi spy. Straddling Parts 1 and 2, their eventful, soap opera-like affair puts a charge into “Reckless Youth” while illuminating a different side of J.F.K.

Also re-created is the famed PT 109 incident, in which a Navy craft commanded by the inexperienced Kennedy was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer near the Solomon Islands. Although not an endorsement of him, the version here is more favorable to Kennedy than some other recent accounts of the incident.

Some have attributed the medal he won for his role in the rescue to the influence of the senior Kennedy, who is depicted unflatteringly here as a smothering, despotic, sometimes even brutal figure whose own skirt chasing may have been a role model for J.F.K. “Sex is like an itch,” he tells Jack. “There are plenty of women around who will help you to scratch it.”

Against his dominating presence, the devoutly Catholic Rose Kennedy (Diana Scarwid) is a shrunken, diminutive figure, portrayed as largely unhappy, lonely and out of touch. It should be noted that the Kennedys have denounced the portrait of dysfunction in the Hamilton book on which this TV account is based.

Perhaps even tougher is the allusion here to the old-style grubby--even dishonest--back-room politics that Joe Sr. and his Boston cronies zealously deployed in the campaign that landed J.F.K. a congressional seat. That they did so with the young Kennedy’s apparent acquiescence--if not active participation--puts J.F.K. the icon in better perspective.