Can a scandal last for forty years? Should it?
On Thursday, President Obama announced that he would award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to sixteen individuals, including Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Mary Katherine is not amused. She asks how many individuals considered complicit in vehicular manslaughter could be given such an honor. Would a conservative (or any non-Kennedy) rise to the heights of the Senate with Chappaquiddick on their resumes?
Yet that was forty years ago. Kennedy has won re-election several times since then, indicating that the people of Massachusetts consider the scandal to be over. Republicans such as John McCain have often worked with Kennedy on major legislation. Interesting, here’s what the WaPo write up of Obama’s announcement said:
While President George W. Bush encountered some criticism when he awarded the medal to such Iraq war power players as then-Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, former CIA director George Tenet and occupation viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Obama hasn’t included any particularly controversial choices in his first picks.
As MK notes,
It is considered bad form for conservatives to mention Mary Jo Kopechne (who would have been close to 70 now if she had lived), especially now that Kennedy himself has fallen ill with a brain tumor.
The unwritten rules that govern political scandals never seem to make all that much sense. We can all point to someone on the other side who got away with something awful. That’s how it is.
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
10 Responses to “Can a scandal last for forty years? Should it?”
Scandals last forever, but they do seem to carry more of a penalty in the modern era than they did back in the day. For all the complaints about the lapdog media of today, the old school was far worse. How many members of the press knew about JFK's many “indiscretions” with the ladies, but we never found out about it until decades later. Some things were just not discussed, it seems. Had the Mark Sanford affair happened in the fifties or sixties, I doubt we'd ever have found out. We may tire of the endless stories of scandals, but I think we're getting more information than we used to and elected officials are held at least slightly more accountable than in days of old.
To me it always seemed that the people of Massachusetts decided long ago that a person from the rich and powerful Kennedy family could get away with something like the Koepeckne incident and that same power could accomplish a lot of things they wanted for their home district and the nation. It's a perverse tradeoff in my mind, but that seems to be the mindset- similar to my experience with LA politics where people also ignored scandal and corruption because they believed that the people who played dirty were the ones who could also play hardball.)
I think Jazz is right too about the difference between then and now, although I think the pendulum has probably swung too far in the other direction. At some point the personal lives of politicians becomes way too much of a distraction. Personally I really don't know what to make of the seedy lives of politicians- I'd love to vote for someone that I thought had high personal character but finding one is as fruitful as Diogenes' quest.
Adlai Stevenson killed a friend of his when he was twelve. He was trying to show off a military drill flourish and the rifle discharged and a sixteen year old girl was killed. But he managed to serve with distinction and relatively few remember the tragedy.
Stevenson's accident is not similar in anyway to Kennedy's. But, yes, other people can rise above tragedy and still contribute. However, I am sure that, were Stevenson alive today, he would be forced out of public life because we demand a false perfection out of our public leaders.
I don't see Kennedy as rising above tragedy so much as getting away with something. He will always be an example of how the privileged, be they liberal or conservative, play under a different set of rules.
Although I don't care for Kenndy politically, Chappaquiddick was far enough in the past and so much has happened since then that it shouldn't be much of a factor in the decision to give him the Medal of Freedom.
Had Stevenson knocked up the girl? No. That is one difference. This was always too convenient. Plus, the time line of Ted's actions never really made sense, and no one can make a case for why the police records 'disappeared'.
I have never read anything except in tabloids that said the police records disappeared. It's also possible that the people of Massachusetts knew a bit more about the episode–like that fact that an engineering study showed the bridge did not meet state safety standards (and was quietly upgraded a year later), like the fact that many of the items appearing in the papers in the next few weeks were false statements the Nixon Administration has admitted planting, and like the fact that the deputy sheriff who insisted he saw the car much later remembered waiting for a few moments to see if the driver needed directions since “People get lost a lot around here.” (I vacationed on Cape Cod the following year and had to eat at a different restaurant each meal because I could never find the same one twice!)
It's also possible that some people know a bit about concussions–based on my experience with two family members who suffered mild concussions and a family friend, Sen. Kennedy's behavior was that of a person with a concussion–the wonder is not that he didn't go to the police but that he survived his post-accident activities at all. (The family friend bumped his head on the top of the car while getting out, collapsed the next day, and died two weeks later.) Concussions can kill.
I don't care what these people think. They should give this medal to SEVERAL KENNEDY family members of IMO. Nobody is perfect and the Kennedy family has given far more than they have taken from this country.
The public rejected the worst of liberalism in 1980, and that, coupled with subsequent “nuclear freeze” and other far-left Dem behavior by Kennedy only sealed his fate thereafter as well.
As to the Kennedys in general:
“I don't see Kennedy as rising above tragedy so much as getting away with something. He will always be an example of how the privileged, be they liberal or conservative, play under a different set of rules.”
Yes, exactly. In the case of the Kennedys specifically, after the plane crash that took the life of one of them, my and my colleagues' reaction at work (in Atlanta, at the time, during the later Clinton years) was that it was another example of the Kennedys believing that the ordinary rules of life (of physics, and so on) don't apply to them.
Probably the most noteworthy implication (if not outright indication) from this award is that Kennedy is truly close to death now.
This awarding of the medal truly demeans the medal's significance now. The question of should a scandal last Forty Years is yes! The death at hand is eternal…………..