Eulogy for Ted? Not willing to take the plunge

On the basis of the proper etiquette that, if you have nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all, I am not going to spend much time writing about Ted Kennedy. But I am not Emily Post, so I do have to say one thing before I hope to drop the topic.

Some of my students are unaware of the Chappaquiddick incident. If they are familiar with the event at all, it appears to them somewhere in that long blur of ancient history that connects the pharaohs to a President called Reagan, and that ends with the beginning of the modern period, i.e., the launching of MTV. So for them, here is a brief summary.

The married Senator Kennedy left a party with a former Robert Kennedy campaign worker, a young woman not his wife, Mary Jo Kopechne. Driving late at night, he lost control of the vehicle on a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. The vehicle ended upside down in the water. Kennedy escaped. The woman did not. After a stop to discuss the matter with friends, he went back to his hotel. The next morning, he was observed amiably chatting with people at the hotel. He did not report the incident to police until he found out that the vehicle had been recovered. The diver who found Ms. Kopechne’s body concluded from her position in the vehicle that she had found an air bubble and had been alive at least two hours after the car plunged into the water. Had Kennedy reported the incident immediately, she would have been alive. One can scarcely imagine the psychological and physical torture she underwent as she awaited death and finally drowned due to Kennedy’s commissions and omissions. Somewhat more “torturous” than the waterboarding of al Qaeda terrorists for purposes of national security. You know, the procedures that Kennedy and his friends and political brothers and sisters found horrifying. Kennedy received a two-month suspended sentence for “leaving the scene of an accident.”

Kennedy did not resign. He made a laughably fictitious, self-serving, and maudlin statement about this event, stressing his own sorry state, rather than the suffering of his passenger. Wikipedia gives a concise, yet solid account of the incident. Reading it brings into sharp focus the utter deceit, irresponsibility, cowardice, and narcissism of the Senator.

Now comes the nonchalant observation that Kennedy liked “Chappaquiddick humor.” The revelation comes not from some Kennedy-hater, but from a friend of the Senator, a former Newsweek and New York Times Magazine editor during a friendly reminiscence. One suspects that he found jokes about waterboarding of terrorists less edifying. Simply unreal.

A lot of people would have looked on the event as a horrible suffering for Mary Jo Kopechne and her family, and on his conduct as simply a tragic moral and personal failing, had Kennedy received an appropriate punishment and then retired from public life. But he chose not to retire. Far from it. He politicized the event with a maudlin speech and subsequent “appeal” to the Massachusetts voters. Worse, he embarked on a career, and not just of pushing for welfare programs to help the less fortunate as his ideologically-blinkered supporters would have it. Rather, he engaged enthusiastically in the politics of personal destruction and made black-and-white moralizing his favored rhetorical style. I still recall his vicious libelling of Judge Robert Bork during the latter’s judicial confirmation hearing. It is that penchant for moral superiority and demonizing of opponents, combined with Chappaquiddick and a lifetime of other personal failings, that reveals much about Kennedy’s character and makes it impossible to look kindly on him.

The excuse that he believed passionately and worked tirelessly on behalf of these causes is an insult. Many, many politicians have those characteristics. I won’t get into naming some of the more controversial historical leaders who have had even more political enthusiasm and zeal for their programs than Kennedy exhibited. But we hardly use that as an excuse for clear personal failings, especially when dead people result. Moreover, how much does it really say about someone that he was generous with taking money from Peter to give to Paul? Better had he given up his own fortune to Paul or otherwise lived a life of personal sacrifice. Albert Schweitzer or Mother Theresa he was not. This whole sordid eulogizing reminds me of the people who excuse their kid’s personal outrages with, “But he’s really a good boy.” Would the same Left that makes such excuses for Kennedy make them if the name were Sarah Palin? Or would they instead still be questioning whether she really bore her son?

So, unlike some of the mindless spectators, I won’t be drowning in tears at Kennedy’s death. There have been enough tears—and drowning—caused during his life.

UPDATE: This piece by Eugene Robinson is a must-read to get a sense of the Left’s delusion about “morality” and Ted Kennedy. This man actually asserts that the thing the nation will miss most about Ted Kennedy is his “moral clarity.” Combining the words Ted Kennedy and moral clarity in the same thought without an emphatic negative is evidence of a serious moral compass issue of one’s own.

UPDATE 2: Mark Steyn makes some of the same points. What to me is unfathonable is the moral obtuseness and the relativistic posturing of the Kennedy admirers in the legacy media, an off-putting parade of “progressive” apologists. Steyn has collected a few examples of their demented excuses for his behavior.