‘Chappaquiddick’ Is A Brutally Honest Movie Laying Bare The Kennedys For Who

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At this point in history, and speaking as someone who was alive during Chappaquiddick and has read a bunch of books on the Kennedys since then, is there anyone in USA who is NOT aware at this point of all the problems the Kennedy family had with women and Chappaquiddick and everything else?

This was not exactly covered up - it would rear its head every time Ted was considered as a possible presidential candidate, which happened several times. I seem to recall once he almost got the nomination, even, in spite of Chappaquiddick.

Ted Kennedy has been dead for a long time. The younger Kennedy grandchild who seems to be a rising star in the Dem party was certainly not involved in all this. Seems like a moot point, or a historical curiosity that will appeal to those who like “Mad Men” - era films.
 
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If Ted Kennedy were a conservative, this movie would have been made a long time ago. For that matter, if Bill Clinton were a conservative, we would not have to wait a few more decades for the movie about HIM.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
At this point in history, and speaking as someone who was alive during Chappaquiddick and has read a bunch of books on the Kennedys since then, is there anyone in USA who is NOT aware at this point of all the problems the Kennedy family had with women and Chappaquiddick and everything else?

This was not exactly covered up - it would rear its head every time Ted was considered as a possible presidential candidate, which happened several times. I seem to recall once he almost got the nomination, even, in spite of Chappaquiddick.

Ted Kennedy has been dead for a long time. The younger Kennedy grandchild who seems to be a rising star in the Dem party was certainly not involved in all this. Seems like a moot point, or a historical curiosity that will appeal to those who like “Mad Men” - era films.
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Ted Kennedy is passed, but hypocrisy and cruelty to women sadly are not past. The things the Kennedy’s did to women are inexcusable. If this movie serves to highlight the hypocrisy of powerful men who make a pretense of “women’s rights”, then it serves a purpose.

People jump up and down about lots of things, but we don’t like to jump up and down about hypocrisy much. And it is core to the problem.
 
I plan on seeing this movie. I was 17 at the time and vaguely remember the incident.
 
Fine, let’s jump up and down about hypocrisy going on right now today and involving people who are alive.
Plenty of women being abused right now on the Hill.
I believe some representative was just resigning yesterday over this.

Ted Kennedy has been dead for a very long time, so he can’t fall from grace or be put in prison. And this story is 50 years old and everybody has known it for decades on end. It was front page news when it was going on. It’s also not exactly news that politicians did a lot of rot with women and continue to do so.

So I’m not seeing how it is doing much good for the current situation of abusing women, or addressing hypocrisy. it might still be an entertaining movie, but it’s not exactly a stop the presses moment.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
At this point in history, and speaking as someone who was alive during Chappaquiddick and has read a bunch of books on the Kennedys since then, is there anyone in USA who is NOT aware at this point of all the problems the Kennedy family had with women and Chappaquiddick and everything else?
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Not everyone is up to speed on them.
 
Everybody knows it? My daughters in their 20’s never even heard of him, or the incident.
My Irish husband still raves about the Kennedy’s…they were sainted while they were alive in Ireland. He recalls families having John’s picture next to the Sacred Heart in homes in the village.
I’ll watch the movie. I have not read one book about them. I frankly didn’t care for any of them, politically.
I don’t’ feel like viewing will somehow lessen them. HIstory should be historical, not emotional
 
I think the Kennedys did a lot of good things, and that JFK was on balance a good President, but I’m pretty well aware of all the bad and misguided things they did too.
I used to see Ted and other ones who were still living around DC, and one of the Kennedy family, I think it was one of Bobby’s many kids, was lieutenant governor of my state for a few years.
When Ted died, I went to his office on the Hill and paid respects and then went to see his casket roll past the Capitol (almost got into a fistfight with some woman in the crowd who was mad because I was blocking her view) and then had a beer at the Irish Times while watching the hearse roll him to the cemetery on TV.

As an Irish-American, the Kennedys are like members of my extended family…doesn’t mean I always love everything they do any more than I love or approve of everything done by the blood members of my extended family, who have done their share of criminal acts or stuff I personally would consider immoral. I have also not been a perfect person morally myself in the past.

I guess there will always be people who did not bother to learn their history or want to be willfully blind to someone’s faults. People are human, and politicians often have some huge character flaws.

If people want to go see a Chappaquiddick movie in this day and age and find it to be new news, then that’s their choice…maybe they should have read a few books or watched a few documentaries so they would be up on this stuff, since the Kennedys seem to be in books, magazines and on TV about every year to this day, and not always in a positive way.
 
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Well, Teddy died in 2009, so I’m not sure that 9 years is a “very long time” in terms of political history. But beyond that, as a life-long Massachusetts resident, I distinctly recall a bumper sticker that was circulating during his 1962 Senate campaign: “I back Jack, but Teddy isn’t ready.” If only that sentiment had prevailed.
 
It’s probably better that Ted didn’t become President.
My mother always thought that he would have probably been assassinated and that it would have been very hard on his mother.

My big memories of him as someone who never lived in Massachusetts include the Anita Hill hearings (where we were all kind of wondering how he could sit there with a straight face in view of his and Jack’s past antics) and the time he testified at his nephew’s rape trial (a masterful job of dramatic testimony, though the nephew was almost certainly guilty IMHO).
 
Yeah, I can see where they would not be at all relevant to today’s Irish in Ireland.

For Irish-Americans of a certain generation, they are still relevant. I think the popularity of “Mad Men” also caused a whole new generation of Americans (not necessarily Irish-Americans) to get all interested in that early-60s era; many people are fans of the clothes, the art, the music, the general style, and see the Kennedys as celebrity examples of all that.

Also, JFK was kind of the gold standard for a young President for a long time, until Obama came along and was in many ways seen as the new and improved JFK (thank God he wasn’t assassinated).

I am constantly amused by the number of “special issues” that Life and Time and other magazines that once were news magazines, but now rely pretty much on selling special issues to bring in the $$$, continue to run on the Kennedys. It seems like every six months there’s a new issue on the Kennedys hitting the stands. I guess they still sell. But given the constant (over)exposure of them, I still find it a bit mind-boggling that anybody would not have at least a dim awareness of Chappaquiddick.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Yeah, I can see where they would not be at all relevant to today’s Irish in Ireland.

For Irish-Americans of a certain generation, they are still relevant. I think the popularity of “Mad Men” also caused a whole new generation of Americans (not necessarily Irish-Americans) to get all interested in that early-60s era; many people are fans of the clothes, the art, the music, the general style, and see the Kennedys as celebrity examples of all that.

Also, JFK was kind of the gold standard for a young President for a long time, until Obama came along and was in many ways seen as the new and improved JFK (thank God he wasn’t assassinated).

I am constantly amused by the number of “special issues” that Life and Time and other magazines that once were news magazines, but now rely pretty much on selling special issues to bring in the $$$, continue to run on the Kennedys. It seems like every six months there’s a new issue on the Kennedys hitting the stands. I guess they still sell. But given the constant (over)exposure of them, I still find it a bit mind-boggling that anybody would not have at least a dim awareness of Chappaquiddick.
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Probably because Ted never became President. I first heard about Chappaquiddick during the 1976 election season, and believe it kept haunting him throughout his career until he finally realized the Presidency just wasn’t gonna happen for him. I still find it hard to believe people kept re-electing him considering his history, but what do I know? I doubt that my 20-year old would recognize the term Chappaquiddick and certainly wouldn’t connect it to a politician. We don’t live in Massachussetts, and while we are catholic (and part Irish), we never elevated the Kennedy Family to royalty in our family. Although in some ways I admire their dedication to public service, that’s about as far as it goes. Personally, from a public policy POV, I believe that the loss of Robert was greater than the loss of John.

On the topic of the movie, I think the victim’s family fought for this movie to be made. Even though I believe her parents are deceased, other family wanted people to understand she was more than just “a girl who died”. She had a name, a career, and her life meant something.
 
JanetF said:
I still find it hard to believe people kept re-electing him considering his history, but what do I know?
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They elected Bill Clinton twice and Donald Trump once, and there are a whole host of congressmen who committed various sexual peccadilloes and still got re-elected. In 1989, Rep. Barney Frank admitted to paying a male prostitute for sex and then hiring said male prostitute as a “personal aide”, and then the guy ran a prostitution service out of Frank’s apartment for a while. And Barney Frank was still getting re-elected right up to the 2000s.

People who vote for these guys simply don’t care all that much what they are doing in the bedroom as long as they bring benefits, like jobs and funds, to their constituents. A lot of the people voting are likely engaging in sexual hanky-panky of their own and don’t see it as a big deal if somebody else does.
 
And I don’t get that either! If they can’t be counted on to make sound moral decisions in their personal lives, how can they be trusted in their public lives?
 
It’s probably a mudslinging movie.

Ted Kennedy is dead and not here to defend himself, so he’s fair game.

It was a tragic accident, and yes, Ted got off more easily than others would have.

But then, so did Laura Bush when she killed a person while driving.

Will we see a movie about her ?

Jim
 
In USA we have had a few politicians fall from grace because they did something sexually bad, usually before they got entrenched as President or long-time congressman from district X or whatever. We didn’t used to be as okay with this stuff as people are in Europe. We’ve also had several politicians in the last couple of decades whose careers were pretty much destroyed by sex scandals, including Gary Hart, John Edwards, and Eliot Spitzer. In the case of Edwards and Spitzer, they were also accused of misusing funds in connection with their affairs.

It’s a bit baffling to me how some politicians like Bill Clinton just get away with all kinds of rot, but others don’t. I tend to think it has to do with how many powerful friends the person has in high places. In Spitzer’s case, the rumor was that he went after a highly placed politician and was trying to get him on a corruption charge, and the politician used his own connections to do Spitzer in. Spitzer apparently hadn’t made enough political friends during his time as governor to be able to fight off the attack.
 
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This story is so well known that it is a punch line.

The inability of certain factions to let the Kennedy family move past things does smack of the anti-Catholicism that haunted JFK’s candidacy.

Ted Kennedy is dead, he has faced his eternal judgement and we should let his family have some peace.
 
I totally reject the contention that calling-out the lockstep pro-abortion Kennedys in political life today is in any conceivable way “anti-Catholic.”
 
Unfortunately, this is the kind of movie that had to wait to be released until after the man and most of the rest of the old guard are dead, in order to avoid potential lawsuits, as I am positive that like virtually all historical Hollywood movies, some liberties have been taken with the story.
 
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