Quotes of the Day

It seems like a victory for John F. Kennedy's assassin — assassin(s), for you Warren Report agnostics — to define the President's life mainly by his death. But that's what will happen this month, as the 40th anniversary of his murder inspires the media to cash in — er, reflect on a turning point in history — with a raft of TV specials.

Yet, as the History Channel's ambitious, three-hour JFK: A Presidency Revealed (Nov. 16, 8 p.m. E.T.) reminds us, the morbidness is somehow appropriate. Throughout his presidency, J.F.K. was haunted by premature death: the death of his infant son Patrick, the threat of his own death from his many secret ailments and the possible death of millions from a nuclear war he believed was ever more likely. "The most important thing about John Kennedy," his biographer Richard Reeves says, "is that he thought he was going to die young, and he could not wait his turn." Behind J.F.K.'s Eros — the skirt chasing, the virile New Frontier rhetoric, the pledge to shoot a big phallic rocket at the moon by decade's end — was Thanatos.

The problem with many J.F.K. documentaries is that the biography overwhelms the history, but Revealed does a good job of connecting the two. J.F.K. reappointed J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, because the FBI director kept an all-the-President's-women file, and his illnesses — colitis, prostatitis, Addison's disease, back pain, a cholesterol level of more than 400--taxed him heavily during national crises. This is familiar ground, but Revealed also makes good use of recently declassified tapes

CNN's President Kennedy Has Been Shot (Nov. 16, 8 p.m. E.T.) tells how print and broadcast reporters covered the shooting in the quaint days before cable news and mobile satellite crews. A TV cameraman inside the book depository had to throw his tape out the window so it could be rushed to the studio, and Walter Cronkite recalls that CBS had no camera ready in its newsroom for his reading of the bulletin. This is an intriguing piece for news junkies, but it's curious that CNN should air it, since the dignity of men like Cronkite (and they are all men here) is a rebuke to today's 24-hour news culture. Announcing J.F.K.'s death, Cronkite chokes back tears, but he does not — as many anchors did on 9/11 and less momentous occasions — ostentatiously remind his viewers that he shares their pain. Yet when you watch Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live on the air, leaving reporters spinning to fill time with little information, you see why this is such a special anniversary for TV. It was a week when a President died — and the logorrheic age of instant news began.

• James Poniewozik