"Jason Clarke is Ted Kennedy," declares The Daily Beast headline, "The Aussie Actor on the Controversial 'Chappaquiddick.' Based on Clarke's remarks to the Beast, he sure sounds like him.
Daily Beast reporter Liza Foreman tells readers in her lede that she was "not all that familiar" with Chappaquiddick, the remote island where Kennedy drove off a bridge late at night with a young woman who drowned in the car while Kennedy escaped. Clarke, who previously appeared in Zero Dark Thirty and The Great Gatsby, will star in a movie about the incident set for release next year.
Kennedy failed to report the accident until the next morning and was later given a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of a fatal accident. The death of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker to Kennedy's late brother Robert, shadowed Ted Kennedy for the rest of his life and arguably kept him from ever winning the presidency.
Clarke has a coincidence linking him to the accident -- he was born July 17, 1969, the day before it occurred, heading into the weekend that Apollo astronauts first walked on the moon.
Here's Clarke's Kennedyesque interpretation on what took place at Chappaquiddick, as quoted by Foreman --
"It changed a lot of things," he said. "Even the move that enabled Ted's legal team to keep the press and public out of hearing into whether there would be a grand jury. They made a new law, and then Nixon used the same law to run away from Watergate."
Albeit without leaving someone to perish in his car while he sobered up, but I digress. Back to Clarke on the accident itself --
"It was a critical night," he added. "It was a really long night for Ted and a long day. I mean we start off from Washington, then Martha's Vineyard for the boat race. There is the beach, then the boat race, then the whole party, and then the accident, and then the whole night to the next morning. So it was a long night for Ted. Ted had a rough night."
That he surely did, but there was someone else whose night was far worse -- the young woman who made the fatal mistake of getting into a car with Ted Kennedy behind the wheel after numerous highballs.
Incidentally, when Clarke says "there is the beach," he's referring to the shoreline on the eastern coast of Chappaquiddick where Kopechne and the other so-called Boiler Room gals from the RFK campaign went swimming on the afternoon before the party. Kennedy was at the beach with them, and all would have passed over the Dike Bridge to and from the water. In his statement to police after the accident, Kennedy claimed to have made a wrong turn onto a dirt road that led to the Dike Bridge, even though he had already been on the same road earlier that day.
Of particular interest is whether the movie will depict Kopechne's desperate efforts to stay alive inside a submerged car after Kennedy fled the scene, more intent on saving his political career than the life of his passenger who once toiled for his brother.
The scuba diver who recovered Kopechne's body, John Farrar, found her situated with her head titled upward in the footwell of the backseat, where an air pocket would have formed in the overturned vehicle. Farrar conducted his own study of the accident and concluded that Kopechne died of suffocation, not drowning. In Leo Damore's 1988 book Senatorial Privilege, Damore describes Farrar's conclusions --
Mary Jo Kopechne had assumed "a conscious position" in the back seat. "She was rebreathing her own air. The oxygen content was lowering from 21 percent as she used it up and replaced it with carbon dioxide," Farrar said. "As the CO2 builds up, you breath heavier and heavier; the emotional trauma is extensive. Try putting a plastic bag over your head and breathing. You can feel the anxiety coming over you. Then try to imagine that bag held over your head by a 300-pound wrestler, and think of having to struggle to get out of that situation knowing you might be breathing your last. It's a very, very scary situation. The anxiety that sets in is just unbelievable."
The length of time a pocket of air remained in a submerged automobile was a matter "no human being can swear to, but she could have lived for a good while after the car went off the bridge," Farrar estimated." She was alive, easily an hour."
Sounds like Kopechne's night was a tad rougher than Kennedy's.
Foreman asked Clarke how the accident affected "the family" --the Kennedys, not the Kopechnes --
"It was particularly strange for the father, for Joe, you know," he said. "He had lost three sons, and this is the weekend that we're gonna land on the moon, which is what Jack set in motion, and you know he gets a phone call from the last remaining son in the middle of the night."
"Ted represented a lot of hope -- the Great Left Hope," he added.
If only he hadn't made that Bad Right Turn in heading back to the beach.
To his credit, Clarke is not entirely unwilling to let Kennedy off the hook, regardless of that rough night he so bravely endured --
"He's much-abused, maligned, and, I think, misconstrued as well as rightly blamed in this. But his impact and influence on American society is huge."
In Clarke's words, the film "paints a very straight-up picture. I mean, it's a horrific event and what happened is horrific. And then it's all the more confusing I think in confronting it, when you put it in the context of his life as a whole."
As for Kennedy's alleged middle of the night phone call to his stroke-paralyzed father who died four months later, count me as skeptical. Sounds like artistic license on the part of filmmakers, reminiscent of the call an inebriated Nixon didn't make to David Frost on the night before their final interview in 1977 -- but staged in Frost/Nixon nonetheless. I'm looking forward to seeing whether Chappaquiddick shows one of the first phone calls Kennedy actually made after the accident, to his girlfriend Helga Wagner for the number of brother-in-law and family consigliere Stephen Smith, now badly needed for damage control.
