Word: chappaquiddick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...After Chappaquiddick, in 1969, Edward Kennedy practiced what might be called the pre-emptive deflective confession. The idea was to assume the guilt in one large abstract gulp in order to silence any further specific inquiries. It did not work well for Kennedy. He spent a full week in a fortress of silence while the reassembled talents of Camelot labored over a text for him. Then he went on national television to take the responsibility of a young woman's death unto himself but also, simultaneously, to leave himself in a state of dazed blamelessness. His biggest mistake...
Incensed by a Reader's Digest article suggesting that Senator Edward Kennedy had lied about Chappaquiddick, a volunteer worker in his presidential campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Identifying herself as "a concerned citizen," Larryann C. Willis of Vale, Ore., accused the magazine of making corporate campaign contributions in violation of federal election laws...
commissioning a computer study on how fast Kennedy was driving when his car went off the bridge, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne; buying a study of the tides off Chappaquiddick that night in July 1969; and distributing videotapes of the computer re-enactment of the fatal accident to major news organizations...
...campaign may have been, in the words of his friend, former Senator John Tunney of California, "a campaign of atonement." Said Tunney: "That campaign and that speech spell the end of the Chappaquiddick era. It is something that had to be done." But the reception of Kennedy's speech last week inevitably raises the question of whether the 1984 Ted Kennedy will be the Ted that America saw in the campaign or the Ted who spoke so magnificently on the convention podium. All year the irony has been that the further Kennedy seemed from the nomination, the better he performed...
...singular crusade of Teddy Kennedy in 1979 and 1980. He learned about the nation. More important, he learned about himself. It was believed last fall by Ted Kennedy and almost everyone else that a person who had come through the assassination of two brothers and the personal scandal of Chappaquiddick, and who had served 17 years in the U.S. Senate, was prepared for big power politics. These assumptions proved to be almost entirely wrong. Kennedy could not articulate any appreciation of the economic anguish of Middle Americans. Nor did he understand the ferocity of the political encounters on the presidential...