OPINION:
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 certainly are entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In their 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 that of 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 name-check 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’ 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, Mr. 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 omelet 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 OK to leave a couple more women down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Miss Kopechne “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 Miss Kopechne could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Mr. 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 play groups, 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.
Mr. 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 Miss Kopechne 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 had 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 National Public Radio’s “Diane Rehm Show,” Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted’s “favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick. 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,” Mr. Klein chortled. That’s one way to put it.
When a man is capable of what Mr. Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, 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 Robert H. Bork, Mr. Kennedy announced on the Senate floor 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 that the judge and former solicitor general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile, but also so preposterous that, like Mr. Kennedy’s 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 would be 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 Mr. Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Mr. Kennedy 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 company, 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 Mr. Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
Mark Steyn is the author of the New York Times best-seller “America Alone.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.