This is the second night of The Kennedy’s After Camelot which is being shown in 2 parts on consecutive nights on RTÉ One. The first 2-hour episode airs on Friday 9 June at 9.35pm. The concluding part airs on Saturday 10 June at 9.35pm.
Information for episodes 3 and 4 which will air on Saturday 10 June:
EPISODE 3 – The Chappaquiddick disaster is resolved, though a permanent cloud hangs over Ted’s public life and his conscience. Jackie’s marriage to Onassis ends when the death of his son convinces him that she’s the bearer of the “Kennedy curse”. She returns with her children to live in New York, but her relationship with JFK Jr is strained as he chafes under the burden of his father’s name. Ted falls deeper into alcoholism and depression when his son suffers a catastrophic illness.
The parents of Mary Jo Kopechne are visited by two Catholic priests – whom they’ve never met. The grieving parents are convinced by the priests that they owe their daughter an immediate burial so that her soul can return to God. The strong implication is given that the priests were sent by the Kennedys.
Jackie, meanwhile, struggles with an increasingly difficult JFK Jr, whose behaviour is growing more erratic and whose grades at private school are abysmal. Father McSorley helps the boy through his troubles. Joan, Ted’s wife, suffers a miscarriage, perhaps due to the emotional stress of Chappaquiddick.
Then, with a time jump to 1972, Jackie has found what she believes will be a life of happiness with Onassis – at his homes in Paris and Greece. But an enemy lurks in the form of Onassis’s daughter Christina, who has hated Jackie from Day One and who, she tells her father, carries “The Kennedy Curse” that will be visited upon the Onassis family as well.
Ted and Joan are thrown into unexpected crisis when their son, Ted Jr., is stricken with bone cancer. His right leg is amputated. In the hospital, Ted Sr. meets a family whose child has died because they couldn’t afford the care that might have saved her. It’s a transformative moment for Ted Sr., and prompts his crusade for national health care for all Americans.
The shocking death of Onassis’s son causes the shipping tycoon to accept his daughter’s view – held from the moment the two women laid eyes on each other – that Jackie brings tragedy to everyone she touches. Onassis wants a divorce, but he dies before the union can be dissolved. She moves back to New York with her children, and realizes that her home and her heart have always been with the Kennedys.
She gets a job as an editor at Viking Press, loves it, and all seems right with her world… until JFK Jr, now aged sixteen, eludes his Secret Service protectors. He’s missing – possibly kidnapped – somewhere on the mean streets of New York as Episode 3 ends.
EPISODE 4 – Ted runs for President in 1980, but his campaign is a failure. His marriage ends in divorce. Jackie urges him to reform his personal life. She finds happiness with a new companion. But that happiness is cut short when she dies at the age of 64. JFK Jr contemplates a run for office, but he’s killed in a plane crash that ends forever the legacy of “Camelot”.
JFK Jr is found by the Secret Service and NYPD. Jackie’s furious at his cavalier attitude about evading his protectors. The possibility of harm coming to her son prompts her flashback to November 1963, one week after President Kennedy’s assassination. Jackie grants an interview to
Life Magazine writer Teddy White, in which she mentions – for the first and only time – the notion of a brief and shining period in her life with Jack that she calls “Camelot”.
Jackie finds fulfillment and happiness with diamond merchant Maurice Templesman, a kind, loving man who becomes her companion for the rest of her life. But all is not smooth sailing. JFK Jr decides he wants to be an actor, which Jackie finds appalling. It leads to major confrontations between mother and son.
Ted believes that 1980 will be his chance to fulfill the legacy of his brothers and continue the story of “Camelot”. He tries to unseat President Jimmy Carter. He enlists the help of Joan – from whom he’s separated. For Jackie, Ted’s campaign brings back the old PTSD memories of Jack’s assassination. She warns Joan against becoming involved. But Joan, in an effort to save her marriage, stands by Ted’s side…
… and the campaign effort is a disaster. Ted knows he’ll never be President. His marriage to Joan officially ends. And JFK Jr starts to feel that the weight of history and of family expectation is descending upon him. He makes a speech to the 1988 Democratic Convention, and the fire of politics seems to light his eyes. Jackie fears for his physical safety and she worries that, like Ted, JFK Jr is being pressured to do something he doesn’t want in his heart.
By 1994 Jackie has two grandchildren by way of her daughter Caroline. Jackie is happiest walking with them and with Maurice in Central Park. But, cruelly, fate steps in yet again. She’s diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
If a life is truly heroic, it’s because of the positive impact it has on the lives of others. Jackie has made Ted a better man, and Joan acknowledges Jackie’s role in her victory over alcohol.
With JFK Jr struggling over his future, Jackie tells him that “Camelot” was largely – though not completely – an invention, a myth that she made up out of her grief over President Kennedy’s assassination. She urges him to be his own man. It’s her parting gift to her son. She dies at home, surrounded by her family, at peace with them and with herself.
Our final moment is with JFK Jr and his young wife Carolyn Bessette. They’re about to take off in the plane he’s learned how to pilot. They share a moment of speculation about perhaps, someday, carrying on the legacy of his parents. America’s Golden Couple fly off into a setting sun.
A crawl tells us they were killed in a plane crash in July of 1999. Camelot – the myth and the reality – died with them.
Overview:
The world-renowned Kennedy family struggles to come to terms with “the end of Camelot.”
A ground-breaking mini-series, The Kennedys: After Camelot is an engrossing look at those who carried the Kennedy name – and the expectations of history – following the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Katie Holmes stars as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Still reeling from the death of her husband, John F. (“Jack”) Kennedy, the nation’s 35th president and all but crushed by the assassination of her beloved brother-in-law Robert F. (“Bobby”) Kennedy, her marriage to Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis provides safety and security for her and her children. It also outrages the American people. But hers is the story of survival, and she returns to the Kennedys to become the rock of the family. She also uses her own talents to further herself in a career in ways she might never have if Jack had lived – before her untimely death at the age of 64. Her struggles with her son John F. Kennedy, Jr. lead to a shocking revelation about the very notion of Camelot which defined the age.
Matthew Perry portrays Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy. Challenged to pick up the mantle of his fallen brothers, he spirals downward into the abyss of alcoholism and infidelity. Our shattering portrayal of the events at Chappaquiddick in which a young woman died when Ted drove his car off a bridge – never before dramatized on television – ends his chances of becoming President and haunts him forever. But his relationship with Jackie, stormy and emotionally-charged, becomes the salvation of his life and, in many ways, the validation of hers.
They were America’s royals, blessed with great gifts and burdened with great flaws. The Kennedys: After Camelot peels back the veneer of power, fame and wealth, and shows them as they really were: all-too-human after all.
Teleplay by Stephen Kronish (writer of the Emmy-winning “The Kennedys”) and Sandra Chwialkowska (“Lost Girl”) based on the New York Times bestselling book “AFTER CAMELOT: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE KENNEDY FAMILY” by J. Randy Taraborrelli.