[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]The strange case of Teddy Kennedy is painfully closing in on its final denouement.
At 77 years old, he lies in his death bed, awaiting his closing breath after publicly battling brain cancer for a little more than a year.
Oh, the dazzling glory that was his.
The last of the fabled brothers, Teddy was typical of the youngest child in many ways, not nearly up to the talent level of his brothers.
But because Jack had been assassinated six years earlier and Bobby one year before, fulsome American adulation for the Kennedys was being channeled into Teddy, who frequently fumbled, when he committed a quintessential act.
The supposedly defining event of his life would have ruined men with a less polished name. Teddy did not miss a step, and neither did his adoring fans in the press and the countryside.
Forty years and one weekend ago, Teddy’s name was horribly etched into the ugly annals of American history.
It was mildly noted at the time, in the summer of 1969, and I guarantee you, dear reader, on the 40th anniversary this month, not one word leaked into the contemporary Kennedy-flavored press.
A Night of Death
Some of you may recall what happened:
After a night of heavy drinking and carousing with a comely young woman not his wife, the two of them drove onto a four-syllable Massachusetts bridge with a very low retaining wall.
Shortly, they caromed into the river.
Summoning the kind of monster strength and indomitable will that only becomes accessible to a man directly facing doom, Teddy crawled out of his car.
Grunting and heaving, he fought fiercely through the becalmed, blackened waters of the Chappaquidick. Miraculously, he saved himself, to the thrilling whoops and cries of Democrats and other liberals the breadth of the land.
Teddy was hailed in every hamlet and newspaper office for heroically crawling out of his car, fighting fiercely and foggily through Chappaquidick’s becalmed waters, and selflessly bringing himself back to life.
What a guy.
The life of a U.S. Senator had been preserved against mountainous odds.
What happened, meanwhile, to ol’ What’s-Her-Name?
The young lady was then, and is now, an unacknowledged piece of lint on the greatcoat that is American history. She was and is less than a flea atop an elephant.
What Is Less Than a Detail?
Except for the girl’s family, the Kopechnes, hardly anyone has ever cared. Pathetically, even fewer have remembered.
This is one of several strands of tragedy to emerge from that hideous event.
The Senator’s enthusiastically approved, even cheered, long life of debauchery is another.
With the kind of extraordinary good fortune that has marked the Kennedy family’s rise to American idol, only hours after Teddy drove his girlfriend of the moment into the river, American astronauts landed on the moon for the first time in the history of the world.
Now this was the kind of excessive luck that every cheating husband lives for.
The embarrassing Kennedy story was buried much faster than the tragic Mary Jo.
Kennedy power and money, and millions of adoring fans nationwide, saw to that.
Dating back to an age when many of us were children, we were instructed by our parents to speak kindly, or at least out of hearing range, of the dead and nearly expired.
It Is Almost Over
Since the storied Kennedys of Massachusetts declared a century ago ago they were exceptions to the rules that govern peasants, surely such cuddly people will not contest one more exception we would like to render.
Dare we speak critically of a dying man?
As summer hits its stride in the northern hemisphere, Teddy Kennedy reposes within inches of death, we are told, following 50 years of virtually fulltime alcoholism and other harmless little-boy high-jinks that harmed others but seldom his wonderful self.
Of thin mind and elephantine girth, Teddy has out-drunk 99 percent of America’s alcoholics most days of his life. Before he was diagnosed with brain cancer, his chief chore during his waking hours was to memorize where he had hidden his favorite liquor bottles.
We exaggerate not about Sen. Kennedy living the life of a golden boy who never stooped to sin despite a choking amount of contrary evidence.
In November 1970, a year after the beloved Teddy killed Ms. Kopechne, the grateful, morally scrupulous voters of of Massachusetts overwhelmingly returned him to office for a second six-year term.
The margin was 62 percent to 37 percent margin over a foolish fellow named Josiah Spaulding.
By this morning, the pompous Sen. Teddy Boy has posted 46 years in the U.S. Senate, a body never particular about the quality of its members, the former Sen. Obama, and the present Sen. Boxer and Sen. Byrd, who used to go to work in a sheet, immediately springing to mind.
And so the Los Angeles Times, which has no problem honoring the dishonorable among us, amateurishly saluted the fading Sen. Teddy Boy on the front page of Sunday’s edition.
The newspaper rang up another dinger, even though it was as stale as1998 bread.
Evidently it was a rewrite from other publications. How low has the Times sunk?
Hurriedly, the newspaper stitched together 28 fawning paragraphs, dripping with sycophancy.
Amazingly, the crack reporters never managed to find space to even mention the girl Sen. Teddy Boy killed.
Sort of the O.J. syndrome. It happened, but not really.
The Times concluded he was a wonderful fellow who has enriched America’s political landscape while imaginatively overcoming the vagaries of a privileged life.
Mazel tov, Teddy Boy.
Ya fooled ‘em again, kid.
