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The Silly Bastard Next to the Bed
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The Silly Bastard Next to the Bed

2014 · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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In 1963, a telephone call recorded inside the White House catches John F. Kennedy in a startlingly foul-mouthed exchange, swearing at an aide over a bungled hotel booking. The recording survives because of a bedside device nobody was supposed to notice, and this short traces how it got there and who set it running. Interviews and archival material reconstruct the technical and political backstory behind a scrap of tape that was never meant to become public, from the person responsible for the equipment to the chain of events that let the call leak out of the Oval Office orbit and into the historical record. Rather than treating the story as a punchline, the film uses it as a way into how JFK's White House handled recording technology, secrecy, and slip-ups, and what a single profane phone call can reveal about the gap between a president's public image and his private temper.