Never Get Caught with a Dead Girl or a Live Boy
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Author:
Harrison
Tags:
Chappaquiddick Eddie McCormack mary joe kopechne Ted Kennedy
Mary Jo Kopechne and the car in which she drowned.
There will be plenty of stories on the death of Ted Kennedy today and in the coming weeks. I found this one interesting:
The details of the July 19 accident were salacious: a Regatta Weekend reunion party at a friend’s cottage with all married men (except one) and six women — the “boiler room girls” — who had worked together on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign.
After a day of sailing and heavy drinking, Kennedy drove his black Oldsmobile sedan off a small wooden bridge into Poucho Pond, trapping Kopechne in seven feet of water.
Edward Moore Kennedy – only 38 and up for re-election the following year– had violated one of the cardinal rules in politics: “Never get caught with a dead girl or a live boy.”
The political fall-out echoed his first run for Senate in 1962, when his primary opponent, the late Eddie McCormack, sneered, “If his name was Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, he’d be a joke.”
Just days after the televised apology, a Time-Harris poll revealed 51 percent of Americans did not believe Kennedy’s explanation of why he was at a party with single girls, how a man so familiar with the island could have taken a wrong turn and how, with a back brace from a 1964 plane crash, Kennedy could have swum the turbulent sea waters to his hotel.
Within five days of the accident, Kennedy’s lawyers arranged for him to plead guilty to leaving the scene of the accident involving personal injury with a two-month suspended sentence and one-year probation.
A Newsweek cover story claimed Kennedy’s friends had recently been “powerfully concerned with his indulgent drinking habits, his daredevil driving, and his ever-ready eye for a pretty face.”
To many, those words would later ring true, when in 1991 Kennedy was present at a late-night hotel drinking binge with his nephew William Kennedy Smith, who was charged, but later acquitted of rape.
Who knows what Ted Kennedy’s “destiny” would have been had Ms. Kopechne not died… maybe he would have run for president and won, been murdered as his two brothers were… we will never know. Many of the Kennedy family members died young or had run-ins with the law… typical results one would find in most families with so much wealth, power, and so many options.
Perhaps Ted Kennedy tried to compenstate for his failings in his efforts to help the poor but he also was a master politician who, like all in that realm, know whom and what to support and the best things to say at any given moment.
What his story illustrates, perhaps more than most, is that where you come from, who you know is at least as important as who you really are.
Mary Jo would have turned 69 on July 28, 2009.
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12:54
The Chappaquiddick incident is always what comes to mind when I’d hear of Ted Kennedy in the news. I wonder if this haunted him up until the end of his life?
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13:12
Maybe..maybe..but I hope he rest in peace…
kindest
hans
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13:28
He knows nothing… he is dead.
13:25
It’s amazing what happens when famous people die, Ted, being the lightning rod he is has not gotten the same treatment that Michael Jackson received. When MJ died, there was an outpouring of sympathy and ignoring his past legal troubles. Ted dies and you either hear that we lost a great man, or good riddance. I personally don’t have an opinion(for once).
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13:28
I’m not in the “good riddance” camp but the guy was no saint. Like many other great men before him, a lesson in wasted potential.
14:06
I like your perspective in the article, and the very last sentence says it all.
16:39
Ghandi diddled children, FDR tried to fix the supreme court, Reagen helped drug dealers so he could sell arms to Iran, Mother Theresa neglected the medical treatment of her wards, Lincoln was manic-depressive and possibly gay, thomas jefferson was changed opinions every year, Malcolm X started out as a racist, and even Bush was a lush and a coke fiend.
There is no such thing as a saint. Every good man in history has done bad things. Often very bad. Extreme personalities are needed to change the world.
Her death and his alcoholism were a crying shame but he did some damned good things in his life and a man’s death should be a time to celebrate his life and not spit on his grave. There will be time enough for that later.
Also,
That’s called the capitalist class system that you love so much.
17:30
No that would be Nepotism might want to look that up.
18:24
Fuck the Kennedys. Especially TED. Only a rich lib can get by with murdering a girl, live a full RICH life and then be mourned upon HIS death as a great human.
And only those on the left could mourn a fucking child molester too. M.Jackson,. may he burn in hell.
And now a leftist president that appoints a self proclaimed commie (Van Jones) as his Green Job Czar?
Look,. I listen to death metal,. loooove smoking my pot and all of my other so called ‘liberal’ activities. But I draw the line at murder, fondling little boy penises and communist.
This country has gone to hell in a handbasket.
07:40
Why would people care so much about what others do?! Because thier lives are pathetic and boring. How about looking at how twisted your own life is for a change? We all have secrects, it is a neccessity of life. Left or right, we are all the same as sick twisted individuals who lead secret lives.
I say who the fuk cares??????