Virtual JFK | Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
This somber documentary posits a fascinating historic impossibility in its title. What would our world have looked like if Kennedy had somehow cheated death and lived to run for another term in office? However, the film actually spends scant time exploring that supposition. Most of Mr. Masutani’s film is a “by the numbers” archival retread of Kennedy’s tragically short presidential career. He offers very little new insight on the grave, political struggles which defined the JFK presidency, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Vietnam quagmire. Instead we get an awkwardly paced montage of press conferences, television interviews with key staff members, and worn footage of our Cold War enemies in what amounts to a condensed history lesson.
Dishearteningly, the strict episodic nature of the film trivializes very complex historical decisions. The use of only one talking head in Brown Professor James G. Blight, who also served as a writer and producer, is the result of either a lack of production time or a strange narrative choice to offer no nuanced engagement with the vast wealth of archival material at the filmmakers’ disposal. Since several people involved in the project are affiliated with Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, diversity of political opinion appears not to have been a driving concern. This languor is apparent throughout the film. Blight appears intermittently in front of a shapeless, white background to provide some neutral gravitas to the proceedings. Unintentionally, his inserts come off as too academic and rehearsed. The contrast to JFK’s witty banter with the Washington press core is stark and only makes it easier to take one out of the documentary altogether.
More successfully, even if belabored, Masutani draws parallels between the war in Vietnam and our current lay-over in Iraq. The congruence is never explicitly stated, but rather suffuses the very sinews of the film. He shows Kennedy’s advisers Robert McNamara, Adlai Stevenson, and General Maxwell Taylor using cold war logic to make a case for confronting the Cubans and repelling the Viet Cong as a means to global stability. One remarkable sequence shows a presentation on Cuban nuclear sites which is eerily similar to Colin Powell’s fateful address in front of the United Nations Security Council which made WMD and yellowcake water cooler fodder.
The last ten minutes of the film does address the question inherent in the title. Nevertheless, the analysis of Lyndon B. Johnson’s divergence on matters of war after the Kennedy assassination seems rushed and merely tacked on to fulfill viewer expectations. Even less time is devoted to a hypothetical discussion of Kennedy’s course of action in Vietnam had he lived. If the director had only spent more time teasing out the policy differences between these two contrary personalities in the last portion of the film, it would have made for a more fulfilling counter-factual experiment. I would only recommend this film for an audience with absolutely no prior knowledge of United States foreign policy in the 1960’s. The short running time is one of the few saving graces in this obvious film.
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