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.
