Mary Jo Kopechne
August 26, 2009
Chappaquiddick | Ted Kennedy | Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick | Edward Kennedy | Kennedy
Mary Jo Kopechne:Every person’s life is like a kaleidoscope. Some pick up another’s life, hold it to the light and all the glass chips fall this way or that. And the person sighting through the cylinder puts it down and turns away, saying they’ve seen it all, when in fact, they’ve only seen one facet, one pattern in another’s life. Thus some remember only one thing or two about the life of another long lived.
But there are other ways to see most of a life in depth, that is, to keep turning the kaleidoscope, letting the glass shards open and reveal, shade and hide, depending on the turn of the scope. Adding up all the patterns, keeping the sum of the brilliant and the dark turns: that’s a view in depth of the life of another.
I’d just lay out a few turns of the kaleidoscope of Ted Kennedy’s life here, a lost story:
Some of the glass shards part, and we see in paradoxically jeweled light that Ted Kennedy was born to a brutally ambitious father, Joe Kennedy, and his mother Rose, was a good Catholic girl, demure and subservient to her wealthy, bellowing husband.
Joe Kennedy true to his obsessive nature, kept his wife pregnant for most of sixteen years, she giving birth, not including miscarriages, to nine children in that time. Ted was the youngest born in 1932.
Ted would be eventually groomed and glossed, and also pressed to follow his father’s example… the ill and clearcut way the older Kennedy conducted himself politically and personally: teaching his male children that Kennedys’ get what they want when they want it how they want it for no other reason that they want it… and it is alright to use most any means to get it.
Another father, with different values, might have pressed an entire set of young Kennedy male offspring, to grow far more seated in heart and soul and clearcut ethics, far sooner.
As a young man, Ted, sent to the top school, Harvard, got kicked out for cheating. He was readmitted, but though some might say he cheated because of laziness, it may also be that his lack of studying and rousting about was his finger flapping in the face of his immensely overbearing father… yet Ted may have tried to fake the grade still fearing his old man.
Ted had reason to fear his father. Being the youngest child in the family, Ted was close to his sisters, and was doted on by Rosemary who was 14 years old when he was born. They laughed together and delighted in each other, and yet when Rosemary began displaying too wild a behavior by her father’s lights… showing interest in sex and sensuality… being too wild for her father’s hyper hypocritical tastes– he himself rumored to have many affairs..
for more details: http://themoderatevoice.com/44426/ted-kennedy-and-mary-jo-kopechne/
