Remarkably little similarity to their actions following their accidents.
Yet they had an identical level of success in subsequently getting elected president.
What was Mass law at the time on DUI causing a death (I know that there probably wasn’t such a law then but the equivalent)? What time of punishment would Kennedy have faced if the cops had showed up and there he is sitting on the bank stinking drunk with the girl dead in the water?
The presiding judge at Kopechne’s inquest, James Boyle, “found ‘probable cause’ for believing that Kennedy was guilty of criminal negligence and even possibly manslaughter.”
In any other state this would have led to the issue of an arrest warrant. But this was Massachussetts. A Kennedy was involved. And Boyle knew his duty as a good Democrat.
There were other incidents where he was involved in allegations of criminal activity after drinking heavily. He even publicly apologized for his drinking. Do you need a cite for that?
Members of his family have stated that they believe alcoholism runs in the Kennedy family (cite).
No, this is not likely enough to convict him of anything. There are other standards than that. However -
A person with a fairly well-documented problem with alcohol, married to a person with a well-documented problem with alcohol, many of whose blood relatives also encountered problems with alcohol and other drugs, leaves a party where he admits having consumed alcohol. He then gets into an accident, and behaves in a way that is appallingly irresponsible where it is not blatantly self-serving and deceptive. All this on the one side.
On the other side, we have - his word for it. Knowing as we do that he has lied about the other facts of the case.
It seems more likely than not that part of his motivation for not reporting the accident until many hours later was to give himself a chance to sober up enough.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, I thought that was kind of a textbook case of circumstantial evidence. Lets examine the circumstances.
- He was drinking at a party.
- He was known for being a drunk.
- He drove off of a bridge.
- He left the scene of the crime to go take a nap rather than calling the authorities.
Now of course we can attribute his afterward actions to head trauma too, but see circumstances 1-3.
BTW some of you may have missed Newsweek’s Ed Klein telling guest host Katty Kay about Kennedy’s love of humor a couple of days ago on the Diane Rehm Show. I did myself but luckily Jules Crittenden didn’t.
“How the late senator loved to hear and tell Chappaquiddick jokes, and was always eager to know if anyone had heard any new ones”, chuckled Klein.
What a card that Teddy was!
Sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say all it is is circumstantial evidence.
People keep asserting that he drank at the party. Neither he nor anyone else testified that this was the case, AFAICT.
I don’t care which way people go on the ‘was Ted Kennedy drinking that night?’ question, but I think people should be consistent.
I think the evidence that Dick Cheney was drinking when he shot a guy in the face is very similar - there was drinking going on during the hunt, and he didn’t talk to police (in fact, he asked them to come back the next day, and they obliged) right after the incident. And he’s got a history of drinking too.
If you think there’s no good evidence for Kennedy drinking, you are entitled to think Cheney wasn’t drinking that afternoon. If you’re pretty sure he was, you should also think Cheney was hiding his drinking when he shot a guy.
I think they were both drinking. As a recovering alcoholic in my family likes to say, “bad things didn’t always happen when I drank, but whenever anything bad happened, I’d been drinking.”
What’s your point? We all pretty much universally think Dick Cheney is a fucking bastard. I definitely think Dick Cheney was more deeply corrupt than Ted Kennedy.
This is an abuse of rational processes. Two unrelated events are unrelated. Though Dick Cheney was likely drunk too.
lol
If only he’d made a video in which he pretends to look for poor Mary Jo in his office. Then we could all have a good laugh, brush off his incompetence (and mendacity) and the lives it cost, and let bygones be bygones.
But I thought the whole point of this thread was the tragedy, not how famous the person who caused the tragedy was.
It is.
O Rly?
Ok, I should say that’s what the original thread was about. The Pit thread is about being pissed off that people couldn’t handle a thread on Mary Jo Kopechne. Which I am no longer pissed off about. I’ve moved on, now it’s just sort of comical in its silliness. Nothing is funnier than hobbits with pitchforks as long as they don’t get too close. 
There are like 13 of these damn things. I can’t remember which one is which and frankly neither can anyone else.
In any case, the tragedy in question is the Chappa… Chappaq… that chick that got killed when Kennedy drove off a bridge.
Not Laura Bush’s ex.
What I think the OP fails to realize is that, while it sucks big floppy donkey dick that Mary Jo probably won’t be remembered by anyone but her family here in a few years, if she’d been riding with anyone else, she would have been forgotten by everybody but her family 40 years ago. My aunt was killed by a drunk driver on her way to work in 1966, leaving a young husband and a 2-month-old baby. You know who remembered her by 1967? Her family. That’s it. She didn’t get the benefit of the public flagellating the man who caused her death for decades, because the man who killed her and 2 other women was a nobody.
Mary Jo Kopechne hasn’t gotten all that she deserves, no. But she’s gotten far, far more than a lot of people who die young and tragically get.
You think I failed to realize that which was blindingly obvious and went without saying huh?
Right. That’s very sad.
Yes, I agree. But I think people are looking at this all inverted. We shouldn’t forget Mary Jo Kopechne merely because others are forgotten. It just means that there is more than one tragedy that deserves to be remembered. Your aunt deserves remembering, and that is a very heartbreaking story. I hope that your cousin grew up to have a healthy and good life.
Mary jo said to Teddy" I think I am pregnant"
He said" Don’t worry we will cross that bridge when we come to it"
I read some on the incident. I got the impression that the small time lawyers in Chappaquidick were intimidated by the big time Kennedy lawyers and did not give much trouble to them. They had little ability to gather evidence and they did not present a very strong case against him. With today’s forensics we might have gotten a better understanding of what really happened. But it was a long time ago,.
So we all should remember everyone who dies tragically? I don’t think I have that kind of storage space in my brain.
No, and really the idea that if we remember one death we are doing disservice to others is an incredibly cynical outlook.
With the exception of CrazyCatLady I think anyone else bringing up other examples were doing so for cynical reasons. The implication is, ‘this isn’t important’, rather than just expanding the compassion to other people.
It’s like people are looking for a reason not to feel compassion. But every story that has been brought up I have looked it up and read the circumstances because yes, those tragedies are sad too. You don’t have to remember every one, it’s unrealistic to expect you to, but if you’re going to join the thread why not just do so with an open heart? All of these things are tragedies, they are all sad, there’s no reason for the comparative misery game.