B-1 Bob Dornan would get quite angry over the cover up.
He said some high level Catholic officials visited the Kopechne family right after her death, and silenced them.
The coroner said, “Ted Kennedy killed her as surely as if he had put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
She was found in rigor mortis position with her head and neck arched upward into an air pocket in the upside down car with her arms frozen in rigor mortis position against the seat.
She died of oxygen deprivation, NOT OF DROWNING. She had used up all the oxygen in the small air pocket she found.
The coroner estimated she lived a MINIMUM of TWO HOURS in that position.
Kennedy did not report the accident until the next morning.
If he had reported it immediately she could have been saved.
On this day – July 18, 1969 – After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.
Events at Chappaquiddick Island gained international attention on July 18, 1969, when the dead body of Mary Jo Kopechne was discovered inside an overturned car in a channel on the island. The car belonged to Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who did not report the midnight incident to police authorities until the following morning.
Kopechne’s body was recovered from the submerged car, and Kennedy entered a plea of guilty to a charge of “leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury”. He received a sentence of two months in jail, which was suspended. (AP)(Wikipedia)
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politicsdaily.com
Ted Kennedy’s actions that followed the accident – not summoning emergency personnel who might have saved her life, the cover-up of the facts, not even reporting the accident until the following morning – likely would have landed a man without political connections in prison. It was heartbreaking for her family and friends to experience the loss of a lovely, devout, and socially committed 28-year-old woman. For millions of Americans who never knew her, the tragic incident has fed a festering cultural grudge.
The idea that Edward M. Kennedy could be a viable national politician – let alone a much-admired and lionized political figure – has convinced millions of everyday citizens and succeeding generations of conservative activists that among the elites of academia, politics, and the media two standards of behavior exist: One for liberal Democrats and another for conservative Republicans.
Liberals in the media pretend not to see this. Or rather, they blame those who feel aggrieved. This very morning, my old friend James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly employed the usual euphemisms about Kennedy’s behavior in his post – and then launched a preemptive strike against anyone who might view Teddy’s life with gimlet eyes. “A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life — the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick — but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul,” Fallows wrote.
I like Jim Fallows, and stand in awe of Kennedy’s effectiveness as a politician myself. But hold on a minute: The “college problems” were serial cheating. The “silver-spoon” stuff, I suppose refers to, among other things, the speeding and reckless driving that ominously foreshadowed Chappaquiddick. And that phrase “redeeming himself in the eyes of all but the committed haters,” well, the problem with that is that to many people, redemption implies that a sinner has come clean.
Certain theological questions present themselves here. One of them is whether one can completely atone for a sin that is not truthfully confessed.
On July 18, 1969, Kennedy and five other men – all but one of whom was married – met six single young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The women were known as the “Boiler Room Girls” for their tireless work in a windowless office in that ill-fated campaign.
Sometime late at night after an evening of drinking, Kennedy and Kopechne went for a drive in his 1967 Oldsmobile. Kennedy placed the time he left at 11:15 p.m. A local cop who believed he saw the car put the time at 12:40 a.m. – significant at the time because Kennedy testified that he was taking Kopechne to a ferry that ran to Edgartown, a ferry that stopped running at midnight. In any event, Kennedy wasn’t headed toward the ferry landing when his car careened off Dike Bridge and into the inlet known as Poucha Pond; they were heading toward the beach.
Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone.When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity.
First of all, he and two of the men, a cousin named Joseph Gargan and a friend named Paul Markham say they returned to the bridge to try and rescue Mary Jo. (If the Edgartown constable who believes he saw Kennedy was accurate, this was impossible.) Next, the men claimed that they drove Kennedy to the Chappaquiddick ferry landing, where he told them not to tell the other women for fear that they would try to rescue Mary Jo – at great peril to themselves – and assured them that he would report the incident to authorities. Then, the men said, Kennedy dove into the water and swam across the sound to Edgartown himself.
Upon reaching Edgartown, Kennedy went to his room at a local inn – it was now 2:25 a.m., — where he spent the night, and the following morning engaged in small talk about sailing with a local yachter and agreed to have breakfast with the man when Gargan and Markham showed up about 7:30. They asked him who he’d called about the accident only to receive the astounding reply: no one. Kennedy explained it this way at the inquest: “I just couldn’t gain the strength within me, the moral strength, to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, either, and wouldn’t until 9 a.m.
Not reporting a fatal traffic accident is a felony in most places. On Martha’s Vineyard, if the driver is a Kennedy, it’s not even a matter of official curiosity: The local police chief never even asked Kennedy why he waited nine hours to report what had happened. The state of Massachusetts, citing Kennedy’s excessive speed on the bridge, suspended his license for six months. That was it.
In protesting Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy thundered, “Is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” These words, uttered five years after Chappaquiddick, are ubiquitous on conservative websites where they are offered up as evidence, not only of Kennedy’s hypocrisy, but the mainstream media’s as well.
Similarly, to movement conservatives, Kennedy’s attack on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is offered up as a case study in the press’s historic double standard. Immediately after Bork’s July 1, 1987, nomination, Kennedy took to the Senate floor.
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,”he said. “Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy....”
It is an article of faith among conservatives that if a Republican senator had launched an attack this personal and vitriolic – not to mention wildly exaggerated – against a nominee named by a Democratic president that liberals would have gone ape and that the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate would have made the intemperate conduct of the Republican senator the main issue.
Twenty-nine years ago, after the inquest cast doubt on his version of events at Chappaquiddick, Kennedy briefly took issue with the report, then went about his duties: In a speech to a Boston business group, he lambasted Nixon’s decision to extend the Vietnam War into Cambodia, he consented to his first broadcast interview since Bobby Kennedy’s death, and he kept an appointment to narrate Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. As Time magazine noted at the time, this engagement included a bit of irony: The opening lines of Lincoln read by Kennedy that night included this passage. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We ... will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
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For Democrats, the end always justifies the means, and rhetoric will always trump reason. Two orators of the Democratic party of the last 40 years, Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, were two of the most immoral men who ever graced public life. Clinton will speak tonight, and as always, his horrific history of rape and abuse of women will be ignored so he can pose as a person who really cares. Just ask Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willie, among others too numerous to name, how much he cares.
But the worst example of all is the Democrat’s lionizing of Ted Kennedy. In a seven minute video at the DNC, there were plenty of quotes from Kennedy and his admirers that should be seen through the agonized eyes of a young girl, slowly asphyxiating in a car submerged in water, a young woman vainly trying to open the door so she could breathe just one more time, a young woman betrayed by the scion of the country’s most powerful family who left her to die.
Mary Jo Kopechne.
Kennedy said:
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
Whose dream? Mary Jo’s?
I believe in the bright light of hope and possibility
I always have even in the darkest hours.
That bright light of hope was the pressure his family brought to bear so he wasn’t arrested for vehicular manslaughter.
Everything he did was about the future, it was about going forward.
You bet Kennedy never looked back.
Barack Obama: Those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here —
people of both parties knew that what drove him was something more.
Sure they knew what drove him. The accessory to rape with his nephew, the sex on tables; why do you think Clinton idolized the Kennedys?
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1. Ted Kennedy’s idea of funny was asking people to tell him the latest Chappaquiddick joke.
Here is what one of his biographers had to say after Kennedy’s death on Aug. 25:
I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?”
This isn’t just any bozo talking through his hat: It’s Ed Klein, who wrote four books on the Kennedy clan over the past two decades, including The Kennedy Curse.
Klein, by the way, is the former foreign editor of Newsweek magazine and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine.
(It does make one wonder about Newsweek and the New York Times, however, when one of their recent senior decision makers thinks he’s burnishing Teddy’s image by telling a story in which a killer — convicted, sentence suspended — seems to be dancing on his victim’s grave.
I know there are some people out there who doubt this story. Here is the link to the YouTube copy of the broadcast interview between Klein and guest host Katty Kay on National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm Show on Aug. 26.
2. Radio interview — again from YouTube — with John Farrar, the diver who got to the scene of the Chappaquiddick accident in 25 minutes — once fishermen found the car nine or 10 hours (depends on whether you believe Teddy’s timeline) after the car plunge. Farrar believes Mary Jo Kopechne found an air pocket in Teddy Kennedy’s submerged Oldsmobile and lived for an hour or more (he’s said up to four hours).
Here’s the link to the 1994 radio interview with Farrar.
3. And while we’re still at it, here’s a TV piece on Kennedy that includes an interview with Leslie Leland, the foreman of the grand jury that Farrar mentions in the previous clip.
By the way, Farrar’s a firefighter and Leland’s a pharmacist . I’ll tell you in a future post about the kind of pressure these guys were under from what was known then as “the Kennedy Mafia.”
Here’s the link to the news report with the 1989 Leland interview.
Wait, Saint Ted, let’s hear one more time how you liked a good joke about Mary Jo Kopechne’s death at Chappaquiddick. Here again is the link to what Ed Klein had to say about you. (Remember, this is a Kennedy sycophant telling the story.)
4. Ted Kennedy — nicknamed “Cadillac Eddie” in university — was kicked out of Harvard for paying another student to take a Spanish test for him in 1951. Teddy then joined the U.S. Army as a private but his father, Joseph — multi-millionaire, former ambassador, powerhouse of the Democratic Party — made sure Teddy got nowhere near the Korean War, which was going on at the time. Teddy spent that war as part of a U.S. Army honour guard in Paris. After the war, he was re-admitted to Harvard. Thanks, Dad.
Wealth and power do have their advantages.
blogs.canoe.ca
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Elizabeth Warren: “Ted Kennedy Changed My Life . . . I Think Of Him Every Single Day”…:
“Ted Kennedy changed my life,” Warren said. “He changed how I understood what it is that a public servant does. And I think of him in this race every single day. And I come to this convention and I think of him every single hour.”
SO DID MR. AND MRS. KOPECHNE:
In his response, no apparent censure was described at all, but in the response, written, as usual, through a senior Vatican official, he stated,
“He was saddened to know of your illness, and has asked me to assure you of his concern and his spiritual closeness. He is particularly grateful for your promise of prayers for him and for the needs of the universal Church."
The Holy Father has read the letter which you entrusted to President Barack Obama, who kindly presented it to him during their recent meeting. His Holiness prays that in the days ahead you may be sustained in faith and hope, and granted the precious grace of joyful surrender to the will of God our merciful Father. He invokes upon you the consolation and peace promised by the Risen Savior to all who share in His sufferings and trust in His promise of eternal life.
Commending you and the members of your family to the loving intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Father cordially imparts his Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of wisdom, comfort and strength in the Lord." (http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/08/29/ted-kennedy-to-pope-benedict-i-am-writing-with-deep-humility/)