CRISIS: BEHIND A PRESIDENTIAL COMMITMENT
TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET
Director Robert Drew’s documentary was released in October 1963, only four months after the events captured in the film, and only a month before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Crisis is a study, with remarkable access to the Oval Office and elsewhere, of Kennedy’s treatment of a pivotal civil rights confrontation that same year. Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a strict segregationist, had vowed to stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama, and refuse entry to two black students who had been admitted as part of the recent federal push for desegregation. Kennedy and his younger brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, are shown trying to avert, then handle, the crisis as it unfolded. Somehow, on Super Tuesday in 2020 – just a few days after a majority African-American population in another southern state may have voted to change the course of history – Crisis has even more power. And, perhaps, even more relevance.