Posted on 07/14/2009 5:59:22 AM PDT by Zakeet
On Friday night’s Hardball, guest host Lawrence O’Donnell enthusiastically promoted HBO’s new, glowing Ted Kennedy documentary.
He began by declaring "There‘s so much ground to cover. We don‘t have enough time for this. And I want to show the people out there, people under 60, who don‘t know the early Ted Kennedy, don‘t remember the early Ted Kennedy, I want to show what you have got in this movie." But O’Donnell’s interview completely left out the biggest scandal of "the early Ted Kennedy" – the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.
This seemed especially odd as O’Donnell recounted with filmmaker Carolyn Waterlow how Richard Nixon was obsessed with Ted Kennedy:
O'DONNELL: Imagine that. Here you are, a senator. You have a president of the United States obsessing all day, is there something we can hang on him. Is there something we can accuse him of?
WATERLOW: With all—to think of Teddy, with all the things he was dealing with politically and within his family and all of the losses he has suffered, he was also—
O'DONNELL: He lost his oldest brother in World War II. He then has his remaining oldest brother assassinated November 22nd, 1963, as president of the United States. His then—his remaining oldest brother is assassinated while running for president in 1968. And at this point, having lived through all of that, here we are in 1972 and Nixon is trying to figure out how to make this guy‘s life worse.
WATERLOW: Yes.
O'DONNELL: But he perseveres. He keeps going. And he eventually himself wants to run for the presidency.
WATERLOW: Yes. That was something that I also had not fully appreciated going into this project, that from about ‘68 right after Bobby‘s death, people are talking to him about running for president. And there was an effort to draft him in ‘68 to take Bobby‘s place, and really for—yes, up until 1980 or ‘79 when he finally decides he is going to run for president president, this is a question that‘s hanging over him and it‘s something people are asking him about that whole time.
O'DONNELL: When you look at that early Senate career of Ted Kennedy, leading up prior to running for president in the ‘80s, it‘s hard to find the easy year for Teddy. Early on as senator, he had a plane crash, a small plane goes down in western Massachusetts. He‘s in the plane. He injuries his back. He‘s never going to be able to walk the same way again for the rest of his life.
One of the things I think about when I watch him in front of these audiences like last summer is the young kids don‘t understand what the older people in that convention hall—what‘s happened to them when they‘re crying listening to Ted Kennedy. They don‘t know the emotional base of the relationship that he has with those voters.
Let‘s take a look at Ted Kennedy giving what I believe was the most public eloquent public eulogy ever given. It was his eulogy of his brother, Robert Kennedy.
T. KENNEDY: My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. To be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it, who saw war and tried to stop it.
O'DONNELL: Not easy to watch.
WATERLOW: No, it‘s incredibly emotional moment, and really we tried very hard in this film—it‘s entirely archival interviews and footage. We tried to let the footage speak for itself. You can see the emotion and you can see Teddy just by watching him and letting it play.
It's not like the HBO film leaves Chappaquiddick out, which it shouldn't, because it was a continuing obstacle to Kennedy's White House dreams. But MSNBC feels comfortable airbrushing it out of their warm, fuzzy historical memories.
The timing on this is interesting. They are omitting Chappaquidick, but yet they are doing the special close to the 40th anniversary of the event.
The early years of Ted, same as the older years, running around half naked, drunk and stupid.
A must miss, thanks HBO.
Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
...and the riches from rum-running, and the mob ties....
Never say anything bad about the dead. What? He’s not dead. He’s a drunken murderous old fool.
This is their own revisionist history. Demonrats live on lies. That is the only way they know how and to hell with everyone else. To hell with Mary Jo as she is an inconvenient truth and an example of just how far these scumbags will go to not abide by the laws, which are for everyone else.
Good graphic, except that for MaryJo, it was all darkness.
How long did they say she was alive, more than an hour, right?
She was breathing in a little air pocket near the back of the car. She might have survived if Ted had notified the police sooner.
How times have changed - that satire could never be published today. (except as fond memory on the web).
Did the swimmer die?
Micheal Jackson died you know.
and walked away while she might have been saved
- (to keep the press from knowing he was drunk) - it would have been in the movie...
Hell, knowing how biased the double standard Hollywood types are, it would have BEEN THE MOVIE.
This was negligent homicide, vehicular manslaughter, and just plain murder. Not one of the lawyers who were immediately on the scene with Kennedy was even sanctioned, never mind disbarred. They literally sat on the beach strategizing while Kopechne died.
Ted was not even a licensed driver at the time, and once the fix was in, he received the mildest of reprimands, couldn't even be called a slap on the wrist.
These simple facts were available even in the Massachusetts press. So what did the massholes who vote this foul beast in term after term do? They got together in demonstrations of sympathy .... for Ted ... not his victim.
Anybody else would have done 20 years for manslaughter. A married man, drunk, goes parking with a young girl. A cop approaches to check out the car and he speeds off. Later the car goes into a channel. He immediately saves himself and abandons the girl, according to experts in an air bubble that lasted some 25 minutes. He walks past four homes without trying to get use of a telephone to notify authorities and swims home. The authorities perform no autopsy even though there was blood on her dress and nose which was inconsistent with drowning. He was found at an inquest to have been driving negligently but that information was withheld from a grand jury. It looked like the hands of friends in high places was screwing up the process at every level. By not going to the authorities he avoided a breath test and since no one determined the reason for the blood, he avoided questions of whether he did violence to her before they went into the water, which would have been a murder charge.
Where did that run originally? The National Lampoon?
“The authorities perform no autopsy...”
Was she pregnant?
I have a copy of that ad. It’s 100% true.
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