A note says that he is writing a biography of Ted Kennedy. In the editorial he says some things that to me seem quite surprising coming from someone who presumably should be very knowledgeable about the facts:
(The word ‘much’ is notable there.)
A partial list of the things that were - or were attempted to be - covered up:
The time when Teddy and Mary Jo left the party
How he came to turn right and drive down a rough dirt road instead of bearing left to follow the well-marked paved road
Where they were headed in the car
Just what he did after escaping the sunken car
Why he bypassed nearby lighted houses to return 1.2 miles to the party house
Why he did not contact the police until the next morning
Details of the multiple phone calls he made in the intervening time
How much he drank at the party
Details of how he got across the channel to Martha’s Vineyard
Why he made a point of changing clothes and then asking the time at 2:25am
The exact cause of Kopechne’s death
Unfortunately, the details of this case fully support this interpretation - indeed, there’s little to cite against it. Kennedy certainly knew the full story, but never told it. None who were at the party or who came to Teddy’s help in the aftermath have said much over the past 49 years.
Here’s a 1974 NY Times article by Robert Sherrill that provides considerable detail. You’d think Gabler would have read this.
Agree with the OP that to say “nothing much was covered up” is complete and utter bullshit for all the reasons mentioned.
Kennedy did say later on, IIRC, that he was in shock and grief and was quite disoriented after the incident, and argued that this was why his behavior came across as so suspicious. I think that’s a pretty poor “explanation.” If it looks like a coverup, especially from a powerful and ambitious politician, it probably is. Anyway, how convenient that his “disorientation” led him to take all the steps that he would have taken had he been covering it up. But I guess if you take that explanation at face value–and I suppose it’s impossible to prove it’s wrong, though it fails on any number of levels–any opposing perspective feels like a conspiracy theory. So maybe that’s what the op-ed author means.
I think the most astonishing line in this op-ed (and there are several) is the following:
“Contrary to the film’s implications, Mr. Kennedy immediately and forever after felt deep remorse and responsibility for the accident; it haunted him.”
First of all, how on earth could the writer possibly know that? Because Kennedy told him so? Because Kennedy said so in an interview? I mean, under what circumstances would Kennedy say anything different? I suppose it’s conceivable that Kennedy kept some “private” journals that documented his torment over the incident–but that seems unlikely, and I’m not sure I would believe they were truly intended to be “private” even if they did exist.
Second, that’s a remarkably unspecific statement. Assuming it’s true: Was he “haunted” because of the role he had played in the loss of a human life, or was his “remorse” due to the political hit he took in the aftermath? Maybe it’s both. Cynic as I am, I know which way I’d be leaning.
I never heard of the op-ed author, but biographers often do wind up falling rather in love with their subjects and believing them incapable of doing anything seriously wrong. And of course the whole “Kennedy mystique” thing has blinded many, many people over the years and gotten them to a point where they can only think only the best of family members. Double whammy, in this case. I don;t think I’ll be reading the book :).
[Moderating]
It doesn’t look to me like this thread is about the movie; it’s about what really happened at Chappaquiddick. Which is going to be mostly speculation, no matter how you go about it, since the only one who knows is dead. Off to IMHO.
About the interface between the event, the movie, and politics today …
Anyone who thinks that in today’s conditions this movie will do better with less educated rural viewers than a movie of its allegedly quiet and thoughtful character study nature getting discussed in the OpEd pages would normally do … and less well with the so-called intellectual class than it would normally do?
Beyond that Gabler, who is a respected biographer, is pretty hard left politically and not shy about it usually. So the fact the ‘right wing hate machine’ scored so many points on Ted Kennedy in later years, and on the Democrats/the left generally for their alleged hypocrisy in ‘lionizing’ Ted Kennedy (to the extent one accepts they did), that’s surely something Gabler has a big problem with. In fact I think that’s more likely his take on it rather than being a naive fan of Camelot or besotted by his particular subject as a biographer. It’s partisan I’d guess more than anything.
And I agree it’s jarring for anyone to say it didn’t look like covering something up which it obviously did look like. Although it’s fair to say we still don’t and may never know what really was being covered up and how bad it was. Also if someone criticizes any ‘based on a true story’ Hollywood movie for not being realistic…OK, so? But more often it’s something/somebody more to the right being made to look perhaps artificially bad in a Hollywood movie, and that wouldn’t be as likely to bother Neal Gabler.
I’m curious about what point, exactly, the OP wants to discuss that is the most pertinent here. That the movie was fully accurate? From the description, it seems to take a lot of artistic license about things that could not possibly be known. That there were coverups about the exact events surrounding Chappaquiddick? Almost certainly there were, at least if one uses “coverup” in the sense that not everything was publicly revealed. That, whatever other things may have deeply troubled him, Ted Kennedy was also concerned about the impact on his political career? Of course he was. How could anyone think otherwise?
What bothers me about the way Chappaquiddick has been politicized is that it’s been used to suggest that Ted Kennedy was unfit for public office, and specifically, unfit for the presidency. And in this regard one has only to point out that he had one of the most exemplary records of public service in the history of Congress. For anyone who believes that Ted Kennedy was morally unfit to be president, I would remind them of another fateful night, the night of November 8, 2016, that has brought on the much broader calamity of present circumstances, the consequences of which, to borrow a quote from another US president, will live in infamy. After this, any allegations of moral or other unfitness for the presidency against virtually anyone, let alone an honored statesman like Ted Kennedy, just smacks of craven hypocrisy.
If the referenced op-ed seems to seek to whitewash the events of Chappaquiddick, the movie sounds to me like it seeks to demonize Kennedy based on a plethora of worst-case suppositions and innuendoes. Probably neither extreme reflects the truth, and that’s pretty much the end of the story here.
[Old Irishwoman’s voice] Teddy was just taking that Mary Jo girl to midnight mass, when he came a bridge built by one of those Eyetalian contractors. [/OIv]
What else is there to know that would actually be enlightening in any way?
Do you think that Venus Williams or Caitlyn Jenner or Laura Bush or Matthew Broderick or Keith Moon or Rebecca Gayheart or Brandy Norwood or Howard Hughes or John Huston or Vince Neil or Dwayne Goodrich or Lane Garrison or Craig MacTavish or Amy Locane or J. R. Smith or Salman Khan or Tony Stewart or Donte Stallworth or Marion ‘Suge’ Knight or Vikram Chatterjee were responsible for the crashes that happened while they were driving a car and someone was killed? They got a variety of sentences. That’s just the cases where celebrities were driving a car when a crash happened that killed someone. There are many more examples of non-celebrities doing this, and they also got a variety of sentences. It would be nice if there was some way to do a fair assessment of who was responsible and to what extent in each case.
A friend of mine went to private school with Ted Kennedy jr and the senator would drive the kids to school events with a glass of bourbon on the rocks in his hand the whole time. Yeah, he seemed really broken up about Chappaquiddick. As a liberal, I’ve never gotten the Kennedy love, just another bunch of oligarchs who can kill whomever they want.
**Corry El **-- You could easily be right about Gabler’s motivation. As I say, I know nothing about him. I just keep thinking about the line insisting that Kennedy was haunted and remorseful over the tragedy for the rest of his life and thinking, “This is a very naive way to look at it; this a writer who is WAAAAY too close to his subject.” Whether that’s because KENNEDY AURA!!! or just what happens to biographers who aren’t careful not to get too close, I don’t know. Maybe it’s simple politics, as you suggest; it just feels like more to me.
Wendell Wagner – As they always say, it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. I can only speak for myself, of course–what’s always concerned me is not what happened before Kennedy’s car went into the drink, but what happened after it did. Unless all the people on your list went out of their way not to alert the authorities until many hours had passed, and refused to knock on nearby doors when a victim was dying, and so on, their experiences seem immaterial.
wolfpup – As a liberal Democrat who has worked for many candidates over the years, I absolutely agree that Donald Trump’s policies are more morally bankrupt than anything T. Kennedy ever did. I also agree that Kennedy was a very effective senator and that where public policy was concerned he was a great asset to this country.
But I think we are best off not trying to minimize the events of that night in 1969. A woman died, and the person most responsible for her death did a whole bunch of things at that point that at the very least suggest that all he was thinking about was saving his own skin and his own political career. (Unless, as I said before, you buy that he was disoriented and did by sheer coincidence exactly what someone might do if they were engaged in a cover-up. I don’t buy it.) I don’t know that it makes him “unqualified to be president,” exactly, but I do believe it calls his judgment and priorities into question, and I think that’s worth exploring. Even if your ultimate answer is “His behavior at Chappaquiddick doesn’t bother me” or “It doesn’t matter in comparison to all the good things he did,” I think it’s best to go through the process of asking what it all implies instead of brushing the questions aside as unimportant, as many people (not just the op-ed writer) seem inclined to do. The rush to say, “He didn’t cover it up,” or “He covered it up, but let’s not examine it,” does not put my side in a very good light.
You omitted Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. The kid she accidentally killed was named Lopez, and the coincidence haunted her. Left Eye accidentally killed herself driving a couple days later.
Rebecca Gayheart definitely was culpable, yes, for driving recklessly.
As for Teddy, he could have caught Mary Jo by the hand and pulled her up with him as long as he was saving himself.
I don’t want to sound like I’m defending Ted Kennedy who I’m sure had many serious faults, but he did have a commendable record of accomplishment on behalf of his country, which is far more than can be said for the vast majority of politicians. This is what comes to mind when I read some of the previous comments.
It’s documented that he held that glass of bourbon the whole time, is it?
This reminds me of the “science news cycle” piece from PhD comics, although the distortions in verbal retelling of gossipy anecdotes from person to person tend to be even more egregious. It typically goes something like this:
A -> B: “I once saw TK Jr. with a glass of bourbon.”
B -> C: “TK Jr. drinks a lot of bourbon.”
C -> D: “TK Jr. is an alcoholic who drinks bourbon constantly, night and day.”
D -> E: “TK Jr. gets drunk on bourbon even when he has to drive.”
E -> F: “TK Jr. is such an alcoholic that he drinks bourbon even while he’s actually driving!”
F -> G: “… driving kids to school!!!”
All good points. But how about, at the conclusion, option #3: “He covered it up, but it doesn’t disqualify him, because we need good, dedicated leaders and they are very rare”. The problem with setting the morality bar so high that you require your candidate for high office to be a saint is that there are very few saints around, and what are the chances that you’ll find one who is also a competent and effective political leader? So you (the generic “you”) focus on all the wrong criteria, wind up with a dysfunctional mess trying to run the government, and eventually say “fuck it” and elect a self-serving avaricious ignorant incompetent reactionary misogynistic narcissist to run things.
Serious question: has any credible investigative body reached this conclusion? Because one of the most starkly shocking facts about getting out of a sunken car is that everything about it is a great deal more difficult than might be imagined by the office-chair-sitting postgame analyst.
