Brothers To The End

Elizabeth Deane, executive producer, Shanachie Entertainment Corp., 4 hours.

Geoffrey Ward, a contributing editor of this magazine, won a 1993 Emmy as principal writer for this two-part series, which relates the Kennedy-family story with unsentimental sympathy. The saga has seldom been presented so clearly; it all seems inevitable given Joseph Kennedy’s equally furious ambitions for wealth and for his children’s success. Certainly it makes enthralling television, especially when it focuses on the interrelations of the brothers. The Kennedy Presidency is revealed as a triumph of father and son and as a product and source of rivalry among the three brothers. The story ends with Ted Kennedy’s sacrificial 1980 campaign for President and the speech in which he invoked the legacy of his brothers even as he was freed from it: “The work goes on, the cause endures, and the dream shall never die.”