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Elites have always gotten away with things you and I never could have. Two-tier systems of justice are the norm, not the exception in all societies. But some societies are much worse than others, and one of the reasons the West has been so successful compared to most places is that our system of justice has been on the whole reasonably fair, at least until recently. Hardly perfect, but overall most people most of the time have enough faith in the system that they retain trust. ... Teddy Kennedy’s manslaughter of Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign volunteer and target for...

Today would have been Mary Jo Kopechne’s 80th birthday. Of course, Mary Jo didn’t even make it to 29 – she died on July 18, 1969, when Sen. Ted Kennedy drunkenly drove his mother’s 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont off a small bridge into a tidal pond on Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard. Teddy, drunk and with an expired driver’s license, swam to safety and didn’t bother to even report the death (by suffocation, not drowning) for 10 hours. By then he’d already made more than a dozen long-distance phone calls off the island, including one to another of his girlfriends in Palm...

AP Images ✔ @AP_Images 50 years ago today, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy left a party on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha's Vineyard with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28; some time later, Kennedy's car went off a bridge into the water. Kennedy was able to escape, but Kopechne drowned. Let’s start this in reverse, as it’s the best way to put this in perspective. It’s not true that Kopechne “drowned.” The coroner never autopsied the body, itself a curious omission when dealing with an unattended death of a healthy young woman. Eyewitness testimony by the person who recovered her body at the scene,...

Ted Kennedy might have become president - Richard Nixon certainly thought the runt of the litter was going to be the Democrat nominee against him in 1972. But the Kennedys' dreams of a restoration of "Camelot" were shattered 50 years ago this week, as Teddy's mother's 1967 Delmont 88 Oldsmobile plunged off a small bridge on Chappaquiddick Island into a tidal pond, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. Teddy killed the 28-year-old "girl," as he called her, and he was allowed to plead guilty to ... leaving the scene of an accident. Not vehicular homicide, or drunk driving, or reckless driving, or...

Brian De Palma’s 1981 political thriller Blow Out was the first movie that dared address the events conjured by the single term “Chappaquiddick.” It was a generational provocation. De Palma, whose comedies Greetings, Phantom of the Paradise, and Hi, Mom! were obsessed with the JFK assassination, advanced to make a deeply emotional film reenacting a well-known loss of life (a supposedly disposable female victim played by Nancy Allen) and national disillusionment. De Palma raised that tragedy, involving both a callous political cover-up and society’s general naïveté, into larger concerns: Blow Out’s daring aesthetic examination of a film technician’s (John Travolta)...

“Chappaquiddick” tells the story of a relatively unknown scandal involving one of the most glorified families in American history: the Kennedys. So, it is not surprising that the cast, executive producers, and director felt some nerves taking on the project. For Byron Allen, Entertainment Studios CEO and co-founder and executive producer of the film, the pushback to tell this story came when he first decided to produce the film. “Unfortunately, there are some very powerful people who tried to put pressure on me not to release this movie,” Allen said. “They went out of their way to try and influence...

Mary Jo Kopechne had been dead for several months when her parents began to have serious questions about what really happened the night of July 18, 1969. At first, Gwen and Joe Kopechne had believed Senator Ted Kennedy’s account of that evening. “They trusted him,” says Mary Jo’s aunt, Georgetta Potoski, 75. “They loved the Kennedys. But later on, they started to question what happened.” Ted Kennedy could never escape the unanswered questions about his 10-hour delay in reporting the accident to Edgartown police. “The longer it went on, more and more inconsistencies were discovered and he wasn’t telling Gwen...

It is almost as though Joey Gargan decided to slip away before anyone noticed. And the funny thing about it is that he succeeded. So, Ted Kennedy cousin Joseph F. “Joey” Gargan, who was Kennedy’s close companion, won’t be around to answer any questions about “Chappaquiddick,” the upcoming film about the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Joey, 87, who was at Kennedy’s side that fateful night, died at his Virginia home December 12 and hardly anybody made the connection to Kennedy and Chappaquiddick

Coming on the heels of Darkest Hour is another biopic of note. Both Paul and I reported a while ago that there was a movie in the works on Ted Kennedy’s infamous incident at Chappaquiddick in 1969.

I paid no attention to the fact that Hollywood was producing a biopic of Ted Kennedy’s famous “accident” at Chappaquiddick in 1969, and would have assumed that it was a typical gauzy pro-Kennedy puff piece if I had known. But Variety magazine, the main trade journal of Hollywood, offers a review that not only says that the forthcoming movie Chappaquiddick is suitably harsh on Teddy, but that he—and the Kennedy reputation—deserve it: The film says that what happened at Chappaquiddick was even worse than we think. Kopechne’s body was found in a position that implied that she was struggling to...

On the heels of actor Will Ferrell pulling out of a planned "Alzheimer's comedy" about Ronald Reagan comes news that Hollywood is preparing a feature film about late Senator Ted Kennedy and the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. Australian-born "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jason Clarke will portray Kennedy in "Chappaquiddick" — the film's working title — and John Curran, whose credits include "The Painted Veil," will direct, said the movie's co-producer and Apex Entertainment president and chief executive Mark Ciardi. Production is slated to begin around Labor Day with a tentative release in late 2017. Ciardi noted that...

Yes, you read that right. The director of the steamy 50 Shades of Grey, Sam Taylor-Johnson, has departed the Ted Kennedy film Chappaquiddick. Apparently, he's not the man to make a movie on Kennedy. Taylor-Johnson will be replaced by filmmaker John Curran. According to Deadline Hollywood, producer Mark Ciardi said of Jason Clarke, who will be playing Ted Kennedy: “Clarke is the perfect choice to take on the complexities of this role.”

In a speech this morning at the dedication of the new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, President Obama praised the late Senator effusively, citing his bipartisan creds and pondering what the world would be like if we all "carried ourselves more like Kennedy. (Oops, did we say "pond"?) The folks at Digitas Daily think Obama might have been well-advised to choose different words, though, when talking up Kennedy's reach across party lines. "[Republicans] know who Ted Kennedy was. It's not because they shared Ted's ideology or his positions, but because they knew Ted as somebody who...

BOSTON — President Barack Obama summoned today's quarrelsome political leaders to emulate the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the pursuit of compromise on Monday, and said a new institute that bears the longtime Massachusetts senator's name can be as much an antidote to political cynicism as the man once was. "What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy? What if we were to follow his example a little bit harder?" the president asked a crowd of family, former aides and political dignitaries of both parties under a tent in raw weather just outside the doors of the Edward...

LIVE Report - Pres. Obama Remarks at Edward M. Kennedy Institute Opening

A veteran senator who let his mistress drown in a car he recklessly drove into a pond, rented a brothel for an entire night in Chile and sought meetings with communists is being honored by the Obama administration this month. Ted Kennedy received his posthumous accolades from the Department of Labor (DOL) with an induction into the agency’s “Hall of Honor.” The recognition is meant to showcase the life-changing contributions that a unique group of people have made on the American way of work, according to the agency. A special panel comprised of the Solicitor of Labor, the Assistant Secretary...

p>I won't run through the usual litany of misdeeds. If you don't already know them by heart, you'll commit them to memory eventually when you finally tire of liberals screeching at you for "hating women" while holding this guy up as a secular saint. (Chappaquiddick material is abundant online, but this post will get you up to speed on another legendary incident.) I've got to say, in all sincerity: I appreciate their brazenness in building a convention around the theme of a "war on women" while not only inviting Bill Clinton to be a headline speaker but having a video...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The two sons of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy strode into the lobby of the Omni hotel on Tuesday morning and were besieged by delegates, reporters, and well-wishers. Photos were taken, sound bites recorded, and a flurry of handshakes exchanged. “It’s like he’s still in Congress,” Ted Jr. quipped as he waited for his brother, Patrick, a former US representative from Rhode Island. The sons arrived in Charlotte for an afternoon reception for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, which is being built at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and to attend a video...

If nothing else, this new file shows that Kennedy was at best a man with tremendously flawed judgment, and at worst, a malicious political opportunist willing to sell out anything for his own personal ambitions.

Teddy Kennedy quashed a National Enquirer story alleging Mary Jo Kopechne was pregnant with his child when she died by giving the weekly a fawning article about Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her kids, a new book claims. In Paul Pope's "The Deeds of My Fathers," he claims his father, Generoso (Gene) Pope, who turned the Enquirer into the best-selling tabloid in America, spiked a story that reported Kopechne, the pretty young campaign worker, was pregnant in 1969 when she drowned in the Chappaquiddick River in Kennedy's car. Pope writes that his father sent a reporter to DC in 1980 to...