-- Charles Pierce in a January 5, 2003 Boston Globe Magazine article.
Someone needs to chisel that quote on Charlie Pierce's tombstone. Soon, I hope.
I love that quote. I'm surprised Pierce was able to pry his lips off of Kennedy's butt for long enough to sit down at the keyboard and compose it. ;)
He was effing drunk. This event today would be vehicular manslaughter at the least.
I read with interest your recent blog posting regarding Charlie Pierce’s 2003 Boston Globe profile of Ted Kennedy. Regrettably, you are perpetuating an urban myth, and mischaracterizing the piece. If you had actually read the piece, you would have continued on to this paragraph:
“She’s always there. Even if she doesn’t fit in the narrative line, she is so much of the dark energy behind it. She denies to him forever the moral credibility that lay behind not merely all those rhetorical thunderclaps that came so easily in the New Frontier but also Robert Kennedy’s anguished appeals to the country’s better angels. He was forced from the rhetoric of moral outrage and into the incremental nitty-gritty of social justice. He learned to plod, because soaring made him look ridiculous. “It’s really 3 yards and a cloud of dust with him,” says his son Patrick. And if his name were Edward Moore, he would have done time.”
Variously, writers from The Wall Street Journal to the Northeastern University School of Journalism have characterized the paragraph you cite as a paragraph “of pure poison” (who exactly first characterized it as that is up for debate). But then they actually read the piece, and had the paragraph in its proper context. WSJ’s James Taranto put it like this:
From the WSJ Opinion Archives
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002879
by JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, January 9, 2003 1:19 P.M. EST
Drowning in Bathos
Charles Pierce must really hate Ted Kennedy. Pierce is the author of a piece on the Massachusetts senator that ran more than 5,000 words in Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine. Tucked into it is this paragraph of pure poison:
And that’s the key. That’s how you survive what he’s survived. That’s how you move forward, one step after another, even though your name is Edward Moore Kennedy. You work, always, as though your name were Edward Moore. If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.
Charlie’s own reaction to certain representatives of the right wing media’s attempts to distort the piece to their own advantage can be found here in the October 22, 2004 issue of The American Prospect:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=8799
The original Boston Globe piece can be obtained from LexisNexis or, for a small fee, from the Boston Globe archives.
I understand that it is difficult for opinion writers to always make their way back to the original source, especially when they find the second hand “facts” so often repeated on the web. However, now that your information has been corrected, I trust you will be able to report it correctly going forward.
Sincerely,
Webmaster, www.charlespierce.com