No one thinks that this was Ted Kennedy’s finest hour. But you can hardly claim his mistakes AFTER the acciddent led to her death. If you want to hang him for his poor choices after the event, that’s fine – just don’t impute the death to his deliberate actions…
What’s yours?
You didn’t provide a link for this, and your quoted portion also omits the fact that she ran through a stop sign.
You don’t know the details of her death. Do you say that any person who was driving at the time of a fatal accident “killed” their passengers? Why don’t you say “he was unable to save her” or “failed to extract her from the car?”
My point is that people die without having children all the time. This is not noteworthy, regardless of how she died.
Why do you think it’s not noteworthy? Or more specifically define for me what makes something noteworthy. What does one have to do in order to deserve being remembered?
Anyway, how do you know her children wouldn’t have been Hitler?
Someone did claim this, at the time of the accident, the diver who pulled her out of the car. I have yet to see anyone put up their own cite, with their own expert, stating that it was impossible for her to survive on trapped air for 30 minutes. I’m a man who believes in evidence and expert testimony, so Ted Supporters, go ahead and knock my socks off.
Well, it would have posed some rather unpleasant paradoxes vis-a-vis the space-time continuum. You know, what with Hitler already having been born and died.
How is the diver qualified as an expert witness on car crashes and air bubbles? The diver was speculating that there MIGHT have been an airbubble. He provided no evdience that there actually WAS one? Are you serious with trying to hold this dude up as a cite for anything? You’re grasping at straws.
No one “deserves” to be remembered. They do things that people remember them for. It happens naturally, for some. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. What if she had kids and they all died before she did? What if she wanted to be childless? What if she was incapable of conceiving a child?
I think you have that right. Ms. Was is full of it. Doesn’t give a damn about Mary Jo Kopechne or her family, and probably can’t tell you the names of any one of them, and won’t let what the family thinks of the incident cross her lips. Probably doesn’t know anything else about her. Ted’s driving killed her and he regretted it for the rest of his days. He pleaded guilty to what he was charged with, leaving the scene of an accident. If this incident had never happened, the Ted Kennedy haters would still find other things to hate.
If it happened in Ohio, she could have been charged with it, actually. There’s a statute that says that if, in the commission of a minor misdemeanor traffic offense, you cause an accident that kills someone, you can be charged with misdemeanor manslaughter. My good friend is defending someone charged with it right now. But yeah, I’ve seen people charged with killing someone after they ran a stop sign, followed too close, changed lanes improperly, or went the wrong way down a one-way street. “But for the grace of God,” and all that. About 50% of the time, the person who was killed was a passenger in the driver’s own car. These cases are pretty much horrible to deal with for everyone involved–the prosecutor has to deal with the family of the dead victim, and the defendant has to deal with knowing they accidentally killed someone for the rest of their life.
I have no cite other than my own memory, but Kennedy did apologize very publicly, in a nationwide televised statement, to the Kopechne family.
I don’t know, I think human life has an intrinsic value. There are all what-ifs but I’m not really interested in playing the, “let’s diminish the value of her life”, game.
What makes you think I hate Ted Kennedy other than this thread?
Is mentioned Mary Jo Kopechne on the day of the death of the man who killed her sufficient evidence for you?
No, I don’t know her family, but that’s immaterial. I used this thread to get to know a little bit about her. It’s really unfortunate that people are not the least bit curious about her. Mostly they are vitriolic that I even bring her up.
Why not try and you know, actually talk about her rather than trying to shout me down for doing it?
Thank you.
No you didn’t.
Yes I did. If people would actually stick to the topic rather than try to hijack it with their amateur psychoanalysis of my motives then the thread could actually be interesting. I mean the bit about breaking apart her death WAS interesting, but I am genuinely interested in knowing more about her. From her Wiki I know now that she was an only child and that she was an aid to Robert Kennedy and that she was rising pretty fast amongst the ranks of the behind the scenes Washington scene.
Googling “Kennedy Kopechne apology” brings up the video. The first hit is a link to the Freepers, who naturally spin the video in the opposite direction, but the video is there, and yes, Kennedy apologized.