Dominick Dunne died yesterday of bladder cancer. I enjoyed his articles in Vanity Fair about crime stories and celebrity gossip. Sometimes he went over the edge and his gossip got a bit tacky. Sometimes he was a bit too self congratulatory. Still, he provided entertainment and even a bit of wisdom. For years, I sent subscriptions to Vanity Fair to family members who enjoyed the Dunne pieces most of all. My mother was a devotee of his stories until she died in 2001. All in all, I think he contributed more to the store of human worth than another famous person who died this week. Sadly, Vanity Fair went off the rails during the Bush Administration and I have not subscribed for a few years. The loss of Dunne cuts the final tie I had with the magazine.
Here is the VF obituary and here is his final article for the magazine.
As for Ted Kennedy, Mark Steyn has it down cold.
As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: “Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”
That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen — and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: “Like all figures in history — and like those in the Bible, for that matter — Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
The basic facts about the incident are here. There is simply no excuse for Ted Kennedy’s behavior. Even treason was not beneath him.
What the political left simply cannot understand is that this sort of enabling behavior toward their fatally flawed heroes leads the reasonable person to have no doubt that “death panels” will be invoked in the worthy cause of health “reform.” After all, if one life is expendable in the quest for Ted Kennedy’s legacy, why not thousands ?