Posted on 08/29/2009 9:55:44 PM PDT by Steelfish
August 30, 2009
The needy little boy behind Ted the titan
Dominic Lawson
As Edward Kennedy was laid to rest yesterday, accompanied by a further fusillade of eulogies, we were forcibly made aware, once again, of the American fixation with the idea of personal redemption. The British are a less forgiving people. While even the right-wing US press skated around the late senator’s appalling personal behaviour over many years, in this country even politically sympathetic newspapers published excoriating accounts, concentrating on the incident 40 years ago when the 37-year-old Ted Kennedy abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die alone in a car he had driven off a small bridge linking Chappaquiddick to Martha’s Vineyard.
It was only in a British newspaper that the American author Joyce Carol Oates was able last week to publish the following (factually accurate) account: “Kennedy chose to flee the scene leaving the young woman to die an agonising death, not of drowning, but of suffocation over a period of hours. It was over 10 hours before Kennedy reported the accident, by which time he’d consulted a family lawyer. The senator’s explanation for this unconscionable, despicable, unmanly ... behaviour was never convincing.”
As Oates might have gone on to remind us, Kennedy’s subsequent broadcast in which he sought to keep alive his political career was a staggering display of self-pity from which even his illustrious team of speechwriters could not preserve him; and although he paid $90,000 out of his own ample pocket to the parents of Mary Jo, her mother later recalled: “I don’t think he ever said he was sorry.”
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
That’s a devastating editorial for worshipers of the “royal family.”
Nothing like it in the US MSM! A sad indictment for a nation that has constitutionalized The Freedom of The Press in the First Amendment!
Nice riposte!
...with oil connections.
Oh, wait. That's redundant.
Tell the Brits I said to call it like it is ...
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