It seems like I’m preoccupied with death these days, Mine, Yours, Ours . . .
Maybe it’s time I shared my thoughts about a 2009 death I haven’t touched on for lack of a ten-foot pole. I had about as much affection for Ted Kennedy as the parents’ of Mary Jo Kopechne.
When Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy died last August, the Dallas Morning News online newspaper disabled the Reader Comments section on all articles about his death. Morning News columnists lamented the fact that Senator Kennedy chose not to visit Dallas after John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dealey Plaza, ironically named after an early publisher of the Dallas Morning News. Unlike the local newspaper, I think that deciding not to revisit the scene of the crime is one of the few decisions Dallasites shouldn’t hold against Edward Kennedy. How many of us would want to visit the site of a brother’s assassination?
Most of Kennedy’s other decisions in politics, and in life, have proven more problematic for those of us who have not shown an inclination toward becoming a habitually drunken sot.
There’s the cowardice Teddy showed on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 when he drove his car into a pond and swam to safety, leaving pretty young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car.
Maybe it goes back even earlier than that, to the time Teddy was kicked out of Harvard in 1951 for arranging with a classmate to take Teddy’s Spanish test.
Or maybe it was the older and wiser (wiser is a joke, in this case) Edward Kennedy forty years later, in 1991, who woke up son Patrick and nephew William Kennedy Smith at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach for a little late night carousing. That drunken escapade culminated in rape charges from a young woman they picked up in a bar and brought back to the family compound.
I doubt Edward Kennedy’s personal life left anything to be admired by anyone not named Kennedy, but for many Americans his political bent was just as troubling. He reveled in his “Liberal Lion” nickname.
Kennedy lost the 1976 Democratic nomination for president to Jimmy Carter, the worst president ever. Kennedy said one of the reasons he opposed Carter was Jimmy’s slow approach to healthcare reform. It’s interesting to note that many of the healthcare reforms championed by Ted Kennedy in his final years were actually first proposed by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Kennedy admits to leading the Democratic opposition to Nixon’s proposals in ’71 through his own shortsightedness. I guess there’s something inherently objectionable to agreeing with any ideas proposed by a political party that’s not your own.
While I wouldn’t wish a brain tumor on anyone, I shed not a tear for the late Edward Kennedy. Among his final accomplishments, Kennedy pushed for a change in Massachusetts state law to bypass the election process and allow the Democratic governor to quickly appoint Kennedy’s successor. An effort intended to ensure passage of Barack Obama’s overreaching healthcare reforms. The law was changed, the appointment was made, and the Democrats still couldn’t find common ground for healthcare reform prior to the 2010 election of a Republican to fill the Senate seat Kennedy had occupied for the last 47 years.
Kennedy’s posthumously published memoirs gave him the opportunity to confess to his use and abuse of women and alcohol, and to deny that he was romantically involved with Mary Jo Kopechne. He claimed that he lived with guilt and despair over her senseless death for the last forty years of his life. Judging by the way he lived his life for those last forty years, I’d have to say there’s a strong case to be made for the Liberal Lyin’ to the American public once again in his memoir . . .
Maybe it’s time I shared my thoughts about a 2009 death I haven’t touched on for lack of a ten-foot pole. I had about as much affection for Ted Kennedy as the parents’ of Mary Jo Kopechne.
When Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy died last August, the Dallas Morning News online newspaper disabled the Reader Comments section on all articles about his death. Morning News columnists lamented the fact that Senator Kennedy chose not to visit Dallas after John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dealey Plaza, ironically named after an early publisher of the Dallas Morning News. Unlike the local newspaper, I think that deciding not to revisit the scene of the crime is one of the few decisions Dallasites shouldn’t hold against Edward Kennedy. How many of us would want to visit the site of a brother’s assassination?
Most of Kennedy’s other decisions in politics, and in life, have proven more problematic for those of us who have not shown an inclination toward becoming a habitually drunken sot.
There’s the cowardice Teddy showed on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 when he drove his car into a pond and swam to safety, leaving pretty young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car.
Maybe it goes back even earlier than that, to the time Teddy was kicked out of Harvard in 1951 for arranging with a classmate to take Teddy’s Spanish test.
Or maybe it was the older and wiser (wiser is a joke, in this case) Edward Kennedy forty years later, in 1991, who woke up son Patrick and nephew William Kennedy Smith at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach for a little late night carousing. That drunken escapade culminated in rape charges from a young woman they picked up in a bar and brought back to the family compound.
I doubt Edward Kennedy’s personal life left anything to be admired by anyone not named Kennedy, but for many Americans his political bent was just as troubling. He reveled in his “Liberal Lion” nickname.
Kennedy lost the 1976 Democratic nomination for president to Jimmy Carter, the worst president ever. Kennedy said one of the reasons he opposed Carter was Jimmy’s slow approach to healthcare reform. It’s interesting to note that many of the healthcare reforms championed by Ted Kennedy in his final years were actually first proposed by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Kennedy admits to leading the Democratic opposition to Nixon’s proposals in ’71 through his own shortsightedness. I guess there’s something inherently objectionable to agreeing with any ideas proposed by a political party that’s not your own.
While I wouldn’t wish a brain tumor on anyone, I shed not a tear for the late Edward Kennedy. Among his final accomplishments, Kennedy pushed for a change in Massachusetts state law to bypass the election process and allow the Democratic governor to quickly appoint Kennedy’s successor. An effort intended to ensure passage of Barack Obama’s overreaching healthcare reforms. The law was changed, the appointment was made, and the Democrats still couldn’t find common ground for healthcare reform prior to the 2010 election of a Republican to fill the Senate seat Kennedy had occupied for the last 47 years.
Kennedy’s posthumously published memoirs gave him the opportunity to confess to his use and abuse of women and alcohol, and to deny that he was romantically involved with Mary Jo Kopechne. He claimed that he lived with guilt and despair over her senseless death for the last forty years of his life. Judging by the way he lived his life for those last forty years, I’d have to say there’s a strong case to be made for the Liberal Lyin’ to the American public once again in his memoir . . .
