20 | May 24, 2018 | The highland park landmark Life & Arts hplandmark.com Rain doesn’t put out family campfire event Staff Report An unseasonable front carrying a chill and some rain limited the participation in the Park District of Highland Park’s periodical Family Campout May 11. But a small-but-dedicated group attended Heller Nature Center for the event. The Family Campout is a seasonal park district series running monthly through October. The next event is June 22 at Millard Park, where families can enjoy camping at the beach. Park District Naturalist Meghan Meredith said the campouts are a fun way to get families involved in nature, as participants take short hikes and chat with naturalists before playing games and enjoying marshmallows over a fire. The theme on May 11 was critters and insects, and Meredith and company planning to examine the underside of fallen logs and branches. Registration for the June 22 and subsequent events came be made at www. pdhp.org or by going to the Heller Nature Center, 2821 Ridge Road, Highland Park. Lonny Miller (left) and his son Simon, 5, of Deerfield, warm their hands on the fire at the Family Campout May 11 at Heller Nature Center in Highland Park. Claire Esker/22nd Century Media rating: PG-13 | genre: Drama | run time: 101 minutes ‘Chappaquiddick’ movie brings back memories for reporter Alan P. Henry Freelance Reporter For 60 years, much of the American media has treated the Kennedy family name with reverence, handled family shortcomings with kid gloves, and kept the high-minded fires of Camelot burning bright. All of which makes the well-crafted movie, “Chappaquiddick,” a rare and refreshing awakening. Nearly 50 years after the fact, the movie efficiently exposes the brutal truths of how the Kennedy family and inner circle pulled strings and manipulated events in the week following the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne off Chappaquiddick Island on July 18, 1969. They did so, as the movie lays out using sourced materials, as a means to stymie criminal inquiry and to cynically salvage the future political ambitions of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Throughout the movie, Kennedy (Jason Clarke) oozes an outsized sense of entitlement and stunning moral indifference. The audience learns, many of them most likely for the first time, that Kennedy fled the scene of the accident, went home, slept it off, and did not report it to the police for ten hours, and only then after contacting trusted advisors. “I am not going to be president,” is the first thing he says to the first person he talks to cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms), who months later became the only insider to walk away from the family. When Kopechne’s body is recovered the next morning, it appears she may have not drowned, but rather died of suffocation, which means she could possibly have been saved if help had come quickly. At Kopechne’s funeral, he wears a fake neck brace, telling advisers, “I am winning back the sympathy of the people.” But equally chilling, or perhaps even more so, is the movie’s portrayal of Kennedy’s willing, even enthusiastic, accomplices in coverup and deceit. They remind the public that the powerful and the connected are very good at circling the wagons to protect their own. That goes double for the family patriarch, Joe Kennedy Sr., who twice barks out one word of advice: “Alibi!” On July 25, one week after the accident, the networks give Kennedy the national stage to work his Camelot magic. “If you do it right you might even be more electable,” said Mc- Namara when the scheme is hatched. In the end, the inquest goes nowhere. Kennedy pleads guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and receives a suspended sentence of two months. Power trumps truth. And the waters close over. More than a movie to me I had a personal reason for wanting to see the movie “Chappaquiddick,” that depicted the July 18, 1969 death of young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne and the subsequent reframing of events by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his faithful posse of powerful insiders. I wanted to see how they depicted what I found and reported in the Boston Herald American. In the official inquest into Kopechne’s death, and consistently thereafter, Kennedy said he and Kopechne left a party around 11:15 p.m. on Chappaquiddick island to catch the last ferry back to Martha’s Vineyard. Once on the main road, they took a “wrong turn” onto Dyke Road that led to Dyke Bridge, where he lost control of his car, they plunged into a tidal pool, he escaped and she didn’t. He had taken the wrong turn, he swore under oath, because he had never before been on the island and was therefore “unfamiliar” with the road back to the ferry. Not until January 1980 did anyone publicly contradict his claim. That’s when I, as a reporter with the Herald, as well as a reporter from the New York Post, went to Chappaquiddick and independently talked to the four people who came forward to state that Kennedy had been on the island on numerous previous occasions. They were the Chappaquiddick ferry operator, an island realtor, the Chappaquiddick Beach Club manager and a club member. But my story made a more damning observation as well. The inadvertent “wrong turn,” which I recreated numerous times, was next to impossible to make by mistake. The main asphalt road was banked and curving to the left at the point where it intersected with Dyke Road on the right. A reflecting arrow directed motorists to the left, as the movie correctly portrays. But Dyke Road was not a smooth road easily accessible by an easy turn from the main road, as characterized in the movie. Rather, it was a narrow, rutted dirt road with a steep drop from the main road, surrounded on either side by reeds. To make the 90 degree turn onto Dyke Road would have required the driver to first make an almost complete stop. After writing my story, I was dispatched by my editor to Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, home of Mary Jo’s parents, Joseph and Gwen Kopechne. They had received a $141,000 settlement from Kennedy’s insurance company and subsequently moved to the unincorporated community of Swiftwater. Their front door was blocked by weeds and brush. Walking around to the kitchen door, I first saw a yellowed three-byfive card taped to the doorframe telling reporters to leave them alone. The screen door was closed but the wooden door was open. Inside, in a small kitchen, Joe was cooking on the stove. I identified myself, told him I had talked to four men who said Kennedy was lying about never having been on the island and reminded him that he had always said that he would talk to the press if ever any new evidence came to light. His wife suddenly appeared, told him not to say anything and walked toward the door to close it. But before she did, Joe said: “I knew he was there, no matter what he says about it.” Not Pulitzer Prize material, to be sure, but more than anyone else had gotten out of him to that date. As a postscript, the Kopechnes said in 1994 that Kennedy had never apologized directly to them over his role in their daughter’s death. They both died over a decade ago. As for me, I’d seen and heard everything I needed to know about the “Lion of the Senate.” You too can review a movie for The Highland Park Landmark! All you have to do is see a new movie and send in a 500- to 600-word review of the film to Editor Erin Yarnall at erin@hplandmark. com
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