Noemie Emery: Ted Kennedy's enablers at Chappaquiddick

“This one’s for you, Mary Jo.” So read signs in the Bay State in 2010, when Republican Scott Brown won the Senate seat opened up by the passing of Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Even before the film “Chappaquiddick,” the stain scrubbed at so hard by some of those featured in the movie had never been wholly erased.

The senator, weak as he was, was hardly the worst of the people depicted. That honor goes to the fixers, who showed up to “help” him escape the consequences of his actions. They saved his career, but not his reputation. And they gave to themselves the stigma they merit, and to his dead brothers a guilt-by-relation they did not deserve.

By 1969, when the accident happened, the Kennedys had been through a series of tortured transitions, when one of its sons met a violent ending, and the expectations around him passed on to the next: Joseph "Joe" P. Kennedy Jr. was killed in the war, and the torch passed to John F. Kennedy; JFK was killed, and the torch passed to Robert "Bobby" F. Kennedy; Bobby was murdered, and the torch passed to Ted, by whom it was dropped.

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