Quote of the Day (Hart Crane, on Emily Dickinson)

“You who desired so much—in vain to ask—
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—
Achieved that stillness ultimately best.”—Hart Crane, “To Emily Dickinson,” in The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (1979)

Part of a sonnet, a tribute by Hart Crane (born on this day in Garrettsville, Ohio) to the Belle of Amherst, these lines evoke the mystery of a life, and represent the ruminations of a fellow poet, whose suicide represents another enigma.

Crane is aiming for something subtle here. The rhythm, the rhyme and especially the dashes bring the reader up short, the way a Dickinson poem does. But the vocabulary is different, the narrator is grave rather than playfully ironic, and the person being addressed is not the reader, as Dickinson did, but the female poet herself, who becomes his muse.

In other words, Crane steals Dickinson’s tricks to find his own voice.

Notice that Crane suggests the circumstances of her life rather than relating them. Her daily chores—tending to her garden, looking after the needs of her parents—are summoned up by “an endless task” and “dignify the labor.”

Like his inspiration, Crane takes a risk with his very first phrase: “You who desired so much.” But what did this famously lifelong spinster desire? Inner freedom? Literary immortality? Love?
Almost immediately sensing the impossibility of answering this question, Crane pulls back: it’s “in vain to ask” what that might be, because of the poet’s reticence.

The quatrain concludes with another ambiguous, one might say Dickinsonian, phrase: “that stillness ultimately best.” Which stillness—the fierce privacy she maintained, for who knows what reason and at what cost, or the peace that comes with death? (As Dickinson put it: “I could not stop for death,/So he kindly stopped for me.”)

The latter possibility is one that must have appeared increasingly sweet to Crane, whose childhood and youth were spent in the company of parents utterly incompatible with each other and whose young manhood was marked by alcoholism and a series of fleeting, mostly homosexual affairs that never really satisfied him. In 1932, he killed himself by leaping from the deck of a ship.

A remark attributed to E.E. Cummings captures Crane in his limits and his promise: "Crane’s mind was no bigger than a pin, but it didn’t matter; he was a born poet."

This Day in World War II History (“Valkyrie” Plot to Kill Hitler Fails)

July 20, 1944—German resistance against the Nazis—a movement in which tens of thousands were jailed, exiled or executed—came the closest to its desired goal when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a high-level staff officer, placed a briefcase containing a bomb under an oak table in Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia.

The count left the room as if to make a call. Shortly thereafter, upon seeing a body carried out, he assumed his plan to assassinate the Fuehrer had succeeded.

But the colonel’s diminished eyesight—the result of war wounds that left him without his left eye, right hand, and two fingers of his left hand—meant he was tragically mistaken, and shortly thereafter he and his circle of co-conspirators were apprehended and executed.

(Official Nazi records indicate that approximately 7,000 were arrested in the immediate wake of the failed coup; nearly 5,800 were executed in the closing months of 1944, with another 5,700 put to death for their involvement the following year.)

Faithful reader, have you seen Valkyrie? Is it worthwhile for me to get it on DVD? The supporting cast interested me, but I found ridiculous even the idea of casting Tom Cruise as the tragic Stauffenberg. When it comes to eyepatch heroes, I’ll take John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn anytime.

I’m not sure how historically accurate this true-life thriller was, but the way I figure it, if you want a good sense of the events and people involved in the conspiracy, the best thing you can do is decidedly old-fashioned: turn to a good book:

* The main action in Peter Quinn’s topnotch detective thriller The Hour of the Cat occurs six years before the Valkyrie conspiracy, but it features one of the most shadowy figures in the July 1944 plot: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Nazi spymaster who engaged in a dangerous double game to bring down the Fuehrer.

* Michael Beschloss’ history The Conquerors is principally about the two American Presidents who demolished the Third Reich and created a durable postwar European order—Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But the deft opening chapter economically but richly summarizes Stauffenberg’s plot and the Allied reaction to it (FDR had no comment—he did not want the Soviets to think he was going back on his “unconditional surrender” pledge, but figured that anything which weakened the Nazis couldn’t be all bad).

* Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945, by Marie Vassiltchikov is written from the point of view of a White Russian émigré princess, many of whose close friends participated in the conspiracy. You won’t find the logistics of the plotters, but will discover the kind of expertly observed atmospherics you’d expect to find in an espionage thriller: the hurried, whispered confidences of plotters; the initial euphoria when it appeared the plot had succeeded; and the dashed hopes upon learning “the Devil” (as Vassiltchikov called Hitler) had in fact survived. An amazing true story, which--big surprise!--Hollywood has completely ignored since its 1987 publication.

Cruise’s faith in Scientology became fodder for controversy during filming, with the Stauffenberg family in particular annoyed by his casting. But the actor’s religious beliefs bother me less than how Hollywood treats the spiritual convictions of the real-life conspirators.

Early in the war, for instance, Canaris had secretly employed the services of the anti-Nazi Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By the time of the unraveling of the Valkyrie plot, the two men had already ended up in prison, but the Nazi hunt for a paper trail around the conspirators uncovered their role, too. Bonhoeffer, like Canaris, was executed in 1945, but his writings would go on to inspire Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu.

The film Valkyrie does not include Bonhoeffer at all among its cast of characters. Just as odd is the omission of the spiritual motives behind the participation of Stauffenberg himself.

The colonel and his family were staunch Roman Catholics; in fact, Marie Vassiltchikov’s diary noted that a fellow conspirator was certain that the colonel was “such a fervent Christian that Masses are surely being said for him all over Germany” after his arrest.

In ransacking Stauffenberg’s papers for evidence, the Gestapo discovered Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”), Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical condemning Nazism, as well as sermons by Bishop Clemens August von Galen, an opponent of Nazism who had loudly denounced the Nazis’ euthanasia program from the pulpit.

Galen’s traditionalism in politics and religion was an outlook shared by Stauffenberg, and Adolf Hitler indicated that, once victory was secured, the bishop would share the same fate—execution—as the courageous staff officer.

You could argue, I suppose, that a script doesn't have time for such background. But that's just an excuse. Character makes action plausible. I can't help but wonder if Hollywood's secular outlook colored how it looked at the background surrounding this great failed opportunity to bring down a tyrant.

Quote of the Day (Horace, Demonstrating Why the Ancients Would Have Been Stunned by Man Walking on the Moon)

“No barrier is too high for mortals;
In our foolhardiness we try
To escalade the very sky.
Still we presumptuously aspire,
And still with unabated fire
Jove hurls his thunderbolts of fire.”—Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), The Odes of Horace, translated by James Michie (1987)

The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC) would not have glimpsed kindred spirits in the Apollo 11 crew that journeyed to the moon on July 20, 1969. Where they were physically fit, he cheerfully admitted to being chubby; where they had ventured far from home, he was content to live on his farm; where they were willing to risk their lives in a vulnerable capsule dwarfed by the immense universe they were penetrating, he was careful to avoid even the suspicion of offending his patron, the Emperor Augustus.

In “One Giant Leap to Nowhere,” a New York Times op-ed yesterday about declining interest in space following the lunar mission, Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe alludes to the “Promethean” nature of the voyage undertaken by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. The Promethean myth is also at the center of Horace’s concern here.

I’m not sure how the ancient Romans or Greeks could have even begun to surmount the bounds of earth. But the Romans, practical engineers par excellence, did have the kind of interest in arenas, infrastructure, and defenses against enemies that underlay America at mid-century. Maybe Horace’s verses here represented a veiled warning to his countrymen on the perils of such impulses.

John F. Kennedy’s bold statement in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon within the decade required eight years and an expenditure of $25 billion. Such a venture today, in a country financially hard-pressed, would be absolutely inconceivable.

In 1978, historian Michael Hart wrote a book called The Hundred: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. He put JFK on the list (#81) solely because the President fired up Americans’ interest in going to the moon.

Ironically, however, we know now that Kennedy, as rational and cautious a man (in his policies, anyway) as any who ever occupied the White House, was not interested in the scientific aspects of space, according to Craig Nelson’s new history, Rocket Men. He came to his full-throated advocacy of the cause at least partly for the same reason that he did the civil-rights movement: because of its link to the Cold War.

Increasingly as his administration went on, Kennedy grasped the complications of persuading newly decolonized nations to join “the long twilight struggle” against the Soviet Union when America allowed a substantial amount of its residents to live without the rights they deserved.

Similarly, as he assumed office, even while listened to the best scientific minds in the country, he did not find anything intrinsically valuable about exploring the stars. But he became convinced that, by losing the “space race,” the Third World would wonder if America really enjoyed the superiority it claimed over the Soviet bloc.

Ironically, the man who persuaded the President about the necessity of the space program was his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson. I wrote “ironically” for a couple of reasons:

* If the President’s brother Bobby had had his way, Johnson would not have been able to catch JFK’s ear on even this matter, but would have been entirely consigned to attending funerals for world leaders.

* When LBJ became president, he could have diminished funds for the space program. Instead, he maintained them at full strength.

* In both the book and film adaptation of The Right Stuff, LBJ comes across as a hysterically egocentric politico—someone who tells associates that the Russians “have our peckers in their pockets” and who fumes in his limo as shy astronaut wife Annie Glenn refuses to admit him, his entourage and his media circus into her home—rather than as a shrewd, forceful and effective proponent of the space program.

While we commemorate the space program today, a few other points:

* I’ve always been fascinated by autographs and their historical and financial value. Since 1994, Neil Armstrong’s, according to a Boston Globe article last week, has risen to the point where his signature is now the most sought-after by a living human being. The former astronaut spurred this upsurge because, after 1994, he stopped signing autographs out of concern over forgeries.

* Armstrong’s hometown is Wapakoneta, Ohio, which now maintains in his honor the Armstrong Air and Space Museum. I myself had occasion to visit this site on my passage through the town more than 20 years ago, when another resident married my oldest brother. I’m sure that Armstrong regarded his lunar mission as the great adventure of his life, but for sheer daring I doubt it can match my sister-in-law’s decision to become a part of our family.

* Perhaps as good a reason as any to journey back to the stars—not just to the moon, but to Mars, the next logical destination—is not what it teaches about other heavenly bodies but about what it shows about the beauty and fragility of our own planet. The image accompanying today’s post shows, from the lunar surface, the "earthrise." Breathtaking, right? A similar picture taken during the Apollo 8 mission gave tremendous impetus to the environmental movement, according to an NPR story. It can’t hurt to have another such reminder today.

The fear that Horace expressed in his poem concerned the tendency toward hubris, the belief that human beings can solve all things, that the laws of nature and history don’t apply, or at least that they can be bent to our will. The Vietnam War—a conflict catastrophically widened by a liberal Democratic administration—was an example of how ignoring limits courts catastrophe. The lunar landing—a triumph of ingenuity and daring conducted under the same administration—likewise sought to surmount limits.

Perhaps the American mission in space succeeded in the 1960s because, virtually every step of the way, we wanted to know every possible danger so we would not be unprepared, alone and in the vast darkness of space.

After all, it sometimes gets lost, in the triumphalistic narratives and commentaries of the past week commemorating this epochal event, that the moon looked, according to Apollo 11 pilot Collins, like a “withered, sun-seared peach pit.” "There is no comfort to it," the atronaut continued; "it is too stark and barren; its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only.”

This Day in Rock History (Elvis Presley’s 1st Singles Released on Sun Records)

July 19, 1954—Sometimes the greatest revolutions are produced by people who don’t know enough not to play by the traditional rules. So it proved in 1954, when self-taught owner-producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records decided he’d like to pump up the amp and echo while tinkering with blues and country styles. If he had a plan for success, it was maddeningly vague and inarticulate—something about tapping “resources that weren’t being tapped.”

That day, 19-year-old Elvis Presley and a pair of studio musicians burst on the national music scene with two singles hatched by Phillips: “That’s Alright, Mama” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

Like a new scientific compound, rock ‘n’ roll had been catalyzed from existing materials into a product that would change everything.

For a year, Phillips wasn’t quite sure what to make of this high school grad who hailed originally from Tupelo, Miss. The kid came in initially because he wanted to cut a record (opinion divided later over whether the young man did so for his beloved mom Gladys or just to hear the sound of his own voice).

Phillips was intrigued enough to invite Presley back. Perhaps the producer figured that he wasn’t in a position where he should turn away business, in any case. After all, his downtown Memphis studio had opened only five years ago with the slogan, "We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime"—just the type of motto if you were trying to parlay a shoestring operation into one with a reputation for innovation.

Invited back in May 1954, Presley showed up a month later. His first attempt behind the mike at his audition, a song Phillips was working on called “Without You,” wasn’t a success. Phillips urged him to try songs he felt comfortable with.

A second audition, occurring on the Fourth of July and featuring two musicians Phillips knew, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, likewise failed to set off fireworks. Moore agreed with Phillips that a full-fledged recording session was necessary to see if they had the musical equivalent of fools’ gold, or something else.

The night after Independence Day, the trio was back in the studio with Phillips. Despite his efforts at loosening them up, nothing was clicking on the tracks they tried: a Bing Crosby tune “Harbor Lights” and the country-music ballad, “I Love You Because.”

During a break, Presley picked up a guitar and started goofing off. On the Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup blues song “That’s Alright Mama,” Moore and Black provided an uptempo beat.

Phillips couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This was the elusive new sound he was seeking. “What are you doing?” he asked. They didn’t know. “Well, back it up, try to find a place to start, and do it again," he commanded.

When they turned to Bill Monroe’s 1945 bluegrass hit, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Phillips knew, unlike Columbus, that he’d discovered something new. “Hell, that's different. That's a pop song now.”

Sun Records would eventually lure Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich because of Presley’s success. But Phillips, needing to secure capital for these rockabilly artists, felt he needed to pedal his initial find. So he sold Presley’s contract to RCA Records.

In 2001, the PBS documentary series American Masters did a segment on Sun Records, Good Rockin’ Tonight, along with a CD tie-in featuring Paul McCartney, Ben Folds Five, Mark Knopfler, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Matchbox Twenty, and other rock ‘n’ roll luminaries covering the great hits at the groundbreaking studio. Both the video and audio products are well worth your purchase.

Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on Christ and Grief)

“Arise sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,
Christ’s resurrection thine may be;
Do not by hanging down break from the hand
Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee;
Arise, arise;
And with his burial linen dry thine eyes:
Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might,
When grief
Draws tears, or blood, not lack an handkerchief.”—George Herbert, “The Dawning”

This week, I thought I would conduct a little experiment with the “Quote of the Day.” For every day this week, I’ll spotlight some verses—something that this blog, I’ve come to see, does not do enough.

My experiment was inspired by two sources. One was reading, in an essay by David McCullough in an anthology called The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian quotes the advice that one of his recent subjects, John Adams, gave to son and future President John Quincy: “Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life." And then this great line: “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

(Young Adams took his father’s advice to heart—really to heart—confessing later in life, “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet.” The subject of his major poetic work, Dermot Macmorrogh, Or, the Conquest of Ireland. an Historical Tale of the Twelfth Century, has great interest for me, but it’s probably just as well that he didn’t continue in this line, as reviewers were pretty savage about his work. Like his later follower in the Oval Office, Abraham Lincoln, Adams found a more natural outlet for his writing talent in prose, particularly as exercised in the law and politics.)

The other inspiration for this experiment was a short story writer-novelist-memoirist, Chris Offutt. At a writers’ workshop I attended a decade ago, he advised members of his fiction-writing class to read some lines of poetry every day, because they made you aware of the weight of words.

For the first entry this week, I thought I would start with the above quote—in the manner that John Adams recommended—with the English 17th century “metaphysical” poet George Herbert. It fulfills my own inclination toward spiritual quotes on Sunday. Perhaps just as important, for baby boomers with aging parents, it serves as a powerful reminder of what needs to be borne in mind throughout their struggles—the enduring grace provided by Christ.

This Day in Literary History (Horatio Alger, Creator of Rags-to-Riches Fables, Dies)

July 18, 1899—Nearly a decade after his enormously popular “dime novels” about boys who, to use one of his titles, “Strive and Succeed,” Horatio Alger Jr. died at his sister’s house in his mid-sixties.

The onetime ferociously prolific writer instructed his sister Augusta not only to keep the details of his death private but to destroy as many of his papers as possible. She complied with his wishes. But she could not hide what he undoubtedly had feared, after more than three decades, would resurface, the reason for writing career: the pedophilia charges that brought an abrupt end to his religious ministry in Massachusetts.

The “Horatio Alger Myth”—i.e., that upward social mobility is one of the enduring promises of American life—remains powerful but highly contested even today. The man who promoted the idea more assiduously than anyone else illustrated it through countless stories of young boys on the streets of cities such as New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Little did his readers know that Horatio Alger had more than a passing interest in boys. After a period of writing tepidly received poems and stories, the former Class Poet of Harvard became minister at the First Unitarian Church and Society of Brewster, Massachusetts.

After a year, however, the popular young minister was confronted with allegations that he had engaged in "practicing on the boys of the church at different times deeds of gross immorality, and a most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.”

Rather than deny or explain it, Alger listened to the complaint, according to the shocked members of his congregation, “with [the] apparent calmness of an old offender.” He left town on the next train.

Alger went to New York, where he took an interest in youthful bootblacks, peddlers and newspaper boys, taking his meals with them at the Newsboys’ Lodging House. His first rags-to-riches story, Raggedy Dick, was inspired by these encounters.

Total sales of Alger’s books have ranged from 100 to 250 million copies, and he was so popular at one point that his name appeared on the covers of books twice. It’s a safe bet, though, that few of his readers over the years have known of his checkered career.

Quote of the Day (James Reston, on Chappaquiddick)

"Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family."— New York Times columnist James Reston, on the Chappaquiddick accident that killed Ted Kennedy’s passenger Mary Jo Kopechne on July 18, 1969, quoted in John F. Stacks, Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism (2002)

Legendary journalist Reston was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard when he was alerted to the discovery of the body of Mary Jo Kopechne off a Chappaquiddick bridge. The quote above was written as the lead of the story he phoned in, until wiser heads at the Times prevailed and drastically rewrote the piece.

Reston did not, of course, commit grammatical errors, nor even errors of fact. No, the issue was a lack of perspective that amounted to a moral failure (one that, admittedly, other newsmen committed, including a young Dan Rather, who pronounced the incident an example of “one tragedy after another for the Kennedy family”). The veteran Reston, a kind of father-confessor to distressed politicians (like President Kennedy after his disastrous Vienna summit with Khrushchev), never got around to naming Ms. Kopechne till the fourth paragraph.

The deaths of Joe Jr., Kathleen, Jack and Bobby Kennedy were, of course, tragedies that “struck” the rich, politically powerful Massachusetts family. But at Chappaquiddick, no member of the clan died. Ted Kennedy caused the death for a young woman unlucky enough to come into the family orbit.

Like Bill Clinton, another brilliant politician of matching recklessness, Senator Kennedy has benefited from a right wing so ready to pummel him against the ropes over every little thing that they exhaust themselves in the process. Their constant screeching over real and imagined sins by the senator has made it easy to ignore fleeting moments when they actually make sense.

From the moment the incident burst into the public eye until the end of Senator Kennedy’s Presidential run 11 years later, the establishment media speculated on what it foretold about how he would react in a crisis. The right wing painted a middle-aged roué, undone by the family weakness for broads and/or booze. Kennedy’s defenders excused the occurrence at the bridge as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise sterling public career.

All three groups missed something essential about the midnight plunge off the bridge and the controversial events that followed—specifically, whether the treatment accorded the Senator met the standard of equality before the law.

In the 1962 primary campaign that launched him on his nearly half-century in the Senate, Ted Kennedy was told by his Democratic opponent, Eddie McCormick, “If your name were Edward Moore [rather than Edward Moore Kennedy], your candidacy would be a joke.”

The McCormick standard can apply here. If the name on his expired driver’s license had been Edward Moore rather than Edward Moore Kennedy, do you really think that Police Chief Dominick Arena would have been so deferential in not pressing him about why he had waited so long in notifying authorities about the event? If it had been your name on the license rather than Kennedy’s, do you think you could have expected similar courtesy from law enforcement authorities?

Let’s put this another way: What if Richard Nixon, not Ted Kennedy, had been behind the wheel of the black Oldsmobile sedan? Would Kennedy’s defenders so readily accept Nixon’s explanation for what happened that night? Or do you think they might have screamed “Cover-up!”?

(I write this as one who believed that Nixon defiled American politics from the moment he ran for public office, that he was a threat to the Constitution, and that his forced resignation was essential in holding him and future Presidents to account.)

What if the body submerged under water had been not Mary Jo Kopechne, but someone closer to you—a friend, a sister, a daughter? Could you shrug off the events of that night so readily?

It needs to be said: Nobody ends up in the legal and political jeopardy in which Kennedy found himself simply because of being in the company of an attractive young woman not his wife. Somebody ends up imperiled if the woman dies, if you made no serious attempt to get help immediately, and if enough time elapsed between the accident and the notification of authorities for you to sober up in a hurry and secure legal assistance.

A specious moral calculus exists in another sense concerning the fallout from the incident. Kennedy, we are told, has spent his subsequent career atoning for this unfortunate event. The massive amount of legislation he championed—the good he has done—outweighs any harm that befell to one unfortunate young woman.

Something interesting happened between 40 years ago and today. The shock of a Kennedy doing something legally actionable was such that many, if not most, Americans at the time couldn’t accept that possibility—and certainly not his Massachusetts constituents, who gave him overwhelmingly support after a televised address, in which he said he would abide by their decision as to whether or not he should stay in office.

Forty years on, I don’t know if anyone finds Kennedy’s explanation for his actions on that night credible. He himself called how he acted “irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable.”

Conservatives, though loudest, have not been alone in decrying Kennedy’s conduct at Chappaquiddick.

The feminist Suzannah Lessard, in a much-discussed Washington Monthly article on the eve of his Presidential campaign, saw Chappaquiddick as part of a larger “case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed.”

In his account The Last Kennedy, left-wing journalist Robert Sherrill (long associated with The Nation) called the aftermath of the accident “the most brilliant cover-up ever achieved in a nation where investigative procedures are well developed and where the principles of equal justice prevail, at least during some of those moments where people are watching.”

Let’s admit much, if not all, that Kennedy’s admirers claim in his defense (I, for one, don’t mind—most, maybe all, of the following is true):

* He has helped to pass more progressive legislation—immigration reform, civil rights, freedom of information, health care, environmental, and labor law—than virtually anyone else in the history of the Senate;

* Unlike brothers Jack and Bobby, he treated the Senate as an institution worth mastering rather than as a fast steppingstone to something bigger;

* In an increasingly partisan age, he became an indispensable bridge-builder to the GOP;

* He is a man of surpassingly good humor and loyalty who has even stayed for hours by the bedside of gravely ill friends;

* Particularly after his remarriage, to Victoria Reggie in 1992, he has acted with greater personal restraint.

And yet, after all of this, one has to reject the notion of him as the Lord Jim of the Senate, searching endlessly for atonement.

To start with, the contention of Kennedy’s supporters that he is a changed man implies that there was indeed something wrong with his conduct at Chappaquiddick.

But Kennedy’s statement only admits that he was dazed after the car went off the bridge. He has steadfastly denied being drunk, even though numerous witnesses described him as drinking from early on in the day.

Moreover, it is odd that Kennedy insisted on driving Kopechne back to her hotel room even though his own driver was present at the party and was available to drive her back. Other aspects of his story (e.g., his claim that there were no lights on at any cottage in the area) were contradicted by residents afterward.

The path to expiation, then, could start with a statement of the truth. But that has not been forthcoming and at this stage won’t be.

Second, Kennedy never renounced power, as did British cabinet minister John Profumo after his notorious scandal in 1963. The disgraced minister could have provided an alternative to how to live one’s life, post-scandal: quiet, continual charity work in London’s East End.

But in the end, power--his power, and his chances to exert greater power--mattered more to Kennedy than the truth.

Time allows people to put the actions of a life in a wider context, but it also runs the risk of making one forgetful. In Kennedy's case, his greater sense of personal responsibility in the last two decades has blinded many to what must be kept in mind when making any final assessment of his career: the double immunity he enjoyed as a member of a glamorous, wealthy, and powerful clan and as a member of a Senate that is constitutionally disinclined to call him to account because of their own multiple sins involving ego, abuse of authority, assumption of deference, and, of course, addictions to sex and drink.

Kennedy’s actions prevented him from reaching the Presidency that so many were predicting for him 40 years ago, but it did not lose him the office he already had. Many other politicians since then have been drummed out of their jobs immediately for far less egregious offenses.

Ted Kennedy lost his hopes for higher office 40 years ago, but Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life. In all the millions of words about the senator, so little remains known about the passenger in his car that night. But that is just another aspect of the same moral myopia that led Reston to believe that tragedy had struck the Kennedy family rather than the Kopechnes.