Posted on 03/30/2018 7:07:00 PM PDT by Kaslin
Conservatives’ expectations for honest and fair movies coming out of Hollywood are understandably low. For decades now we have been brow-beaten and lectured by clueless celebrities on everything from saving the Spotted Owl to gun control – the latest flavor of the moment.
But a breath of fresh air is blowing in from the left coast. The new movie ‘Chappaquiddick,’ from Entertainment Studios and Apex Entertainment, is a brutally honest recounting of one of America’s greatest public tragedies: the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in a car owned and driven by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)
Producer Mark Ciardi has a winner, and perhaps it’s his record of brilliantly telling true sports stories (Invincible, The Rookie,Miracle, and Secretariat) that so influenced a talented group of director and actors – liberals all – to buy into a straight-up, no spin or bias, telling of this story. As one might expect, longtime Ted Kennedy senior aide and speechwriter Bob Shrum, trashed the movie (likely without even seeing it) as “a disservice both to the victim and the truth.” On the contrary, the movie is a revelation of truth exposing the decades-long cover-up that Shrum, and other defenders of the Kennedy faith, have long perpetuated.
The Kennedy PR machine, aided and abetted for years by the mainstream media – and, yes, many celebrities in Hollywood –crumbles under the intellectual and historic force of this film. Likewise, we see Mary Jo Kopechne come to life, no longer just that one hopeful face in that one overused photograph.
Mary Jo was a 28-year old experienced Capitol Hill staffer and presidential campaign aide when she came to Chappaquiddick Island off Martha’s Vineyard in August 1969. She and other campaign workers, all women affectionately dubbed “the Boiler Room Girls,” had been invited by Senator Kennedy to the island for a reunion. They had faithfully served his older brother Bobby in his Senate office, and on his presidential campaign before his tragic death the year before.
It possibly was the first time the women had gathered since that fateful night at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a haunting scene that will forever be fixed in America’s memory. One moment, Bobby Kennedy is thanking his supporters for his win that night in the California primary with Olympic Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier of the Los Angeles Rams at his side. The next moment, chaos and anarchy as he lays there helpless and dying – and with him the dreams of Ms. Kopechne and countless others.
In the movie, both on the beach during the day and after they leave a party that night, Mary Jo (Kate Mara) discusses her future with Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke), who makes it very clear he wants her to come back to Washington and serve on his staff. He was the Senate Majority Whip at the time, a leadership position, and thinking seriously about running for president himself in 1972.
It's an attractive offer, but she demurs. The pain of Bobby’s death is still real and she doesn’t seem ready to plunge back into another run for the White House. Kennedy himself concedes he’s conflicted about running; the tragic deaths of all three of his older brothers, plus his family’s public legacy, weigh heavily on him.
The accident literally turns his life upside down. Mary Jo dies and Kennedy survives under circumstances still unknown to this day. His father, Joseph Kennedy, suffering from a stroke, gathers top advisers from President John F. Kennedy’s administration to help Ted through the maelstrom that ensues.
Their objectives – avoid accountability, protect the brand, and preserve political and professional viability – are so familiar to a 2018 America in the midst of scandals affecting an array of powerful men including Harvey Weinstein, Russell Simmons, Al Franken and others. Not to mention how our collective consciousness still vividly remembers the media and our liberal friends so adamantly defending Bill Clinton and dismissing his accusers.
Despite obstacles, the spin doctors prevail. Kennedy’s fixers literally “fix” the legal problems to where he only pleads guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and gets no jail time, not even probation. His live, televised speech to the people of Massachusetts brilliantly casts himself as a victim and exhorts his constituents to “think this through with me.” They wind up re-electing him again and again.
What ‘Chappaquiddick’ does is lay bare the Kennedys for who they really were. The Camelot myth-makers can’t cover this up any more.
And while we don’t say it often, credit must be given where credit is due: well done Hollywood. Thank you for telling this story openly, honestly, and compellingly.
Yep, my first reaction is, A Day Late and a Dollar Short.
But they are Kennedy's, so I digress.
Consider if it had been 2 of Teddy’s contemporaries at Chappaquiddick instead of him, Richard Nixon or Jesse Helms. Would the MSM and the Democrats have treated it in the same way, as a non-event?
“More Kennedy road kill, anyway...”
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The American Republic itself may end up being Kennedy roadkill if Trump can’t turn things around on the “immigration front”.
and wrote a recent book release Kennedy Babylon: A Century of Scandal and Depravity
But we’re supposed to get the vapors over Stormy “Whore-me” Daniels ...
“well done Hollywood. Thank you for telling this story openly, honestly, and compellingly.”
They would have deserved kudos had they made the movie when Kennedy was still a serial Senator. He’s done all the damage he will do. And now that it makes no difference, Hollywood reveals to the public what observant folks on the left and right knew all along. And that’s well done?
Promos sounded good enough I was afraid it would turn out to be a bait-and-switch, so glad to hear it’s actually worth seeing.
Mary Jo was an only child.
I remember people being skeptical about the accident claim soon after it happened. She was buried the day after her death, so there was plenty of speculation and wondering why her family didn’t want an autopsy.
Another account you can find on the internet is that after leaving the party (presumably to go have sex in the back seat of the car), they were driving along a road on the island and a policeman saw them (and they saw the policeman).
Teddy had had too many drinks, so just in case the policeman circled back around and pulled them over, Teddy switched seats and had her drive the car so if they were pulled over, the then-presidential candidate wouldn’t be arrested for a DUI and end his chances of winning the presidential election.
But it’s also possible he may have gotten out of the car completely and let her drive it alone so that the cop would just pull her over and let her go because she wasn’t drunk. Moreover, Kennedy, a married man, wouldn’t be seen in the news the next day as having been discovered with a young single woman in his car at 11 pm at night on the island.
Mary Jo, being unfamiliar with the island and the roads, and trying to evade the cops, drove off the bridge. If you look at how the road approaches the bridge at an angle, it makes total sense that someone could drive off the bridge by accident if they were unfamiliar with the roads.
That is the most plausible story, IMO.
It’s pathetic to see the pic above showing slick Teddy with a neck brace. What a faker!
when she came to Chappaquiddick Island off Martha’s Vineyard in August 1969.
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Too bad, she was dead in July.
I noticed the wrong date also. It was July 18, 1969 per Wikipedia .
As I’ve said before, Ted Kennedy, the LYIN of the Senate.
And, of course, this comes out after the death of Ted Kennedy.
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