In early September 2009, as then-President Barack Obama made his healthcare pitch to a joint session of Congress, he attempted to add emotional force to his speech by invoking the posthumous words of the recently deceased Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
In the weeks leading up to the speech, Kennedy had been eulogized by members of both parties as the “Lion of the Senate.” Obama read a letter from the senator written before he died, which framed the case for imposing national healthcare in terms of “the character of our country.”
Obama’s effort to pass off the late senator as some sort of moral compass for the nation was yet another despicable example of the way that Kennedy legacy had been sanitized for decades. From birth to death, Kennedy was able to get away with anything because of his wealth, his name, and his liberal ideological views.
The new film, “Chappaquiddick,” provides a long-overdue reality check on the true Kennedy legacy. Director John Curran explores the days in July 1969 surrounding Kennedy’s fateful drive off of a bridge that led to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. And the portrait is not a flattering one for Kennedy.
To be clear, the film does not fulfill some sort of conservative fantasy. It does not, as some on the right may have hoped, take a blunt sledgehammer to Kennedy’s image. Actor Jason Carke’s Ted Kennedy is sometimes sympathetic, as a man who saw his three older brothers killed and who carried the burden of his overbearing father’s expectations on his back. The film shows him drinking before driving the car off the bridge, but not necessarily drunk. He does not come across as some stone-cold killer — instead, he is shown exhibiting remorse and sadness about Kopechne’s death.
Though some conservatives may end up criticizing the movie as a whitewash as a result, in reality, the more nuanced portrayal is more likely to make the film resonate beyond those who already despise Kennedy.
Ultimately, the movie is damning to Kennedy — for whatever remorse he felt, it did not surpass his concern for his political career. Before explaining to his associates what happened, he first tells them, “I’m never gonna be president.” After the accident, rather than calling the police immediately, he walks past lit houses, passes by numerous phones, makes calls to political aides to strategize his response, and even contemplates saying that Kopechne was driving the car. In the end, he waited until the next morning, eight to 10 hours later, to inform the police — after they had already discovered the car.
Whether quicker action could have saved Kopechne will never be conclusively known. The film shows the diver who fished out Kopechne saying, when discovered, she was in a position that suggested she was gasping for air, which could mean she slowly suffocated over the course of hours, in which case Kennedy’s hesitation to call for help may in fact have been the difference between life and death. On the other hand, a medical examiner at the scene claimed she drowned in minutes. The reason we’ll never have more conclusive proof is, as the movie shows, Kennedy conspired with local authorities to have the dead body transferred out of the state quickly, so a proper autopsy could not be performed.
Though this element remains a mystery, it doesn’t really change Kennedy’s moral calculus. In the dark of night, which he said was such a blur to him that he didn’t even remember how he got out of the car, he could not have known for sure whether she could have been saved by emergency responders. As far as he knew, she could have still been alive when he left the scene, but public relations concerns came before getting help.
The movie also shows, in numerous ways, that Kennedy’s version of events is not credible. He had said he was driving Kopechne back toward the ferry to drop her off at her hotel, but turned down the road with the bridge by mistake. In reality, Kopechne left her purse and keys behind in the cottage where they had been partying, the road to the ferry was a clearly paved road and the obvious path, while the road leading to the bridge was a gravel dirt road and getting on it required a deliberate sharp right turn.
Kennedy’s strategy sessions in the following days with luminaries such as former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and speechwriter Ted Sorensen portray an elaborate effort to cover up what happened, aided by the fact that the event coincided with the news tsunami of men landing on the moon — a realization of the legacy of Kennedy’s brother John. In a more comic moment, Kennedy pathetically attends Kopechne’s funeral wearing a neck brace, hoping it will generate sympathy.
The force of the Kennedy name, his sway with local law enforcement officials, and a compliant media, over time, allowed him to get away with something that would have landed most people behind bars and would have forced any other politician to resign in disgrace.
More moral men having emerged from the tragic incident at Chappaquiddick unscathed, might have at least reformed their ways thereafter. But Kennedy only learned that if he could get away with Chappaquiddick, he could get away with anything. He would remain a regular drunk, a serial adulterer, and an abuser of women. Infamously, Kennedy once threw down a waitress at a Capitol Hill restaurant, sandwiching her in between his large body and that of former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut.
We’re led to believe that his big punishment was that he never got to be president. But he allowed to hold sway in the Senate for decades, and in death he was praised as a hero. A reassessment of his real legacy is long overdue, and hopefully this new film will trigger that conversation.
