I wrote a post last night about Ted Kennedy before anyone knew he had died, saying that he seems nice enough and everything but he’s a useless hack of a politician who should have resigned awhile ago. Now, while I have the deepest sympathy for his family and am not glad he’s dead or anything – I can’t help but not be indifferent towards his passing on account of his prementioned uselessness to the public he was supposedly serving and that other thing. The “other thing” being how he killed a girl and got away with it.
Since the news media has been respectful of the murder and not dwelled on it since it happened or since news of Kennedys death was released this morning, people have been taking to teh Googlez to find out more and indeed the second and 4th most searched term on the search engine is the Chappaquiddick “incident” and the 5th highest is the girl who died there.
At first I was going to just show the top 5, but then I saw 2 more in the 26-33 column to the right, so I included that also just for context.
It was a long time ago… though there isn’t really a statute of limitations on murder (or to be fair: “involuntary endangerment of life that only turned into manslaughter when the suspect leaves the victim to die a horrible death and doesn’t tell the police until the next day”).
In 1969, on the little island of Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, Ted Kennedy was leaving a party, driving drunk with a 28-year-old girl he was banging and probably impregnated (oops) named Mary Jo Kopechn. He drove right off a frigging bridge and into the water but was able to escape the overturned vehicle and swim to safety… and then said oh well and went home probably to do a line of coke and masturbate. Wait, what happened to Mary Jo? Ya, she friggin drowned in the car and Kennedy not only left the scene of the accident, but didn’t say nuthin to nobody until Kopechne’s body was discovered the following day. Fortunately, there’s a happy ending for everyone who didn’t die that night: Kennedy apologized and denied being drunk or banging Mary Jo, was never indicted, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court accepted the request by Kennedys lawyers for the inquest on the matter to be conducted in secret.
Even though they found that a lot of Kennedys claims were not true and that he was at fault, nothing happened and Kennedy easily sailed to re-election as senator the following year, and every year since then.
Radio host Mark Levin told the story last month:
In 2004, I posted this video from the short lived Spike TV cartoon This Just In that references the crash at the end:
Don’t drive with Ted Kennedy!!!!
UPDATE: Former editor of Newsweek and New York Times Magazine, one of Kennedy’s close friends, Ed Klein, tells something called the Diane Rehm Show that Chappaquiddick jokes were high up on the list. full audio of the show here. The line comes at 30:10, or you can just listen to this little wow-moment isolated in the clip below:
I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?” That is just the most amazing thing. It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.