Joyce Carol Oates On Ted Kennedy
Joyce Carol Oates, whose 1992 novel Black Water was based on the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, looks at the legacy of Ted Kennedy. She asks, "if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?" It's not an easy question.
Great senator. Sucky human being.Maybe he did redeem himself. But who knows what Mary Jo might have become?
And it's not just Ted. It's every single person who let him get away with it, down to the DA's in Massachusets to his own family (his sisters? What were THEY thinking)?
It's a very easy question, JoyceBalk, with a very simple answer: WTF? (followed by loud gunshots to run youyou out of town).
You wonder if the thrill of slipping off with a married powerful person is the off chance that you just might become 'inconvenient' and one of those ritual sacrifices. The Fay Wray effect. Because it's not very exciting if someone doesn't eventually get sacrificed. So, Teddy also gave us that.
I haven't read a ton of tributes, but none that I have read have mentioned Mary Jo. Cokie Roberts talked about how his wife had a transformative/civilizing effect on him on NPR this morning, but didn't mention anything specific. Why the avoidance? I thought part of the deal of being a Kennedy was being a womanizer.
This is the WORST THING I HAVE EVER READ.
So it's not just me? I read it this morning at 7:30, twice and it didn't make sense. What's her conclusion?
I knew you didn't read my comments!
There are no second acts in American lives'– this dour pronouncement of F Scott Fitzgerald has been many times refuted, and at no time more appropriately than in reference to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whose death was announced yesterday
And this is the first sentence! Pedantry alert!
There are no second acts in American lives': cliche
– this dour pronouncement: unsonorous; also, dour means something else. FSF was not dour. Also: pronouncement. shudder.
of F Scott Fitzgerald: either "of F. Scott Fitzgerald's" (it's his pronouncement) or "by FSF"
has been many times refuted,: passive for no reason, and bad, and only proves that the opposite of the cliche is still cliche.
and at no time more appropriately: why all the negative? What is an "appropriate refutation"? (you'd already forgotten that you were refuting something, hadn't you?) How about definitively? Also, suck it all you slightly-less-appropriate-refutators out there!
than in reference to: humans say "than in Ted Kennedy's case"; we usually use "in reference to" for things that are not animate, and, yes, Kennedy is no longer animate, but it's his soul, not his corpse that we're judging here. Vulcans might say "in reference to Dr. McCoy…"
the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whose death was announced yesterday probably the editors redundancy. How many times do we need to know he's dead? I stopped reading here, but I bet it goes on like this…
editor's…grrr.
And, strangely enough, it comes with a book that someone might want to buy.
Sentiment aside: Joyce? Give your keyboard to a designated typer.
Too bad he did not die of cirrhosis so we could get the double redundancy of the late senator’s death of cirrhosis of the liver.
This piece has my mind reeling. How is it possible that I did not already know many of the facts Oates lays out here? Or ever wonder how much the Kopechnes must have been paid to keep silent as they did–to say nothing of about a billion other questions that somehow failed to surface?
They surfaced, they just never got answered. That was still a time when the press laid off the Kennedys. Teddy was just lucky in that his 2 brothers had been assassinated. So it was hard for the general public to believe that a Kennedy could be such a sleaze.
As late as 85 the family was still controlling the press
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20091986,00.html
In 1969 just one year after Bobby died the family was still pretty much deified in the public mind.
And though I was a kid back in the day, around the Irish Catholic mommies in my nabe, the horror was saved for Mary Jo (what was that tramp doing in the car anyway?)
Sarah, I bet they still have pictures of Jack, Bobby and the pope hanging on their walls.
Look, people are flawed. And Ted was a massive, almost unbelievable, example of that. But, after his worst possible moment as a human being, he could easily have lost the rest of his privileged life to being drunk as a skunk and fucking anything that moved. Instead, he gratiously relegated these activities to the status of highly euthusiastic hobbies, while working tirelessly to better the lives of those born less fortunate than him. I certainly don't think this knowledge was worth anyone's life, but if he hadn't found out how much harm he could do in the world, who knows who he would have ended up being. Probably just another aging playboy/senate hack striving for the presidency.
It's a pretty easy question for me. He was cheating on his wife (I don't care) and had a car accident, probably while drunk (I disapprove but there but for the grace of God go I). The woman he was with couldn't get out of the car and he couldn't save her.
I don't think there was any evidence of intent sufficient to make it homicide. I don't know for sure if the laws at the time would have made drunk driving into something like vehicular manslaughter or criminally negligent endangerment, but anything like that would have been an impossible case to prove. No evidence.
So, it's presumptuous and unseemly for Oates to disregard Teddy's oft-stated story, that he tried to save her but couldn't get the car door open (a task requiring Herculean strength given the water pressure). No one knows what happened except for him.
By way of comparison, didn't Laura Bush have a car accident that resulted in the death of the other driver? Are we going to remember that guy's name and claim upon hearing the news of Laura's death that her legacy is tainted?
Laura Bush's legacy is tainted by her choice of a husband.
taint of a man.
It's more than presumptuous. I don't care if she chooses to disbelieve EMK. Her bald assertion of an hours-long death due to suffocation is based, as far as I can tell, based on speculation from a diver with the Edgartown Volunteer Fire Department. I'm not sure that's dispositive. Jack Anderson in the St. Petersburg Times, about a month after the incident.
When I was in art school I tried to convince a female friend of mine to do a video inside a car slowly filling with water. She would then put on make up, smoke a cigarette, read the newspaper, file her nails, etc., every once in a while looking at her watch and muttering "what's taking so long?" Once the car was full of water her last words were to be "Damn Ted!" My friend declined, and neither of us became art stars.
I'll wait till April to share my Kurt Cobain video idea, also unrealized.
Is that the one where Kurt is sleeping and Courtney is singing in a mirror while alternately loading a rifle and using it as a mike?
If only I had gone to school with you my whole life would have turned out soooo different.
Ms Oates writes of the "cooperative silence" of Mary Jo Kopechne's family, noting they "agreed never to speak of the tragedy" of their only child's death at Chappaquidick." While I believe that Mr Kennedy redeemed himself in his later life, to extraordinary effect on the American public, Ms Oates is incorrect in her assertions.
In 1975 as well as on 18 July 1979, to The New York Times, both parents expressed doubt about the accident's findings. The latter article was lengthy, with the couple stating their opinions about Kennedy (that he had "grown up in the last few years") and discussing various aspects of the case and its effects on their lives.
And on 18 July 1989, Mr Kopechne told The New York Times, re Kennedy, "He was worried about himself, not about Mary Jo." And his wife added, "Somebody's hiding something."
Ms Oates was incorrect.
In writing about Kennedy Oates sees Gatsby, and others have Camelot–but was there ever a "Hamelot" riff? There seem (I'm no expert) to be so many similarities, namely a young man of promise's rash act; his moral corruption; political calculation; narcissism; internal conflict, repressed desire; descent into depression and madness (here alcoholism); his inamorata's death by drowning in a river; and so forth. Some Catholicism, too!
Many of the same questions arise: How much can one know about a crime, when there are no witnesses? What we can know of a person's state of mind through observation of his words and actions, etc., etc.? And when Oates writes, "it might be argued that Senator Kennedy's career as one of the most influential of 20th-century Democratic politicians… was a consequence of his notorious behaviour at Chappaquiddick bridge in July 1969," later "that innocent individuals figure almost as ritual sacrifices," it calls to mind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the minor characters whose death, if memory serves, served as a plot device for Shakespeare, in the guise of a lifeline for Hamlet–who was honored upon his own.
Are we still talking about this?
If Ted Kennedy did nothing in his whole career but keep Robert Bork off the Supreme Court, then that would have been a life well-lived, Chappaquiddick included.
It's difficult to imagine Lawrence v. Texas or any number of civil rights cases coming out the way they did with Bork as the "swing vote" rather than Anthony Kennedy.