DEAD Kennedys, their assassins and their rivals, haunted the airwaves this week, in fiction, fantasy and documentary. In the second episode of Dark Skies, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby turned out (as expected) to be under the control of extra terrestrials, while in The Robert Kennedy Assassination, the many questions about Bobby's murder were dissected but left unresolved. Even in Red Dwarf the intergalactic travellers, travelling back to the 20th century in search of chicken tandoori, landed accidentally in the Texas Book Depository, making Oswald miss. All the "what ifs" raised by these programmes - serious documentaries and spoof sci fi comedies alike - seemed equally ridiculous.
The makers of the Robert Kennedy programme seemed to believe that if Bobby had survived, he would have easily won the presidential election, got the troops out of, Vietnam, and we'd all be sitting around now with flowers in our hair, but the Red Dwarf version, in which Jack Kennedy's survival has a catastrophic effect on the course of American history, seemed more realistic and would definitely have been preferred by Lyndon Baines Johnson, the subject of the week's best documentary, Hello Mr President.
Like most politicians, LBJ had a well developed sense of his own place in history. One of his first actions on coming to power was to order the recording of all his telephone calls from the Oval Office, setting a precedent which Richard Nixon was to regret. Only calls made up until March 1964 have been released so far but they provided a fascinating insight into Johnson's attempts to move out from under the shadow of the martyred JFK and make his own mark on American society in the first months of his presidency.
Despised by Bobby and the other members of the dead president's inner circle, Johnson set out to prove his mettle by forcing his predecessor's stalled legislative programme through Congress. With 30 years of Congressional experience under his belt, he knew how to get what he wanted and the tapes provided an object lesson in the twin political arts of flattery and threat. In a conversation with J Edgar Hoover, a few days after Dallas, the flattery came close to grovelling: "You're more than the head of the FBI to me; you're my brother and personal friend." Graciously accepting the homage, Hoover offered to provide one of his bullet proof cars for the president's use. Up until Dallas, apparently, the president didn't have them, "much to my surprise", purred Hoover. Hm....
LBJ was a paradox - a Southerner who broke legal segregation, a hard nosed millionaire whose prime concern was the elimination of poverty. "I'm a poor man and I don't have much money," he pleaded, while finagling a free family portrait out of an unfortunate photographer. A White House secretary remembered how the president would insist on washing and re using his styrofoam cups.
Posterity hasn't been very kind to Johnson, although his legislative record was far better than that of his more telegenic predecessor. But he had no understanding of foreign politics and met his downfall in Vietnam. The taped conversations with cabinet members about what to do in southeast Asia revealed how completely at sea the government was. Just as Vietnam was the first, and probably the last, American war to be broadcast directly into the country's homes, it's impossible to imagine any US president elected after Watergate allowing such extensive and potentially incriminating recordings to be made again. More's the pity.
Cunningly manipulated archive material gave the impression that we could actually see the protagonists speaking in Hello Mr President. It was clever and stylishly done but verged at times on the misleading. Blurred video shots of Johnson talking, hand over mouth, on the phone came very close at times to pretending that we were watching the conversations taking place. There's a very thin line between this kind of thing and the inevitable next step of digitally altering footage.
Programme makers will go to any lengths to avoid the dreaded talking heads in TV documentaries these days but, there are times when fancy camerawork is just inappropriate and distracting.
HOME Truths, about the predicament of three families who had never found the bodies of relatives abducted and killed by the IRA, would have been better advised just to stick with the testimonies, rather than indulging in badly handled and superfluous "reconstructions".
In 1972, 37 year old Jean McConville was abducted from her home by a gang of men and women who bundled her into a van. A Protestant, married to a Catholic, Jean and her family had moved from East Belfast, the year before, to Divis Flats, where her husband had died of cancer, leaving her to look after her four children, aged from six to 15. Slogans were painted on the family's front door after she came to the assistance of a wounded British soldier and, a few days later, Jean was taken away and never seen again. Her children continued to live together in the flat for several weeks, until they were split up and dispersed to various orphanages, where they were told "you're not brothers or sisters anymore". It was an unspeakably tragic story, told with dignity by Jean's daughter, Helen.
The case of Brian McKinney and John McClory was probably more typical. The two young men disappeared in 1978, probably because of their participation in an armed robbery on an IRA protected drinking club. For their families, the knowledge that they probably knew the killers made the experience even more traumatic than if they had been murdered by the "other side". There arc up to 20 victims of the Troubles whose bodies have never been found and it's very unlikely that they ever will be. Approaches over the years by the families to "the republican movement" had been met with stonewalling and blank faces.
THE millions of victims of nationalist and inter ethnic violence in 20th century Europe were recalled in Stories My Country Told Me, when historian Eric Hobsbawm returned to his Viennese birthplace and to nearby Bratislava, the capital of Europe's newest nation state, Slovakia. The concept of the European nation state, the product of "a rag bag of 19th century intellectuals", came under attack as Hobsbawm's dry observations on the construction of national identities "from myths, fairy tales and legends by those uninterested in history" were intercut with TV news footage of the fledgling country's unprepossessing nationalist leader, Vladimir Meciar, and patriotic Slovak pop songs, that combined Eurovision kitsch with proto fascist banality.
Along the border, the barbed wire and machinegun posts used to keep the Slovaks in until 1989 had been replaced by spanking new electronic surveillance equipment, installed by the Austrians to guard the frontiers of the European Union against unwanted immigration.
Hobsbawm's dream of a future when the two cities could return to the close relationship of a hundred years ago seems unlikely to happen soon.
HOBSBAWM might not approve but there's something comforting about seeing the worst national stereotypes confirmed by an objective observer, and the suave KGB officers in The Honey Trap had some unique insights to offer into the distinguishing characteristics of diplomats, scientists and military personnel from different Western countries. For several decades the KGB employed "swallows" - attractive young women who would initiate romances with foreigners useful to the Kremlin - but some cultures proved more resistant than others to the tactic. All the cliche's seemed to be true - amorous Italians and Spanish were the easiest meat, Germans were promising material, as were Americans. The British, by contrast, were "cold and sober - not passionate", except where the targets' preferences were homosexual - "then we were very successful". Worst of the lot were the Dutch, dismissed witch disgust as "awful".
Clayton Lonetree, a young, not very bright Marine, stationed at the US embassy in Moscow in the 1980s, fell for receptionist Violetta Seina, who introduced Lonetree, as planned, to her "Uncle Sasha", who plumbed him for information. When Lonetree was caught, the news caused shock and humiliation in his Navaho tribe, who prided themselves on generations of service in the US military.
Potential Mata Haris needed to be "charming, intelligent and devoted to the Motherland," according to the KGB brass, who were straight out of a John Le Carre, novel, but most of the swallows interviewed seemed to have been battered and humiliated by the experience.
As a humble foot soldier, Lonetree was unlucky - after confessing, he was sentenced to 30 years' hard labour.
More fortunate were those higher up the intelligence food chain, like the French ambassador who was the subject of an elaborate plot, initiated by Khrushchev in 1956. Ambassador Dejean, an old associate of De Gaulle's, was known to have a roving eye (those national cliche's again) and the KGB's strategy involved surrounding Madame Dejean with a coterie of admiring young male artists and writers, to distract her while her husband dallied with the charming ballerinas and actresses placed in his path. When his government finally caught him, Dejean's treachery was efficiently hushed up until after his death.
Honey traps are one of the oldest espionage tactics but only the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed a chink of light into the secret files of the Cold War years - on one side of the fence. A former CIA chief was wheeled on to assert that Americans didn't go in for that sort of thing. Confronted with this, the KGB man just laughed but you could see the humiliation" of Russia in microcosm in the stories of the swallows, some of whom had become prostitutes, working now for the Yankee dollar rather than the glorious Motherland.
