One of the pleasant surprises of this movie season has been Chappaquiddick, an account of the famous episode from 1969 in which Mary Jo Kopechne was left to drown in a car driven into a pond, and abandoned, by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. It’s not a perfect film by any means; but Kennedy is treated not as the Lion of the Senate or sad inheritor of a famous legacy but as an empty suit surrounded by an abundance of prominent yes men. As I say, a pleasant surprise.
Less surprising, perhaps, is the news that Edward Kennedy’s nephew—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the 64-year-old third-oldest child of Ted’s older brother Bobby—recently visited his father’s assassin, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, in his California prison not because Sirhan is seeking redemption but because Kennedy has concluded that Sirhan was wrongly convicted.
“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” he told the Washington Post, which heralded the tidings on its front page. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.”
This is not the place to repeat the assertions that have proved so persuasive to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suffice it to say that the younger RFK—a stalwart of the second generation of Kennedys in politics from which much was expected—has been best known in recent years for his crackpot views on vaccines and autism, as well as his dogged belief in a cousin’s innocence in a separate murder case. Accordingly, his theories about Sirhan are equally dubious.
What intrigues me is Kennedy’s awakening about the facts of his father’s murder, which occurred exactly a half-century ago and are scarcely in dispute. Why now? It brings to mind the spectacle, two decades ago, of the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. embracing the innocence of James Earl Ray in King’s assassination two months before Robert Kennedy’s.
To his credit, Kennedy junior has said little beyond endorsing the possibility that a proverbial “second gunman” might have been involved in his father’s death. No such restraint was exercised by the King survivors. In 1999, after her son Dexter had visited Ray in his Tennessee prison and asked him if he had killed his father (“No, I didn’t,” replied Ray), Coretta Scott King announced her belief that her husband had been the victim of “a major, high-level conspiracy” involving organized crime and the Lyndon Johnson administration.
The assertion was preposterous—poor LBJ was, if anything, King’s greatest benefactor—but sufficiently sensational at the time that the Clinton White House felt constrained to undertake its own inquiry into the case against Ray. The conclusion was that Ray, who had confessed to the crime and offered no contradictory evidence, was guilty as charged.
We like to think that we moderns are relatively sophisticated people, with cutting-edge views on social issues and impressive knowledge of science and emotional life. But the human brain is not quite as evolved as we like to believe and, when it comes to the violent disruption of the political order, astonishingly retrograde. Social media, which function as a kind of unbuttoned national id, surely make things worse.
According to polls, a majority of our fellow citizens believe that John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy that has held tight for the past 55 years. And the King family’s benevolent attitude toward James Earl Ray and suspicion of the government is shared to some extent by such well-known associates of Dr. King in the civil-rights movement as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young. The same primeval instinct that impels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to question the validity of vaccines seems to have affected his judgment about family tragedy.
Yet the curious fact is that 19th-century Americans, for all their benighted attitudes about other matters, were considerably less superstitious than we are about national calamities. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865), who really was the victim of a political conspiracy, did not obsess his countrymen while the event lived on in common memory. It was Lincoln’s life, not his death, that mattered to the Gilded Age. And the assassination of William McKinley (1901), who was shot and killed by an anarchist at a time when anarchy was regarded as the terrorism of its day, did not inspire conspiracy theories into the next half-century.
One difference, I suppose, is that people with more literal religious beliefs might have been inclined to accept such heinous acts as beyond their control—God’s will, as it were. By contrast, we have an implicit faith in the perfectibility of man and the efficiency of police agencies. Moreover, the lurid contrast between victims and perpetrators—the sainted King and the debonair Kennedys, brought to grief by slovenly nobodies—offends our contemporary sense of cosmic justice. Irony plays a part, too: Advances in forensic science and technical expertise have not so much laid rumors to rest as kept them alive indefinitely.
Which is what makes a movie like Chappaquiddick, which can hardly be welcome to the custodians of the Kennedy family mythology, so compelling. The particulars of the incident are not beyond comprehension but quite easy to believe and accept. The only conspiracy surrounding the death of Mary Jo Kopechne involved not the facts of her case but the all-too-human effort to conceal its details and make Edward Kennedy appear to be something he was not.
