Sixty years ago this week, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down, but the family’s political odyssey did not end there. JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, who had served as attorney general, made a run for the White House but on June 5, 1968, but Jordanian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan shot RFK dead. That raised expectations for Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy.
In July of 1969, the “boiler room girls,” who had worked for Bobby Kennedy, gathered at Chappaquiddick Island for a drunken bash with Ted and his handlers. Ted took Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, for a ride in his cavernous 1967 Oldsmobile, but not to talk campaign strategy. The Massachusetts Democrat drove off a bridge, escaped the sunken vehicle, and abandoned Kopechne, who died by drowning.
The “incident” got the Hollywood treatment in the 2017 Chappaquiddick, with Bruce Dern as patriarch Joe Kennedy, Jason Clarke as Ted, and Kate Mara as Mary Jo. The film does a decent job with Ted’s evasive actions, but curious viewers should cross-check everything with Leo Damore’s Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up. As that masterful work shows, virtually everything Ted Kennedy said about the incident was a lie.
In the film Joe Kennedy tells his son “you will never be great,” but Ted Kennedy went on to be “the Lion of the Senate,” with the fourth-longest record at the time of his death in 2009. The intended takeaway is that Ted overcame the tragedy and did indeed become great. Liberal Democrats of the time certainly didn’t think so.
In an October 18, 1987 New Republic piece headlined “Hamalot: The Democratic Buffoon-in-chief.” Henry Fairlie found “little evidence that any wheels are turning inside his skull,” and “every image that the Democrats have to overcome – that they overtax the Middle Americans, try to meet social problems only with a proliferation of programs, are the junior partners of vociferous but marginal interest groups, look too carelessly at the credentials of the Third World movements and leaders, and neglect the security of the nation and of the free world – is kept alive by this buffoon.”
Ted was also a pioneer in seeking the influence of hostile foreign powers in the American electoral process. In 1984, Kennedy sought help from the Soviet Union, then headed by the KGB’s Yuri Andropov, an old-line Stalinist. In return for offering Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan, the Soviet boss would help the Democratic Party challenge Reagan in the 1984 election. The gambit failed, and Reagan won in a landslide over Democrats Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and Communist Party USA candidates Gus Hall and Angela Davis. No film has dared to tackle Teddy’s collusion with Russian Communists.
By 2021, Ted’s brother Bobby had been resting in the family plot for 53 years. That same year, Bobby Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan was recommended for parole. Gov. Gavin Newsom denied it in January 2022 and California’s parole board rejected Sirhan’s parole bid last March. That month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was running for president, and in October Kennedy declared himself “an independent candidate” for the White House. As former occupant Donald Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
Kennedy’s quarrel with the Democrats might have something to do with The Real Anthony Fauci, released in 2021. Kennedy did his homework but Dr. Fauci is actually worse than the author contends. That is perhaps a theme for a future essay. In the meantime, happy reading and Happy Thanksgiving.
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