It would be easy, and not unwarranted, to mark Thursday’s 50th anniversary of the Chappaquiddick incident by reviewing in excruciating detail all the ways that night that then-Sen. Ted Kennedy failed his duty as a decent human being.
Maybe we can go deeper, though, and let this anniversary of the accident be the last one receiving major retrospectives. Maybe we, too, can act with good judgment by letting this awful story rest once this week ends.
It is by now well known that Kennedy, that night and the next morning, acted with selfishness, callousness, and cowardice. With his victim, Mary Jo Kopechne, remaining in the car he had just submerged, Kennedy walked past several lighted houses without knocking on the doors to ask for help. He didn’t report the accident until after a full night’s sleep, a shower, and a social visit with breakfasting hotel neighbors. And it turns out that Kopechne probably survived long enough that if Kennedy had secured a rapid and concerted rescue effort, and if everything went absolutely perfectly, it might have saved her life.
We know all that. Nothing will change it. Nothing to be written here will reduce Kennedy’s moral shame.
Now, though, spare a thought or two for the Kennedy and Kopechne families. This was a human tragedy. It left upon the survivors some devastatingly human scars.
Of course, the worst survivors’ scars were those suffered by the Kopechnes and by Mary Jo’s friends. Not only did they lose her, but they had to endure decades of having her known by most of the world not for the accomplishments she surely would have made, but by the way she died. This is wretched beyond words.
But don’t withhold your sympathy from the Kennedy family, either. As horrid as we conservatives think their politics and personal behavior often were, their tales of tragedy are epic as well.
Imagine you are Caroline Kennedy. Before you were even born, you lost an uncle in war, an aunt to a plane crash, and another aunt’s mind to a lobotomy. You lost a father and another uncle to assassinations. You almost lost another uncle to a plane crash, which he somewhat miraculously survived, only to have him besmirch the family name at Chappaquiddick.
You lost your mother too early to cancer. You lost two siblings in infancy, and lost a brother to whom you were very close to in yet another plane crash. You had cousins dead of suicide and skiing accidents, others with serious drug problems, one accused of rape, and another charged with murder.
That’s a lot of heartbreak for one family.
Yes, the Kennedys for more than half a century have been treated, quite ludicrously, almost as royalty. They did not merit that treatment. But they certainly do not merit this bizarre, recurring, horrific streak of calamities.
Ted Kennedy was not a victim at Chappaquiddick. His family, however, suffered. Still reeling from Robert Kennedy’s assassination just one year earlier, the innocent Kennedys, like Caroline, must have experienced the deadly plunge from the bridge as just another knife to the gut.
So yes, it makes sense to note that a tragedy that quite arguably changed history in a massive way occurred 50 years ago on Thursday. Beyond that, let it be. Say a prayer for the Kennedy family, that the next generations escape the “curse” that plagued earlier ones — and that they might know what it is to be neither royalty nor accursed, but normal. And say a prayer especially in the memory of Mary Jo Kopechne. May she and her memory rest in God’s good peace.
