In light of what Mark posted a few days ago regarding “The Man Who Helped Me Realize I was a Conservative”, this article by Mark Steyn has surfaced. Many of use have heard about what happened in Chappaquiddick pond, but the rising generation may need a little help understanding the nature of Ted Kennedy. Mark has already touched on some of his personal experiences with the man.
AIRBRUSHING OUT MARY JO KOPECHNE
Only a Kennedy could get away with it.
By Mark Steyn
We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation — or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture — declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America ’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.
In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940–1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: “Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”
That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen — and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: “Like all figures in history — and like those in the Bible, for that matter — Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts . And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea , well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?
We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.
Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.
His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his “progressive” agenda, up to and including health-care “reform.” It was an odd kind of “redemption”: In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted’s “favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, ‘Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?’”Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
Beats me!
Why did the Last Lion cross the road?
To sleep it off!
What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! “He was a guy’s guy,” chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.
When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”
Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co., that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot — that “fleeting wisp of glory,” that “one brief shining moment” — must run forever, even if “How to Handle a Woman” gets dropped from the score. The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
Mark Steyn’s piece deserves a Pulitzer Prize. It’s how we behave in extreme circumstances that truly defines us.
This is how right wing media teaches you to think?
Really he left her there to die? Where did you get that information?
Real Americans believe in innocent until proven guilty. This is not easy, but a real patriot would rather die than betray our principals.
So where is your evidence?
Of course, where you get your news is always giving you examples of making substantiated arguments, right?
Without evidence your some deranged lunatic that makes baseless accusations.
P.S. – His repudiation of Bork was directed at what kind of country we would live in if Bork legal philosophy was applied to them. Ted Kennedy helped pass these protections and it was right that speak up in their defense. If you don’t want to be considered as a strict constitutionalist, don’t take that position.
Chappaquiddick bridge to be renamed Ted Kennedy memorial causeway
EDGARTOWN, Mass. – Just a week after the death of semi-permanent Senate fixture Ted Kennedy, the so-called Lion of the Senate has garnered a touching posthumous honor in his home state.
Chappaquiddick’s picturesque Dike Bridge, where, in a less-than-lionhearted moment in 1969, Kennedy drove a young courtesan to her watery death, is to be rechristened in his name, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (D) confirmed today …
http://wineandexcrement.com/chappaquiddick-bridge-to-be-renamed-ted-kennedy-memorial-causeway/1653/
Edwinforprogress…the right wing media never teaches us how to think. It gives us things to think about. There’s a big difference, but one that I’m sure you won’t be able to understand since it’s clear that you believe in allowing media outlets to teach others how to think. I guess that would be one of the many (but major) differences between liberal progressives and conservatives. We actually think rather than being told what to think.
I know he’s dead, but Ted Kennedy’s life was not one that should be celebrated. I didn’t speak ill of the man out of respect for his family and the fact that he was just recently laid to rest, but it’s painfully obvious that this man was a career politician who took advantage of his position (and name) at every opportunity. Any other person would have seen the inside of a prison cell. Now that the whole “national memorial” is over, I think it’s fine to let some opinions fly!
And what he did to Bork was ridiculous, shameful, and extremely hypocritical. If he were worth his weight in pennies then he would have vocally admonished his cohorts for supporting Sotomayor for exactly the same reasons he ridiculed Bork. The only difference is that there was/is sooooooo much more evidence against Sotomayor than there EVER was against Bork…and the evidence is not just circumstancial, either!
His entire life was driven by ego, pride, hunger for power, and extreme amounts of hypocrisy…EXTREME AMOUNTS!!! I really don’t have a single positive thing to say about the man. Ted Kennedy was not a good person, but then again…I really can’t say that there are too many “good persons” filling the halls of congress these days. Kennedy just happeed to be the cream of the hypocritical crop and set a disgustingly low standard for others to follow.
See, you didn’t answer the question did you? Is this what you are used to from the journalists at right wing media? Let me restate and make clear that unless this is answered, no other question is you should be treated as someone who is evading the answer, rather than “take personal responsibility” (this still is a beloved idea among conservatives, I hope) for slander.
“So where is your evidence?
I am astonished by how many people who want to lay claim to American patriotism are slandering Senator Edward Kennedy by stating that he left a young woman to die.
Yes, I prefer to blame your news sources for giving you poor examples of how information is fairly examined, rather than think ill of my countrymen here. The alternative, if true, is despicable; that you “bear false witness” and that you betray a core American principal, “Innocent until proven guilty”.
Correction:
Let me restate and make clear that unless this is answered, you should be treated as someone who is evading the answer, rather than “take personal responsibility” (this still is a beloved idea among conservatives, I hope) for slander.
Edwin,
Either you are too young to remember, or you are so possessed with a socialist liberal agenda that any truth or facts presented directly on front of your eyes wouldn’t prove effective in any attempt to help you become a decent and honest citizen.
I would ask you: what proof do you have that Senator Kennedy didn’t leave a woman to drown in the Chappaquiddick pond? How do you know it isn’t true? But, if you were old enough to remember, and honest enough to search in the light of truth, you would find that Ted Kennedy was indeed convicted for “leaving the scene of an accident” causing this young woman, who struggled for 5 hours in a little air pocket, to die. There was plenty of time for him to report the accident, yet he did not.
Here is a source for the facts: http://www.answers.com/topic/edward-m-ted-kennedy
How long, Edwin, would it have taken you to google search on “ted kennedy convicted for Chappaquiddick”?
Get off your high horse, Edwin, for you are not worthy of credibility as you have demonstrated. It is “common knowledge” among the informed and educated that Ted Kennedy was convicted. In fact, it is so common to know this that one would assume that most people already knew it! But, “common knowledge” seems to have passed you by in life or you, in your dishonest approach, have not sought after it.
Really, was he was convicted of manslaughter?
He is being treated here as if he was.
Guess how long it took them to remove her body from the car when they found her? You should know the answer before slandering an American Senator.
And since when is a high horse arguing for American values enshrined in the Fifth amendment? The supporters of McCarthy believed in guilty until proven innocent. Has conservatism fallen so far as a result of Rove’s politics, that it is little more than the New McCarthyism?
I wanted to cite a source that is very damning of Edward Kennedy and that has a reputation for caring for nothing more than the facts:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/politicians/tedkennedy.asp
I agree that the failure to report was a terrible choice. Mary Jo Kopechne’s life’s work was fighting for the America the Kennedy’s espoused. He abandoned her dead body.
However, two paragraphs before the Snopes response to point 8 is the truth that makes the accusation of “leaving her to die” so vile.
Good Job for accepting my challenge to actually do some research, although that research proved nothing in regards to Ted Kennedy’s intentions. I don’t know what his intentions really were and even as Snopes pointed out, “it stirred up a lot of speculation” because he didn’t report it for hours! You have a woman trapped in a car and you don’t report it for hours? The first assessment would be to assume he tried to kill her. Whether it was his intent to leave her to die or not, he did leave her to die nonetheless.
Only a person with a betrayed conscience would deny that assessment. So whether he meant to leave her for dead or not, he still did. Your argument is invalid and we see that Ted Kennedy was indeed guilty.
If it were anybody else(except maybe Obama) they would have been
Kinda like the way you and the rest of the left wing nut jobs Slandered George Bush? Hm, but then we are dealing with a different -double- standard aren’t we?
Hey, you feign of dishonesty, did anyone on this blog accuse Ted Kennedy of manslaughter?
Spencer…I would have jumped in, but you were making minced meat of edwin so I decided to just sit bac and enjoy the throttling.
Yet another plain example of how facts and logic simply do NOT make sense in the mind of a progressive liberal. There’s nothing more we can do except present them with facts and logic then hope that it will somehow rub off on to them.
Keep it up, Spencer.
Edwin…I hope you always feel welcome here even it things get a little heated. It is through discourse like this that we are able to hammer away the rough edges (from both points of view).
Feel free to jump in any time M.J.! The bottom line with this situation ,as well as the many other corrupt situations Kennedy has found himself in, is that the man was no Saint. He was kicked out of Harvard for cheating, and having someone cheat for him. He was an Adulterer, a drunk driver…..
He was not a good man. Look, I believe that even the vilest of sinners can be redeemed. However, Ted Kennedy was not one to seek Redemption. He continued to engage in bad behavior, as has been stated by Mark here: http://thecompetentconservative.com/2009/08/28/senator-kennedy-the-man-who-helped-me-realize-i-was-a-conservative/
Thanks, Spencer.
It’s not that I ever expected people like Sen. Kennedy to be a Saint, either! I find it hard to believe that there aren’t just as corrupt people in federal government as Ted Kennedy. I just want our leaders to be honest in their dealings with us, the American citizen. That’s all! I don’t expect them to be perfect and I’m just as willing to forgive any man his trespasses if he simply apologizes. I can’t expect anyone to live to my personal moral standard just as I don’t expect anyone else to insist upon me living to theirs! What’s right is right…and Kennedy was rarely ever close to being “right”. All of this dialogue surrounding his extremely numerous negative dealings throughout his life are a direct result of the way HE lived his life and it’s fitting that it’s how he will be rememberered by millons upon millions of Americans.
FYI…I just watched the HBO documentary about Ted Kennedy (which originally aired several weeks ago) and there was a quote directly from Ted that struck me. He said, “I was raised to believe that public service was a noble profession”.
After reading what I just quoted from the mouth of Kennedy, can you guess what it was about such a short statement that gave me pause? It just struck me at the time and made sense to me when I think about people like Kennedy.
I’ll put an end to the suspense…ha.
Here’s the thing: I was always under the impression (and raised under this assumption) that public service was NEVER intended to be a profession!!! At all! Yet, here we are…in a country where Senators and House Representatives serve (and I stress the word “serve”) for decades upon decades! How did we ever allow for this to happen? It’s not just democrats, either. How many years has McCain worn out his welcome in the Senate, yet continues to win re-election??? I would argue that it is because of people like McCain that we have these “life long appointments” in congress (see: McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Bill). It’s not a right vs. left thing…it’s a right vs. wrong thing…to quote Beck.
This is a great site and I hope to see it grow over time!
Thanks M.J. I would love to have you as a contributor. The site is only 2 months old and is already getting 50-60 keyword searches per day, and has shown up on CNN, Washington Post, the TOC Report, Stop Acorn, and other reputable sites for reference. I specialize in “search engine optimization” and felt I need to use my skill to promote Mitt online.
As people will be looking for “Competence”, I have no doubt that this site will a heavy hitter. Regarding you issues about Ted Kennedy being taught that public service being “a noble profession”, I think it is accurate to say that Mitt Romney is the epitome of a true public servant. If “flip flopper” is all the Dems can come up with to attack him(there really isn’t anything unethical they’ll find), then they are in trouble!
I would be honored to contribute in any way that I am able. Send me an email and let’s chat.
Are you able to see what my email address is?
Yes, I have your e-mail. Is that your blog as your website address? Do you use “Word Press” as the blogging software? I’ll send you an e-mail tomorrow…getting late and I’m tired.
I refer to it more as a means of relieving tension, stress, and temporary insanity, but if you want to call it my blog then I suppose that’s alright. I obviously don’t keep it updated as much as I would like, but I enjoy writing (and currently write for a financial magazine with a circulation of approximately 20,000/month; had a contract to write for Montel Williams’ new magazine [Living Well With Montel], but it didn’t test well and they scrapped it) especially when I’m able to just let loose (with relative annonymity)…he he he.
I actually have a more primary email address, but once you send me someting to the address you have then I’ll reply by giving you my main address. With people like “edwin” out there I’d rather not share my personal email address on this forum…not that I wouldn’t enjoy/appreciate engaging in a more private dialogue with someone like “edwin”, but you know what I mean.
Look forward to chatting with you, my man. Have a good one!