I’ve written before about the JFK assassination in reference to an excellent book about the conspiracy theories surrounding it, and I’ve been obsessed with that event for years. (For awhile I even bought into one of the more outrageous CT’s—that JFK’s body was spirited off the plane out the back door, taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and then had its head wounds “modified” before the autopsy took place. The shenanigans that would have had to take place in order for this to happen are unlikely, to say the least. But boy, was I riveted! That book is Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by David Lifton, and no, I don’t recommend it, unless you have a taste for fantasy. You’ll note that I’m not giving my usual Amazon link to it.)
Anyway, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 hasn’t ever gripped me, and I don’t know that the 1969 Chappaquiddick drowning ever did, either, although I do vaguely remember reports about it in the news. I would have been a rising senior in high school that summer and not paying a whole lot of attention to national events. But now, with the release of the new film about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne after Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and left her to drown, my interest has been kindled. We went to see the movie this past weekend, but I had already done some of my signature bopping around on the Web to see what I could see. What I found was quite interesting. So much so, in fact, that I ended up paying over $15 for a Kindle book on the subject since that item wasn’t available at any of my usual library sources. The book is Chappaquiddick Tragedy: Kennedy’s Second Passenger Revealed by Donald Nelson. My only criticism of the book is that the author is so detailed and meticulous when he gets into the testimony at the inquest that I found myself doing quite a bit of skimming in the last third or so. He ends up telling the story several times: once in the way that he thinks the evidence points, once in the way it was presented in the various news reports and in Kennedy’s TV speech a week after the accident, and once in the way it was presented at the inquest. He probably didn’t have much choice in how he structured his narrative, though, since trying to incorporate all of the versions into one would have been massively confusing. I’m including video of a speech he gave at a historical society and also a link to an article in which he explains his theory. I’m not going to explain it here as I can’t do it justice in the short space of a blog post. If you’re interested, follow the links and then perhaps purchase his book. He really knows what he’s talking about, it seems to me. He’s also a thoroughly charming elderly gentleman who seems to have no agenda beyond telling the truth as he sees it and who started out researching the tragedy just for his own amusement.
So I’ve now spent over half of my allowed limit of 1,000 words for a post going on about this event in American history. (It’s fair to say that this event also changed American history; if it hadn’t happened, we almost certainly would have ended up with a President Ted Kennedy at some point.) The question is, how does this all fit in with my website’s emphasis on intentionality? And of course the answer is clear: character is destiny, and character is the fruit of the choices we’ve made throughout life. Had Ted Kennedy been a different sort of person, had he developed a characteristic of responsibility, he would never have left the scene of the accident as he did; indeed, he wouldn’t have found himself in that situation to begin with. (Nelson’s theory says that he didn’t actually know that he was leaving a woman in the car to die, but even so Kennedy was still driving erratically enough to go off the bridge and was still going off for some “private time” with a woman not his wife, so he’s by no means off the hook. Plus, of course, whether or not Nelson’s theory is true, it’s indisputable that Kennedy willfully and deliberately participated in, indeed instigated, a coverup of the real story, whatever that real story is. There’s no way that the version of events he gave was true.)
Moments of crisis reveal what a person really is. You can go along for much of your life without being severely tested and so without knowing what you’d do when and if it happened. But I think it’s true that the moment of truth comes for everyone. I’m not sure what mine would be, unless it was my son’s cancer and our attempts to deal with it. There was no split-second decision that had to be made in that case, but in reality these character-revealing events aren’t always immediate. Often there’s time for reflection and for further decision-making. You might be the kind of person who panics in an emergency but then you do your best to put things right. No one can blame you in that case. (I say that as someone whose personality is rather, shall we say, “reactive.”) But if you fail to deal with the situation honestly the cloud will hang over you for the rest of your life. The taint of Chappaquiddick certainly clung to Kennedy for the next four decades until his death in 2009. He could never escape it.
And what of the movie? I’d go see it, but I did feel that there were certain parts of the story that weren’t very well explained. It’s just not clear what they’re trying to say about the relationship between Kennedy and Kopechne or why the two of them leave the party together. There’s also an odd moment when the camera zooms in briefly on a purse that’s sitting on a table in the living room of the cottage where the infamous post-yacht-race party takes place. A purse plays an important part in Nelson’s alternate theory of the case, but the film doesn’t follow that line. So I’m very puzzled about the purse zoom-in. The film also doesn’t clearly establish just how much Teddy had been drinking from the time the yacht race ended that afternoon. (He and his crew came in ninth, so there was nothing to celebrate there.) One big part of the supposed reason why Kennedy waited for almost 10 hours before reporting the accident is that he didn’t want to be tested for his blood alcohol level until there had been enough time for the booze to percolate out of his system. All that being said, the movie is well acted and the machinations that go on behind the scenes to keep Teddy out of hot water are admirably spelled out. There’s no attempt made to whitewash anyone.
I’m over my limit, so here are the links I promised:
First, an article from the local newspaper about Nelson’s book: “New Chappaquiddick Book Presses Theory of Third Person”
And then the video, which is poorly-shot and low-res. At first you’ll think that Mr. Nelson is too quiet and laid back, but once you get used to his speaking style he’s quite compelling: