Sunday, August 30, 2009
"The needy little boy behind Ted the titan"
The Brits are straight up on politicians.
Ted Kennedy doesn't escape their scrutiny...
Ted Kennedy doesn't escape their scrutiny...
Dominic Lawson writes about it at TimesOnLine.com:
"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.'"
