I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
There is no other way to start a discussion on the death of Edward M. Kennedy, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts. He is being hailed throughout the media as the "liberal lion" of the Senate, somehow confusing the loud Bostonian accent and thick mane of hair for regal bearing.
Ted Kennedy lived the last forty years of his life running away from the first thirty-seven. I'm not sure if the scant years on the "good" side of the scale make up for the bad. Not when that includes his responsibility for the death of a young woman who made the mistake of trusting him to give her a ride.
The Boston Phoenix is keeping track of where Chappaquiddick is mentioned in the Kennedy obits.
For those keeping score at home: the Globe put it in the fifth paragraph, the Herald in the tenth. Which isn't that odd, given the considerable attention paid to the fatal accident in the Globe's recent Ted Kennedy bio, and the Herald's recent love affair with Kennedy.
Chappaquiddick will be discussed here, in the fourth paragraph. It is the name of a small island where Kennedy attended a party with a group including six girls who had worked on his brother Bobby's campaign. Kennedy left the party with Mary Jo Kopechne after offering to drive her to the ferry. He took a wrong turn, the car went over Dike Bridge and ended upside down in a channel. Kennedy was able to get out of the car, but Mary Jo was not so lucky.
He walked past four houses until reaching the house where the party was held and grabbed two male friends to accompany him back to the channel where efforts to save Mary Jo were restarted, to no avail. The rest of the party-goers were not informed of the accident. After the men were unsuccessful in trying to rescue Mary Jo, they drove Kennedy to take the ferry to his hotel where his sleep was interrupted by some noisy guests -- according to a complaint he made to the hotel staff.
By 8 o'clock the next morning, Kennedy (who took the time to complain to the front desk about noisy neighbors) still had not reported the accident to authorities. A half hour later, a fisherman spotted the overturned car and went to the neighboring house to alert them -- they called the police.
John Farrar, the diver who eventually discovered Mary Jo's body in the car, testified at the coroner's inquest that Mary Jo did not drown but, rather, suffocated. He stated that when he found her the next morning, she was pressed up with her head against what may have been an air pocket. He testified that had rescuers been notified of the accident within a half hour, she likely could have been saved.
We know the rest of the story. Kennedy received the statutory minimum, a two month sentence -- suspended -- for leaving the scene of an accident causing injury. His driver's license was suspended for six months. He paid some money to the Kopechnes, but not much as they did not want to appear to be taking blood money.
Kennedy lived out the rest of his life in the public spotlight and will be laid to rest in Arlington as a national hero, but what did he do that was so heroic? He didn't serve in the war (he was stationed in Europe during the Korean War and would have been on academic deferment had he not been expelled from Harvard for cheating). And his "service" to his country was the luxury of having one of the guaranteed seats in the Senate -- being a Democrat in Massachusetts, a state so in love with the Kennedys he was reelected with 62% of the vote after Mary Jo's death.
As the media remembers Kennedy, let us remember the entire story of this politician. It includes a young woman left to die forty years ago this past July, in a car on the island of Chappaquiddick.
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