Posted on 08/29/2009 7:01:34 AM PDT by kellynla
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.
Kennedy’s minions most likely told her parents Mary Jo was naked and pregnant in the car. If they didn’t want a scandal don’t make an issue of this.
Plus, we’ll give “ restitution” in the form of payments. Please sign here. End of story.
Steyn’s vocabulary makes William F. Buckley sound like Jerry Clower.
You sound exactly like my mom.
She had never voted before 1960, but she made sure to register to vote against JFK. She still has the utmost contempt for the name Kennedy.
She passed it along to me.
Of course, then the Kennedy Curse would today be despoiling that Faire Isle!
Eulogizing this man's life with the gushing adoration evident this week is no different then during the 1950s USSR when the Stalin toadies mourned his passing. Only fools and the like-minded rave about a dead monster.
Steyn was mocking Sam Shepard in that sentence. IMHO
A single woman leaving a party alone with a married Senator? How hard would it be to write THOSE stories. Note the lack of question mark.
bttt
I never watch Stewart. But OMG these people are truly sick. Sick and evil.
Well said. AMEN.
I liked this line:
“We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.”
Someone else who got to inflict their sickness onto an entire nation was Bill Clinton, who couldn’t just cheat on his wife, he had to drag the country through months of hell while we tried to deal with his actions and lies.
Good riddance. I’m thrilled Ted is dead and nauseous he is being buried in Arlington - still riding his brother’s coat tails. Puke on the commie slime. He has robbed me of as much freedom as any other commie slime liberal spitwad since the 60s. Good riddance, I say. I’m very sorry you made it out of the car. Much better for American freedoms if you hadn’t, you commie punk.
Teddy is past the point of getting away with anything. He will get perfect justice now.
Exactly. I’ve never been a fan of Joan Kennedy but I do have a lot of sympathy for her.
I found the book by chance in my local library.
too bad they were not cremating him so he could get a sneak preview of coming attractionsAmen, brother. Amen.
Steyn is always right on mark and many here have it exactly right. Kennedy tried to make America complicit in Mary Jo’s death allright, but it didn’t work. They let Kennedy’s lies about Mary Jo stand but, We The Voters, kept him out of the White House by not rewarding him with the top job. The Kennedy legacy for the last of them is everything the DNC are known for. He lied, cheated on his wife, drank himself into oblivion and got away with murder. He legislated liberal law that should have been against his religion and kept a true Constitutional scholar off the Supreme Court. Democrats loved this guy. They will use him as a reason to pass Obamahealthcare, and then trample over his grave tomorrow.
It's like abortion. Liberals have no concept of the value of a human life, so no wonder they believe and say such outrageous things. Are you really that shocked?
Save for later.
From what I’ve read in the past, they were paid $90,000 by the Kennedys and $50,000 by the insurance company. One can only imagine what sort of pressure was put upon them by the Kennedy thug machine.I don't care what kind of pressure. They are (were) criminals. If someone murdered my kid I would, yes, put my life on the line to bring the scumbag to justice. And so would you. And so would most Americans.
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