Before The Donald, There Was Teddy

3178

As the Democrats’ hysteria over Trump reaches its rabid zenith, it’s worth recalling their sainted liberal lion of the Senate who was literally caught with a dead girl in his car

By Mark Cromer

“I don’t want to be known, I don’t think I should be known, as the man who brought Teddy Kennedy down.”

— Roger Mudd, CBS News Correspondent

A stoic, statesman-like journalist expressing doubt and perhaps even remorse for what he felt might have been his unlikely but seminal role in tanking a presidential candidacy rather than mounting it’s severed head on the wall of his den like a trophy kill.

Well, those were the days.

As the media maelstrom against Donald Trump burns ever hotter in its unbreakable feverish pitch, I can’t help but think of Ted Kennedy.

Or more formally: Edward Moore Kennedy. Scion of the old American aristocracy and the roaring liberal lion of the Senate whose political career and personal freedom should have ended on Martha’s Vineyard in July 1969 after he left 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne to slowly suffocate in the submerged car he’d driven off a small bridge while leaving Chappaquiddick Island.

By Kennedy’s own account, as Kopechne ran out of oxygen in the sunken car, he made it back to his hotel room and got some shuteye before waking the next day, grabbed some breakfast and then called some friends for advice. By that time, fishermen had discovered the car and called the police and a diver recovered Kopechne’s body. When Kennedy learned the police had found the car and her corpse, he went to the police station on the island and gave a statement. John Farrar, the diver who recovered Kopechne’s body, testified she was in the back of the Oldsmobile where an air pocket had formed in the car. According to Farrar, Kopechne had her face turned upward in the pocket, where he said she had clearly been breathing until she ran out of air. He estimated she could have survived several hours before finally asphyxiating.

mary-jo-kopechne
Mary Jo Kopechne, 28-years-old, an emergency diver found her in an air pocket in Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile and testified she likely survived for several hours before suffocating. Ted had gone back to his hotel room for a few winks.

The official inquiry into ‘the incident’ was conducted in January 1970. The proceedings were closed to the public. Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. He was sentenced to probation. He attended Kopechne’s funeral with his first wife Joan. Despite having appeared uninjured from the fatal crash, Ted wore a neck brace at Kopechne’s rites.

And so it went for Ted Kennedy.

He beat the rap and held on to his Massachusetts Senate seat for 40 more years, until the day he died in August 2009. In 1980, Kennedy made a frenetic run for the Democratic nomination against President Jimmy Carter, winning 12 states (including the big enchiladas of California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts) and garnered more than 7.3 million votes against Carter’s 36 states and 10 million ballots.

Now, with the maelstrom of media mania exploding across the news channels over Donald Trump’s dirty talk about—gasp!—pussy et al in some small beer juvenile-jawboning that prompted the very Republican hierarchy that had sought to kill his campaign in the cradle and then sabotage it on the stump to hang in their heads on cue in faux shame as they burped forth bowel-scented statements of shock and outrage, I just keep thinking about Ted Kennedy and the girl he left to die slowly in his car.

No, Ted Kennedy is not running for president, though given the Democrats aggressive voter registration drives across cemeteries this campaign season he may well be casting a ballot for one this fall, but when he did run in 1980 he was not only considered a valid candidate by the Democrats and much of the media—but a valiant one.

The ghost of Mary Jo Kopechne and the cold tide of Chappaquiddick drifted about the background of that turbulent spring in 1980, but with the American hostages being held in Tehran and Soviet armored divisions parked in Afghanistan, the dead girl in Teddy’s car was never much of a marquee issue during the campaign. In fact, Chappaquiddick didn’t doom Kennedy as much as Roger Mudd did when he asked Ted simply: “Why do you want to be President?”

And Kennedy just blanked, on camera. He couldn’t effectively, even coherently, answer that fundamental question of why he was seeking the highest office in the land, other than perhaps he was a Kennedy and that’s what was supposed to happen to a Kennedy.

President Carter, that good Baptist from Georgia, when warned in 1979 of Kennedy’s looming challenge for the nomination cooly replied “I’ll whip his ass” and that indeed proved to be one of Carter’s enduring achievements. But far more than Bill Clinton’s serial political resurrections and rehabilitations following the multiple NookieGates that trailed him from the Ozarks to the Oval Office, the sheer political survival and ultimate viability of Ted Kennedy as a public official remains a stunning pinnacle in American political hypocrisy.

After his loss to Carter, Kennedy returned to the Senate while Carter sailed over the horizon to be consumed by the hurricane that was the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and once it became clear to Teddy that he would never be president he promptly unloaded his wife of 23-years since divorce would no longer be a political impediment. Kennedy then petitioned the Vatican to have the marriage annulled, claiming per Catholic doctrine that the vows were not consensually given. His petition granted, Kennedy then married a woman 22-years his junior. It’s unclear whether Joan received a gold watch in honor of her two-plus decades of service, perhaps inscribed on the back: ‘All the best, Ted.’

Less than a decade later, in 1987, Kennedy would take center stage in Washington during the Senate confirmation hearings for Robert Bork, and once again burned himself into the American body politic with a ringing moral denunciation of the conservative federal circuit judge, the tone of which made Clarence Thomas’s proceedings a few years later look like a birthday party.

It says something about a nation when a man who left a young woman to suffocate in his car is not only returned to the upper-chamber of Congress repeatedly, but is given credence when he starts speechifying from the higher altitudes provided by a moral soapbox.

poor-joan
The Good Wife: Joan Kennedy accompanies her husband Senator Ted Kennedy to the funeral of his young campaign volunteer after she suffocated in the back of his car. After Ted lost his primary run against President Carter in 1980, he dumped Joan for a younger model.

Yet the Democrats not only bought Teddy’s rap, but they imbued him with the authority to deliver it.

And few if any of them—then or now—ever questioned Ted Kennedy’s fitness to serve either in the Senate or the White House.

Louisiana has a scarlet letter history of political figures that have emerged from its swamps and back roads, none more notable than the firebrand Democratic populist Huey Long, but good ol’ boy Edwin Edwards was one of the finest Creole-speaking hustlers to put his feet up in the gubna’s office in Baton Rouge. And Edwards once infamously noted during the late hour of a campaign in the early 1980s: “The only way I can lose this election is if I am caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”

They didn’t find him with either a cold girl or a breathing boy and Edwards served as the Bayou State’s governor for terms in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s. Then he was found guilty of racketeering and sent up to the federal penitentiary in 2002 on a 10-year ticket.

But Edwards gleeful estimation of what it would take to knock him out of the box proved to be prescient and he had to have had Ted Kennedy in mind when he declared it, since that old pole cat had Louisiana locked up tighter than Rose Kennedy after Joe senior sent their daughter Rosemary for a lobotomy.

And so Ted Kennedy didn’t just endure after Chappaquiddick, he prospered politically after it.

So how odd it is, if not too terribly surprising these days, to watch the Democrats weep, wail and gnash their teeth over Trump even as they continue to light votive candles for Teddy at St. Patrick’s during the midnight mass.

They say Trump was born into money and they mock him for it, and yet Ted Kennedy grew up on the hardscrabble streets of Hyannis Port, worried about not how much of Joe Kennedy Sr.’s Nazi-sugared pie he was going to get before the actual inheritance, but how soon and how high he might land a slot on the family’s fabled political tree. War casualties and assassinations got Teddy on the fast-track.

They say Trump doesn’t have the ‘temperament’ to be president, and yet Teddy was a raging hard-drinking fighting Irishman that emotionally brutalized his wife Joan and jettisoned her the very moment she no longer benefitted his political career.

They say Trump’s admittedly profane and superficial social interface with women disqualifies him from holding the highest office in the land, and yet they don’t just stand by their man like Tammy Wynette—as Hillary has spent her life playing charades with Bill Clinton—but they elevated Teddy to a pantheon of American political demigods where he was somehow qualified to look down in moral judgment, even though he left a girl to die as he slept it off before ordering bacon and eggs and a Bloody Mary from room service.

That Trump is their arch-villain isn’t so terrible, but that Teddy Kennedy remains their hero says it all.

They are frauds, in the most basic sense of the term.

Ted Kennedy accomplished something Bill Clinton couldn’t have imagined on his wildest of nights in those Rogers, Arkansas, trailer parks: He makes Trump look like Mr. Right for the purest of debutantes presented in Peoria.

Of course, the Republican establishment’s Tony award-winning performance of feigned disgust over Trump’s adolescent penile bravado is something to behold as well, with perhaps none more so than the GOP’s own Eddie Munster: Paul Ryan. As the Bush clan dropped their ‘October Surprise’ on Trump in payback for what he did to their family’s own version of Ted—Jeb—the Republican hierarchy practically beat the Democrats to the ballroom mic to denounce him and issue their phony denunciations adorned with allusions to their daughters.

teddyvwad
National Lampoon’s VW ad based on Chappaquiddick.

Strangely lost in the stampede was that on the very same day some of Hillary Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks had been made public by Wikileaks and they didn’t disappoint. As Bernie Sanders had long suspected, Hillary behind closed doors with Big Money was not the same Hillary that was on the stump with Main Street mom and pops.

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it,” Hillary said. “Powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

And so there it is: Hillary Clinton is really running to be The Leader of a One World order. Open trade and wide open borders. Her commitment to Darfur is no different than it is for Detroit. So this is your choice, America, a lifelong politician whose dream it is to rule the world, or a loud-mouthed narcissist who actually wants to secure the nation and her borders.

No, Hillary Clinton is not Teddy Kennedy, but neither is Donald Trump—and that’s the point. Hillary will milk whatever teat of outrage she can get her hands around to squeeze from it every drop of indignation without a whiff of hypocrisy. Trump’s the mook who thinks repeating “we’re gonna make America great again” is actually enough to get him elected.

And Ted Kennedy?

Well he’s the guy who stood at podium of the Democratic National Convention on a hot August night in New York City in 1980 and gave probably the most memorable speech of his career, a ringing concession address that stoked the fires of the faithful even as he acknowledged the torch remained in Carter’s hand.

Vanquished, Teddy never left the mountaintop.

“I am confident that the Democratic Party will reunite on the basis of Democratic principles and that together we will march toward a Democratic victory in 1980,” Kennedy offered. “And some day, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the crowds stop cheering and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our party in 1980 that we found our faith again. And may it be said of us in both dark passages and in bright days…I am a part of all that I have met. Too much is taken, much abides. That which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts. Strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on. The cause endures. The hope still lives. And the dream shall never die.”

And Teddy was right. That dream has never died.

But Mary Jo Kopechne did, on that casually cruel night in the summer of 1969, in Ted Kennedy’s car.