Posted on 01/26/2006 10:22:20 PM PST by Congressman Billybob
On 12 January, 2006, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Thrust into the Limelight, and for Some A Symbol of Washington’s Bite.” It was a mini-biography of Mrs. Martha-Ann Alito, and it purported to explain the reasons for Mrs. Alito’s tears during her husband Samuel’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It blamed them on a follow-up question by Senator Lindsay Graham, rather than on the verbal savaging of Judge Alito by the Democrats on the Committee, led by Senator Ted Kennedy.
The Times should have gotten the story right, because one of the three reporters on the story was in their New Jersey Bureau, and based in Caldwell. But they didn’t. Here are the operative paragraphs from that article on the cause of her tears:
She has sat behind him [her husband] all week, a pleasant-looking woman in sensible clothes, peering through rimless glasses as Democrats grilled Judge Alito about his investments and his affiliation with a conservative Princeton alumni group and Republicans tried to provide him some relief.
On Wednesday, one of those Republicans, Mr. Graham, tried to mock the Democrats with a question about the alumni group, which opposed affirmative action.
"Are you really a closet bigot?" Mr. Graham asked, at which point Mrs. Alito drew her hands to her face and left the hearing room weeping.
Source: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20C14FD3C5B0C708DDDA80894DE404482
As the article explained, Mrs. Alito is “fiercely protective” of her husband. And she was upset by the attacks on him as if he were dishonest, or a bigot, or a poor judge. But there was an additional reason, much older and much darker than what happened at that hearing. It concerns the fact that Senator Kennedy led the attack against Judge Alito.
Mrs, Alito was born Martha-Ann Bomgardner in Ft. Knox, Kentucky. The family moved with her father’s profession as an air traffic controller to New Jersey, where she attended Rancocas Valley Regional High School in Mount Holly. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Kentucky, she returned to New Jersey and became a librarian in the US Attorney’s office, where she met her husband.
Through her husband’s family, she learned of their personal friendship with another young woman who was also an only child. This other woman and her family were staunch Catholics. On occasion, they attended the same church in Roseland, New Jersey, as the Alitos, Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, one of only two churches in that town of 5,298. The Alitos live in Caldwell, population 7,584, where this other woman graduated from Caldwell College, probably as a commuter student from her home, rather than a resident student.
From the personal memories of this woman that Mrs. Alito got from her husband’s family, and from her own understanding of what it means to be an only child, Mrs. Alito knew of the worst thing that any human being could do to another. She also heard of its impact on the family.
That other woman’s name was Mary Jo Kopeckne. She was killed by Senator Ted Kennedy, in an auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, on 18 July, 1969. That was the other reason for Mrs. Alito’s tears.
[Author’s notes: The author did not bother any of the three families referred to here in writing this. All the information was gathered from reputable Internet sources. If the Times puts a competent reporter on the story, it can find the same information. It should also then apologize for its original article, in which the three reporters presented their personal assumptions as facts on the cause of Mrs. Alito’s upset at the hearing.]
John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
Some folks here don't seem to have read that you wrote the OTHER reason--i.e. aside from the obvious.
And yet, reading your above explanation has moved me into the other camp, I'm afraid--please don't take this as another of the hysterical rants on this thread.
You have made a fatal error, as you explained above.
You have taken YOUR personal experience and decided "That's how MY family would react, so logic dictates that's how EVERY family like mine would react."
Your article is thus a theoretical one. You don't know that this is how things went in their family.
My brothers know, for years, people in our old town I have never once met. By most people's logic, if X knew my brother for twenty years, one would say "Oh, Darkwolf377 knows X, he's best friends with his brother!"
That is assumption. It is not a fact, because it wasn't verified.
Someone could also say "DW knows his mom's next door neighbor, they've lived next to her for ten years!" But...I've never met them.
I'm sorry, I respect your THEORY, but that is all it is.
You need to rework this piece. Maybe as a "what if?"
Unless you know, from the players involved--the Alitos or those they have directly told this to--that one of the reasons she was crying was because she was thinking of her husband's family's friends (as likely as it may SEEM), you are merely pushing a fiction.
That's the exact same logic the article you are railing against uses.
And I'm from a small town. But the point is that Mrs. Alito did not know Mary Jo Kopechne personally. She maybe, possibly, at some point heard about Mary Jo from her husband. And to imagine that Mrs. Alito burst into tears in the middle of her husband's confirmation hearings because of someone she had never met and may have possibly heard about is going too far.
Your hysteria over an article on an internet board. With the ??? and !?!?!?
Check out post 161 for the way it's done. Use calm logic, not "yelling".
Oh...THANK YOU!!! I am looking that up as we speak!!!
And by the way, there is a large segment of younger voters who don't know a thing about the Dike bridge and Chappaquiddick. They should know about this hellish, loutish coward, the fraud Ted Kennedy.
Filibuster on, Dems.
At the very least, it's far more sensible to assume that she was crying over the treatment of her husband by the Democrats. However, I did cite a quote and, as I recall, Sen. Hatch said both that she had been crying because of the attacks on her husband and because she had a migraine. It did not, however, say anything about her crying about Mary Jo Kopechne.
ping
He was one year ahead of me. His mother taught piano lessons, and I would have taken lessons from her except that my family waqs short of money at the time. A friend of mine did and was a personal friend though intimidated because he had small hands and Van's are big enough to palm a basketball.
(Not that he ever played the game) Want to see the first property he ever owned, after he won is Russia. It is an apartment house across from the library.
In other words, you don't have a direct quote from Mrs. Alito, you have someone else (Hatch) making an assumption, and this is somehow superior to just making an assumption on your own and calling it fact?
You're doing precisely what you're accusing this writer of doing.
FGS
Thanks for that.
If this is true, the next logical question would be "Did Sen. Kennedy know of this connection before the hearing was conducted?" If he did and did not recuse himself from the questioning is he not subject to disciplinary action by the Senate and also the bar association?
Nam Vet
Jeeze ... are your neck veins ready to burst?
But you are not even allowing for what many biographers get away with, which is drawing an implication from a likely fact: that her husband was be villified by a man whose character was known to her in a personal way. It is called empathy.
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