A Memorial Day Irony

Memorial Day was originally an occasion to celebrate the sacrifice of fallen soldiers, but quickly evolved into an occasion for the remembrance of all those who have passed on. Families visit cemeteries and decorate the graves of their deceased family and relatives, while politicians give the expected speeches lauding the sacrifice of soldiers felled in foreign wars.

To most people, in reality, it is just another holiday, a chance to take off work with pay and visit family, perhaps have a backyard barbeque or picnic, maybe attend a parade-just for something to do.

Most of the dead are just that-dead, and for the most part, forgotten.

I find it ironic in the extreme that, over the course of this holiday, Senator Edward M. Kennedy is being hailed as some kind of great and noble national figure and leader, while the girl whose death he caused now some forty years ago has long been forgotten. Oh, sure, people bring her up and discuss the tragedy of Chappaquiddick, and they usually do so as a means of haranguing Kennedy, which actually was and remains the appropriate thing to do.

This, however, is not doing full justice to the memory of Mary Jo Kopechne. Nothing can approach justice for this tragically fallen woman as long as the true nature of her passing remains shrouded in darkness. Unfortunately, Kennedy will never tell the whole story. If he did, he could be prosecuted, but not for murder-nor, more than likely, even for manslaughter, for that matter.

What I believe happened to Mary Jo Kopechne seems clear to me, even obvious. Unfortunately, political partisanship on both sides has kept the truth, ironically, submerged.

The obvious fact as I believe it to be-when Mary Jo Kopechne went off that bridge into the murky waters of the tidal pond below, she was in that car alone. Senator Edward Kennedy was nowhere in the car, and in fact may have been too far away to hear the car fatefully crash onto the water’s surface.

This next point is an important one to consider-

KENNEDY MIGHT NOT HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THE ACCIDENT UNTIL HOURS AFTER IT HAPPENED-UNTIL, IN FACT, SOMEONE ELSE DISCOVERED THE ACCIDENT!

It would certainly explain the awkward and unlikely response and the unbelievable explanation, which to this day seems like something that somebody made up in a perfunctory manner, with not a lot of thought put into it. Although I could never hope to prove it, what I believe happened was the following-

Kennedy was out with Kopechne, was drunk, and as most would suspect, made a move on the girl. He might possibly have attempted to rape her. He might have actually succeeded in doing so. What I am sure of is, he tried, and became in his drunken state obnoxious and forceful, perhaps even verbally and physically abusive and, I have no doubt, potentially if not actually violent.

At some point, with the car parked, but possibly still running, Kopechne jumped out of the automobile, whereupon Kennedy pursued her. He caught up to her, and they argued, whereupon Kopechne, pushing Kennedy away from her, caused him to fall and hit his head. This explains the one and only visible injury Kennedy received-a slightly swollen bump and cut on the head. While he was yet down on the ground, drunk and disoriented, possibly even at this point semi-unconscious, she jumped into his vehicle and drove away.

The rest is history, albeit shadowy.

This was 1969, of course, and Kennedy knew he could not tell this story and retain any hope of salvaging his political career, to say nothing of his marriage, while simultaneously limiting his criminal liability. Therefore, he tried to establish as good an alibi as he could come up with in the short amount of time that he had. On the face of it, it looks ridiculous, but the people of Massachusetts swallowed it. They wanted to believe it, even if most in truth could not. Kopechne’s own parents, it would seem, falls into this category. They remained a supporter of Kennedy, at least publicly. They never pushed the affair beyond the initial investigatory phase, while the people of Massachusetts were never interested enough to warrant it being an issue in any of Kennedy’s re-election campaigns.

Nowadays, Kennedy talks about sailing and boating, or other such water related references, with no apparent sense of irony. That is because, in his own mind, he did nothing wrong. At least, he did not do what a large portion of the American public honestly believes that he did. Why should he feel guilty about an unwarranted charge of manslaughter? Why should he care about the drowning death of a young girl of which he obviously was not directly to blame? His conscience is clear. He only wanted a piece of that ass, and if she had not overreacted, she would be alive today. I honestly believe this is how he rationalizes it. I have no doubt that, to his way of thinking, she was “sending mixed signals” and “leading him on”, so to speak.

(Correction-I made a common mistake here, though I actually know better. Kopechne did not drown. She died of suffocation when the oxygen in the air pocket, in which she placed herself within the submerged vehicle, finally dissipated. She may have actually lived for several hours).

Of course, Kennedy is now among the most vociferous supporters of the liberal feminist movement, and the entirety of their agenda. It is easy to conclude he does so in so vociferously a manner out of some sense of guilt. For their part, I have the strange idea that at least most of the more radical feminists would secretly like to see Kennedy chemically castrated. Be that as it may, Kennedy goes on about his business, this so-called “Lion of The Senate”. In true Catholic fashion, he purchases his own brand of absolution by way pursuing his legislative agenda. He reaches across the aisle when necessary in order to forge the friendships and alliances he needs, all the time devoting his career to the task at hand, as he makes vain attempts to soothe his damaged psyche, applying his influence and the power of his office as though they were healing balms to his ruptured conscience.

All the while, he stands up for the minorities, the dispossessed, the “little guy”, and all of those who just can’t seem to help themselves, while sticking it to everybody else-especially to people much like himself, it would seem-in a not so nearly magnanimous fashion.

When he harangues a potential court appointee, for example, particularly one whom he feels might pose a threat to his notions of progress made in the arena of women’s rights, the more discerning among us wonder in awe at his capacity for projection-this mouse that roars.

When Robert Byrd stood up on the floor of the Senate and spoke of the illness of his “dear friend Ted”, crying as he did so, it was a form of low comedy, yet another case of projection of the fears of mortality onto one who seems ironically to have neither fear nor shame. Media luminaries laud him. Both Barak Obama and John McCain have expressed their concerns, and their well wishes for his speedy recovery. Even Hillary Clinton, whose own campaign suffered a fatal symbolic dive off a bridge following Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama, in surrealist fashion refers to Kennedy as a friend.

We are all supposed to play along and buy into this media promotion of Edward M. Kennedy as the idealistic ”liberal lion of the Senate”, and take it at face value when pundits promote him as a man of character and integrity, a man who has been a devoted, tireless public servant. They ignore-or more accurately, they neglect to point out-just in what direction his devotion lies, but one might ponder his second and current wife as a symbol of his life and beliefs. She is a pro-gun control attorney, devoted to ensuring a “common sense solution” to the problem of kids and guns-which probably means making sure, by any means necessary, that none of the rest of us have access to them "for the good of the kids", lest they get their hands on them.

That, then, is the legacy of Edward Kennedy, both literally and figuratively married to the concept of the application of strict limits to the freedom of Americans, based on a faulty premise-that we need protection from ourselves. What we really need is protection from the likes of Edward Moore Kennedy, but for now, we will listen politely while media pundits and self-serving politicos sing his praises and wish him a safe and speedy recovery. Many Americans, of course, will join in those expressions, just as many have brought into the Kennedy myth, and the Kennedy lies, for the past forty years.

The rest of us prefer to ponder the lost life of a young, idealistic, hopeful, yet unfortunately naive young girl who wanted to make a better world-a magical, mythical world, much like Camelot-and ended up sucked too deep into the same old lie.