Word: reybold
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Reybold offers a mystery story, complete with a classic detective-hero: retired Scotland Yard Inspector Charles Darby, visiting America while writing his memoirs. Darby is invited to present his findings on Chappaquiddick at a cocktail party hosted by P. Faulkner Truliman. Truliman, a Long Island multimillionaire, arranges for members of the party to read selected portions of the testimony. Darby moderates and points out relevant pieces of evidence; placing the testimony in chronological order and marshalling a string of 92 "facts." These "facts" are the pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle that Darby reassembles in the last chapter...
...MALCOLM REYBOLD'S novel The Inspector's Opinion advances unusual answers for some of these questions. His theory explores the contradictions in testimony and confusing sequence of events that night and concludes that Kennedy was not driving the car when it went off the bridge...
Will Rogers, politely, would have called that applesauce. Assuming Reybold's mouthpiece is correct--that Kennedy was an observer and not a driver--it makes the Senator guilty of perjury and probably conspiracy and misprision: crimes far more serious than the original charges...
...Reybold's thesis is too elaborate, and there are too many gaping holes in it. Like most conspiracy theories, it involves too many complex and fortuitous coincidences. Darby always accepts the convoluted explanation for the simple one. Deputy Sheriff Look may very well have seen the Oldsmobile at 12:45, and Kennedy may have lied about the time of the accident. Does that incident have to fit into Darby's theory? Indeed, there is a more logical conclusion. Kennedy knew if he placed the time of the accident at 1 a.m. it would destroy his story about driving Mary...
With his reluctance to deal with Kennedy's guilt, in a way, Reybold has written an elegant whitewash of the Chappaquiddick affair. He is too concerned with THE Kennedy, as he terms him at one point in the book, and incredibly insensitive to the moral questions raised by Chappaquiddick about equal justice and the power of certain people in American society. And what about Mary Jo Kopechne, left to drown? Her mother later asked bitterly whether Kennedy considered her a fish, to leave her overnight in a submerged car. It is a disturbing question, one Reybold never asks...