Mark Steyn, National Review
...In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedys passing, Americas TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where theres a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.
In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 19401969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.
Thats the way to do it! An accident, ugly in some unspecified way, just happened to happen and only to him, nobody else. Teds the star, and theres no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: Like all figures in history and like those in the Bible, for that matter Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than betrayed him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, lets face it, he doesnt have Teds tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps its kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of tremendous moral collapse. When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, its usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddys biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedys achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.
You cant make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I dont know how many lives the senator changed he certainly changed Mary Jos but youre struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddys Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows maybe shed feel it was worth it. What true-believing liberal lass wouldnt be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?
We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-seconds notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if youll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britains comparatively very minor Profumo scandal, the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majestys Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queens Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with childrens playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.
Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the Kennedy curse, a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didnt, he made all of us complicit in what hed done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.... 
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