THINKING OF MARY JO AND TED -- 40 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Brookline, MASSACHUSETTS: As the Senators wrangle and posture over the controversies surrounding nationalized health care. Senator Kennedy stays home, dying for all we know. Kennedy has worked on various health care issues for ages, but now his health, ironically enough, does not allow him to participate in the political debates.

Saturday 18 July -- We remembers the 40th anniversary of an incident that reduced and clouded Edward Kennedy’s influence for decades. Some local media news outlets reported on this anniversary, but the national news organizations by and large simply ignored the anniversary, maybe out of respect to the dying senator.

On 18 July 1969, Kennedy attended a party at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts and took a girl other than his wife on a car ride at which the girl drowned in the car in an estuary. Kennedy’s detractors claim he had sexual contact with her and drove drunk. Kennedy denied both accusations, but frankly the story does not make much sense without either sex or liquor. The senator obviously survived. Supposedly the Senator made an attempt to save her but could not. The question as to why he could not remains to this day a big mystery, especially if the senator did not suffer the effects of alcohol.

Suppose If I had been in this sort of position: the dictates of law and of humanity would require me to phone the police as soon as possible. Kennedy did not contact the police first. First, he got political advice from his retainers – and they gave him really rather bad advise. Their advise and Kennedy’s inclinations were both so bad that Kennedy did not report the accident at all and did not talk to police for HOURS plural after the wreck. Only when locals discovered the wreck the next day did Kennedy talk to the police. And apparently, he never apologized to the family of the dead girl either.

A Massachusetts court did find the Senator guilty of some sort of vehicular negligence, but this being Massachusetts the court gave the minimum sentence possible (a couple of months) then suspended it.

This sort of death incident remains utterly unique in the history of the modern United States Senate. No other senator had somebody die accidentally in his care in his car or in his anything else.

Senator Kennedy should have resigned from the Senate, period. In July and August 1969, the Kennedys and their advisers all suffered sufficiently from delusion and denial to believe that Edward's taking full and complete responsibility for his actions was a secondary consideration to his political aspirations. This is the only way to reconcile the Senator’s words and actions in this period. As a political analyst in the PBS documentary The Kennedys observed, quite rightly, the advise Edward got proved bad advise all the way around.

The voters of Massachusetts do not cross the Kennedys – ever. So they found themselves under the obligations of holding their noses and reelecting Edward Kennedy over and over and over. Senators, who as a group do not obsess much at all over moral and ethical implications, think highly of him, and he earned his reputation in the Senate as a result of long years of work and service. The fact is – Kennedy’s long career should have never happened. His career in the Senate should have ended in July 1969 at the conviction.

Those who teach that moral agency implies one can choose to act as he wants, but one has to take responsibility for the consequences along with the consequences should study Edward Kennedy’s life closely. He illustrates that for many people, the concept is simply bogus. The accident kept him from the Presidency of the United States, but that is really about it. He didn’t lose his political career in the Senate, he did not go to jail, he did not have to pay reparations.

In August 1968, some leaders in the Democratic party came together to see if they could make a deal at the Convention to get Edward Kennedy nominated president – or barring that, vice president. Eventually, and eventually is the right word because Kennedy showed some interest in the idea, Kennedy withdrew from the idea, but in his heart of hearts (as so well expressed in The American Melodrama, “Kennedy in his heart of hearts did not turn down the presidency. He took a rain check on it.”

Suppose what could have happened if Kennedy had just taken the girl back to her hotel without incident. I cannot imagine how the Democrats in 1972 or in 1976 would have taken McGovern, Humphrey, Wallace, and Carter seriously if they had the real possibility of Edward Kennedy unspotted. Nixon possessed so-so popularity with voters in 1968 and 1972, especially considering how he managed to take an unpopular un-winnable Vietnam War and keep it going for four years.

Kennedy did run for president in 1980. Unlike his brother Robert, he had to oppose the President from beginning to end. Furthermore, his candidacy sat under the cloud of the accident, only an 11 year memory then. The Democrats did not really like Carter, but they couldn’t bring themselves to disloyalty for the sake of Kennedy spotted.

Kennedy as a result became an entity with a lot of potential that was either untapped or unwanted. He made his situation. a situation not inevitable.


THE MORAL TO THE STORY

Have someone with you when you take a girl other than your wife home.