Parallels between Albert Camus' The Fall and the Chappaquiddick incident are eerie and irresistible.

"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old [July 2003]. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Senator Edward M. Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."
– Charles Pierce, Jan. 5, 2003, in Boston Globe Magazine.

If only she had lived. To enjoy comforts  of her old age. Marriage. Kids. Family outings. PTA. A career, perhaps in politics, or teaching. Middle class joys. Pity she did not live. She died hideously, gasping for air in an overturned Oldsmobile in a back channel of Chappaquiddick Island off Martha's Vineyard during the dark night of July 18-19, 1969, at the hands of young Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA).

It is a tale told comparatively in fiction by '57 Nobel Prize-winner Albert Camus in The Fall (La Chute), an existential analysis of a self-pitying, self-absorbed lawyer who walked away – in Kennedy's case, swam away — from a woman about to die in a murky, watery grave. Parallels between Camus' fiction and the Chappaquiddick incident are eerie, and irresistible.

Same as Camus' gregarious, ever-do-good lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clemence, Kennedy sought to be an advocate of Everyman, the wretched and the poor, at least in his public persona, perhaps to expiate nagging feelings of guilt. Maybe to overcome, or escape, what fictional Clemence called "a "past peopled with bad dreams."

Kennedy's unrepentant silence about Chappaquiddick, kept up to the very end, means the public — that's us — will never know if he was "successful," or not, at self-redemption. Now the answer is between Edward M. Kennedy and his Maker.

Kopechne, an only child, at age 68, would likely be living out life with a loving husband. They would have grown-up kids, enjoying grandchildren now in their teens, maybe in college. Just what "comfort" would she be afforded in such an "old age" is not spelled out in that sappy article by the Boston Globe Magazine's Pierce, as found at the top of this column. Social Security? Wasn't that FDR's baby?

Regarding Kennedy's indecision at Chappaquiddick in '69, the silence of the liberals, and of the Massachusetts judicial system at the time, has been deafening. It is as though "K," for Kopechne, a loyal RFK campaign worker bee, suddenly became a non-person, tossed aside as no longer, er, useful? Once dead, her rights were trampled by the rich and powerful, an army of Kennedy lawyers circling the wagons on behalf of Their Client. "Power . . . settles everything," says Camus' Jean-Paptiste Clemence at Chapter 3 of The Fall.

Kennedy was eulogized last week to high heaven. Media fell all over themselves, breathlessly, to report on the funeral services, properly accompanied by dirge music, or patriotic themes, praising the Senator's good works, many already recorded in history. It was a love affair in reporting the passing of "their guy," with hardly a mention, appropriately, of his manifest warts.

No mention of his libeling, that without a scintilla of doubt, of Judge Robert H. Bork, in the televised Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in 1987. (I sat in rapt attention at the replays, on public TV in the wee hours, watching the lynching of Bork.) As Judge Bork recites in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (Regan Books, 1997), every sentence in Kennedy's slimy take-down was a pitiful, outrageous lie, easily demonstrable to anyone who cared for the truth. Yet others on that panel, and the media, let all the lies go unchallenged. Ugly politics "won."

Senator Kennedy's performance that day, plus others, displayed a reckless disregard for the truth (plus malice aforethought), two main triggers required for public figure libel under New York Times v. Sullivan (1960), if that scenario could have played out.

At Kennedy's politically star-bedecked funeral last week, nary a mention of Judge Bork. Nor of Mary Jo Kopechne, at least by name. Purge unseen devils of the past?

Behind the often hyperbolic eulogies, some liberals, "up for the game," used the sad occasion of a colleague's death, mind you!, to advance their agenda. (Shades of Senator Paul Wellstone's politicized "memorial service" in a public auditorium in Minneapolis?)

Have they, at last, have no sense of decency, of shame? Pushing a partisan agenda in a time reserved for mourning is strictly bush league. Using a death to promote "Obamacare," the ultimate takeover, over time, of health care insurance by the U.S. Government, is a new low mark of infamy.

Within hours of Kennedy's death, for example, House Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) was emailing the party faithful, the base base, to use Kennedy's death as a wedge tool for promoting "Obamacare." How low-down can it get? No shame, none whatsoever?

Last Thanksgiving, in a singularly reported story (not in MSM), Kennedy quietly visited "K's" grave in Pennsylvania. The visit came after her parents had died, after Kennedy was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Some things, such as facing death or, for some, causing it, are not easily cast aside, as Camus' Clemence discovered, trying endlessly to live down a moment of his fatal indecision. For Ted Kennedy it was Jean-Baptiste Clemence all over again. Life imitates art.

At Kennedy's funeral, fittingly, no ill was said of the dead Senator in the flag-draped casket. Only, stated by multiple speakers, that he was, like the rest of humanity, "imperfect."  Fair enough. Good manners prevailed.

Gushing praise for the "lion of the Senate" — an ironic depiction, if you think of Wizard of Oz's lion — came in torrents.  Minneapolis Star Tribune's front-page headlined its praise as "A Tribune to a Lion." Pages upon pages were slavishly devoted to his long career. It was a love feast, sans significant mention of his victims, notably "K" at Chappaquiddick, and Judge Bork. Civility was properly in vogue.

Seasoned listeners, including many of us geezers, still wonder. Oh, we've read Leo Demore's Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up (Regnery, 1988). It brings up a host of questions unanswered, now never to be. Examples: Why did "Teddy" inexplicably take the car keys from his chauffeur, and drive off a bridge on a road he knew very well, going the wrong way? Then after the tragic accident, not seeking nearby help for his dying passenger? Panic? Some dare call it manslaughter.

Drowning, said the coroner, was the cause of death. More likely, death came by asphyxiation, say experts from afar, and the diver who recovered her body. A precious life-giving bubble of air gave out, it is said, after the airborne Oldsmobile plunged, upside down, into the icy waters. Either way, hers was a nightmarish way to go.

No autopsy was performed. Such deaths cry out for one. No telling what a postmortem would have turned up. Speculation flies off in all directions.

Astonishingly, an article in the mean-spirited, hard-left online Huffington Post speculates that "K" would have somehow approved of her driver's negligence. Melissa Lafsky, ex-lawyer and Dartmouth grad, writes, NOT tongue in cheek, or as parody, that passenger "K":

. . . got into a car driven by a 36-year-old senator with an alcohol problem and a cauldron full of demons, and wound up a controversial footnote in a dynasty.

We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably [emphasis added] being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history [sic!] What we don't know . . . could fill a Metrodome.

Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (a.k.a, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo would had [sic] to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows — maybe she'd feel it was worth it. [emphasis added]

Come again? Read that last line again before puking. It is the true believer speaking out, revealing an ideologically crazed mind-set. Call it loony tunes.  

Crackpot Lafsky — sorry, no other adjective fits – reflects a nutty, otherworldly incoherence here, suggesting ideological lunacy. (It affects both far-out ends of the political spectrum, by the way.) Sometimes far-left liberals' faux "realities" outdo even absurd, existential fiction. Camus himself could not have improved on the plot line. Life imitates art.

In The Fall's denouement, Jean-Baptiste Clemence no longer feels remorse for the screaming woman he chose not to save from drowning. (Did I reveal the ending there, or what?) Still, Clemence the Self-Centered One claimed loudly, except to himself, to live "purely for the sake of others." In such a plot is found the ultimate fatalism of hypocrisy, sort of a J.P. Sartre's No Exit.

Finally, and then I rest my case (promise!), I find among the plaudits for Kennedy this whopper from columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. in the reliably slavishly liberal Washington Post:

He suffered profoundly, made large mistakes and was, to say the least, imperfect. He stood for large purposes, and never ducked tough choices.

Never ducked what? Forget Chappaquiddick. Forget that he hired students to take his college exams. Forget the well-publicized womanizing, his joked-about Dean Martin-like boozing. Hanging out with a nephew accused of rape, in Palm Beach. Dumping a wife suffering from alcoholism. Et cetera. Ah, mere trifles for a larger-than-life guy, a liberal hero.

Darn those dark realities: Keep getting in the way of liberal dreams, idealized revisionist history.

Throughout all time, though, Lady "K" and perhaps Bob Bork, will be remembered, even as the former is put down as a mere "controversial footnote in a dynasty." Plain truth has a way of hanging around, unperturbed by spin, by revisionist party-line history, or hero worship. Thank God for THAT.

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Editors' note: Read Larson's fact-filled prequel to the above article, "Honoring Chappaquiddick Ted."