The Chappaquiddick Spectator/All Washed Up
Terzian, Philip
THE CHAPPAQUIDDICK SPECTATOR ALL WASHED UP Bosola: . . . Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out: The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the...
...Let us, therefore, leave a wreath of flowers at her grave, and a garland of confetti, and give up some thanks...
...Here that Dorian Gray face seems to loom like a dirigible, and the knowledge of our narrow escape is easily forgotten...
...For even though Senator Kennedy—now fifty-seven years old, alternately beet-red and ashen-faced, bloated, weaving through the motions and bursting at the seams—has settled into a kind of left-wing Colonel Blimp persona, he has had to content himself with lilliputian triumphs...
...Instead, they were chased off the field and run down to earth by old Richard Nixon and little Jimmy Carter—and poor Mary Jo...
...After all, if Senator Kennedy had not stuffed the living Mary Jo Kopechne into his Oldsmobile sedan, with visions of sugarplums dancing in his Philip Terzian is editor of the editorial pages of the Providence Journal...
...Richard Gephardt and Sam Nunn, Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon...
...a McGovern Democrat would be a dentured liberal from a Plains state, at best...
...But even his admirers were mortified by his density: he stumbled through his scripted questions, gazed ceilingward during the answers, stared blankly across the table, and changed the subject as instructed...
...At Chappaquiddick, of all places, it is more evident than ever that Camelot had nothing to do with Sir Thomas Malory, or even King Arthur, but was and remains a musical comedy...
...This is not how it was intended to finish...
...Or watching the parade of aspirants gone by: Albert Gore must still have had acne when the senator and Mary Jo left the barbecue that evening...
...Edward Kennedy would not have been stripped of his whip's lash by an old Ku Klux Klansman...
...erhaps here in New England, 1- where the Kennedys seem to metastasize, there is more reason for comfort in remembering Chappaquiddick...
...or speaking at a seminar on the theme of "family values...
...or pinching a waitress at your favorite Thai restaurant...
...He could be in a committee room, reading declarations drafted by some eager 24-year-old...
...But wherever he is, and whatever he is doing, he is seldom at the White House...
...Who would have believed it that the Senior Senator from the Bay State, petted and nurtured by such lovesick chroniclers as Henry Steele Commager and Archibald MacLeish and James MacGregor Burns, should be wasting the springtime of his senility by tacking on by Philip Terzian riders, and speaking at rallies, and hiring more interns, and flying to Pittsfield, and hiring more interns, and speaking at rallies, and tacking on riders...
...the little hamlet of Edgartown still yawns in the noonday sun...
...or staggering down the corridors of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government...
...or running his skiff up on a sandbar near your house...
...The answer, of course, is that the wonderful edifice is actually a screen...
...He might be tempting the gods by inveighing against drugs...
...And he is not now, has never been, nor will ever be, President of the United States...
...Some of the names—Esther Newberg, Joseph Gargan, Susan Tannenbaum—bubble to the surface now and then...
...and even Jimmy Carter would eventually have disappeared from the pages of Time...
...All the great faces and names of the past—Roswell Gilpatric and Arthur Schlesinger and Jeff Greenfield and Edwin Guthman and Adam Yarmolinsky and John Kenneth Galbraith—were supposed to put Humpty together again...
...Now, his televised interrogations of Judge Robert Bork or Judge Anthony Kennedy must have pleased the nephews and cousins tuning in...
...Thanks because you never know when you might encounter Edward Kennedy...
...The incident is not a memory but a basic fact of life: nobody knows details, but everyone knows it happened...
...The bridge still crosses the pond...
...if he had not slept off his debauch, and griped about some noise, at a nearby motel—and then slowly but casually telephoned police with the interesting news . . . well, where would we be...
...For at St...
...if he had not abandoned the drowning Miss Kopechne to her agonizing death...
...if, perhaps, Marshall could have bought off the sheriff with an autographed picture...
...his youngest son once shrieked to me...
...If, for example, Sorensen could have drafted some slightly more eloquent falsehoods to be broadcast on the networks...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 49...
...Americans were supposed to demand new priorities, a better tomorrow, a compassionate future, and the National Health Service...
...But I trust that on the eighteenth of this very month, when the moon is down low and the tree frogs are chirping, when Mary McGrory has drifted off to sleep and dancers in Los Angeles are taking the floor, a modest delegation of reverent Americans will do the right thing...
...head...
...It has been the good fortune of the Kennedys to have been attended and embellished by more creative talent in greater abundance than even old Joe might have dreamed was possible...
...But the best of fortune has a way of turning sour, and once the show is over, the audience drifts home...
...or if Goodwin had dined with some journalist friends, inventing the new art of damage control .. . Things might have been different...
...T his has been strikingly evident, 1 even pitifully obvious, in the past few years...
...Vincent's Cemetery in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, lie the tortured remains of a tragic young woman who gave up her life that this country might endure...
...But it was not to be and it never was, either...
...Ferdinand: Cover her face...
...The Duchess of Malfi rri hat was John Webster, four cent turies ago...
...if he and his automobile had not taken a swan dive off the Dike Road bridge...
...The island itself is little changed from twenty years ago, when the boiler-room girls and a handful of fellows got together for some fun...
...or visiting the shrine of the Guadalupe Virgin...
...who are these people, anyway...
...Imagine that instead of holding the young prince steady through a flaccid series of small-town inquests and reverential probes, these estimable guardians had sought another path...
...And for that we can thank a single sad woman, and that woman only, who since one night in 1969 has dwelt beyond our thanks...
...murder shrieks out: The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens...
...mine eyes dazzle: she died young...
...The family has resolutely circled around Teddy: "Why bring this up now...
...for in any equation of politics future, in any calculations that the Democrats could make, no tactic, no stratagem, no scientific polling could rub out thespectre of Mary Jo's corpse...
...Who would have thought that the Next Kennedy, the surviving brother, should have been reduced in our lifetime to lapping up sound bites from the likes of Norman Ornstein...
...Or cover her face...
...That woman, of course, was Mary Jo Kopechne—and twenty years have passed since she was killed in Poucha Pond...
...Suppose, for example, that the swift gathering of slavering courtiers and talented liars—Burke Marshall, Theodore Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, Robert McNamara—had really pulled it off...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
