Joseph Campbell has a great review of the movie “Chappaquiddick”.
Funny how white liberals love defending Kennedy’s actions in Mary Jo Kopechne’s death.
The Times commentary chafed at the movie’s treatment of Kennedy, whom Massachusetts voters returned to the U.S. Senate seven times after the Chappaquiddick scandal.
“Contrary to the film’s implications,” says the commentary, written by Neil Gabler, “Mr. Kennedy immediately and forever after felt deep remorse and responsibility for the accident; it haunted him. By the end of his life, however, the then white-maned senator had managed to transcend celebrity and emotional paralysis and become what he had long aspired to be: an indispensable legislator whose achievements included the 18-year-old vote, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
“His was a large-life, tragic and multidimensional figure, and it could have made, and perhaps someday will make, for an expansive novel or film about sin and redemption,” adds Gabler, who is working on a biography of Ted Kennedy. Chappaquiddick, he writes, “is not that movie. Instead of excavating Kennedy for larger artistic aims, it eviscerates him for narrow voyeuristic ones.”
How hagiographic. How beside the point.
Instead of “speaking truth to power,” the democrats love backpedaling and covering up for Kennedy.
Despite it shortcomings and occasional indulgence in dramatic license, the movie presents the incontrovertible main elements of the Kennedy-Chappaquiddick scandal, namely that:
- Kennedy left the party with a young woman not his wife. Kennedy later said he was driving her to the ferry that would take her to Edgartown and her hotel. But Kopechne left behind at the party herpurse and motel room key.
- Kennedy did not immediately call for help from police or rescue workers after escaping the Oldsmobile in Poucha Pond.
- Kennedy did not report the accident for 10 hours — until Kopechne’s lifeless body had been found in the submerged sedan.
- Kennedy’s loyalists sought to pitch the episode asanother tragedyfor Kennedy’s family.
- Kennedy was charged only with leaving the scene of an accident, not the far more serious charges of manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter.
- Kennedy’s ambitions to become president were derailed by Kopechne’s death; he sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1980 but was soundly beaten by the incumbent, JimmyCarter.
As Leo DaMore wrote inSenatorial Privilege, an incisive and detailed study of Chappaquiddick, “In his pursuit of the presidential nomination, Kennedy had run against Chappaquiddick. And Chappaquiddick had won.”
Via Media Myth Alert