I was on my Facebook page yesterday, where some of my facebook contacts were commenting nastily about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, which prompted me to ask there, rhetorically, about whether Dick Cheney will be remembered when he dies for torturing suspected terrorists to death. But it's Facebook, where people are all over the place politically, and which is a place where I don't necessarily want to be too overtly political. This is a revision of something I posted here and then deleted.
I know that some may think that this is an inappropriate diary, but I'm not so sure that it is. I am acknowledging Ted Kennedy's human frailties, even though I greatly admired him and always will. But more importanly, I am doing something that Ted Kennedy did, which is to speak truth to power. When right wing bullies attack Ted Kennedy, they are, it seems to me, really attacking what he stood for. They are attacking progressives. So, my choice is to stand up by hitting back at their own icon, namely, President Ronald Reagan.
Seeing and listening to the predictable responses by the right to Ted Kennedy's passing, and particularly to the Chappaquiddick incident (which, truth be told, is hard for even Ted Kennedy fans to defend), I am reminded of the great double standard, in which IOKIYAR. That is, Republicans are held to one low standard, and all the rest of us are held to much higher standards (Just as, when Republicans talk about "limited government," what they really mean is limited government services and protections for most of us, but a high concentration of governmental power in their hands to preserve their own exclusive interests).
And in thinking of this double standard, I am thinking of Selene Walters. Selene Walters was Ronald Reagan's own Mary Jo Kopechne. And yet, while everyone remembers the name Kopechne, Walters remains obscure. As Slate reminds us,
In Kitty Kelley's 1991 book Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, actress Selene Walters claims that Ronald Reagan forced her to have sex with him in the early '50s. According to the book, Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, met Walters in a Hollywood nightclub. He asked for her address, and she gave it to him. Later at 3 a.m., he arrived unexpectedly at Walters' door and forced himself on her, Kelley alleges.
The press ridiculed this and other passages from Nancy Reagan : the night the Reagans smoked pot with Jack Benny and George Burns; Kelley's implication that Frank Sinatra boffed Nancy Reagan. But Kelley's sourcing of the alleged Reagan rape is not much worse than the sourcing of the alleged Clinton rape.
What's more, People magazine got Walters to repeat the story almost verbatim. Walters denied one key element of Kelley's version to People--that Reagan forced his way into her apartment--but reaffirmed the rest. It sounds remarkably like Juanita Broaddrick's story:
"I opened the door," Walters told the magazine. "Then it was the battle of the couch. I was fighting him. I didn't want him to make love to me. He's a very big man, and he just had his way. Date rape? No, God, no, that's [Kelley's] phrase. I didn't have a chance to have a date with him."
Walters--like Broaddrick--did not file charges. And Kelley maintains that Walters shared contemporaneous accounts of the encounter with friends.
For those who might say that Kitty Kelley is a less than reliable source, note that the story in its essence was corroborated later on.
Whether or not this was treated as an actual rape, it sounds an awful lot like something - i.e., date rape - for which there was not vocabulary in the 1950s. It sounds like something that actually occurred. And it was committed by by a married man who was also two timing on his wife. None of this has stopped the right, paying lip service as they do to "family values," from wanting to both smear liberals and progressives and to put Reagan, whom they revere, on Mount Rushmore.
Ted Kennedy, to his credit, did own up to and assume responsibility for the Chappaquiddick incident. He would have probably been the first to acknowledge his own flaws. He was human, after all. And yet, he was also a truly compassionate human being - carrying with him a compassion that those ridiculing him today are clearly lacking. And those who are doing this are also likely deluded enough to think that people like Reagan could not possibly be capable of criminal behavior. as the Slate author, insightfully, observes.
Chatterbox doubts that Reagan raped Walters. But where was Fred Barnes and where was the Wall Street Journal back in 1991? Were they outraged by Reagan's refusal to answer the rape charge directly? Were they accusing the press of partisan bias for refusing to confront the accused? Not exactly. A quick shake of Nexis produces this Barnes appearance on the April 12, 1991, edition of The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.
"This is National Enquirer journalism," Barnes said of Kelley's book. "It's the kind where you look for everything, you vacuum up everything that's unfavorable, use all of it, whether it's rumor, fact, innuendo, hearsay, use all it, and don't let a kind word get in the whole thing."
This incident aside, the sordid nature of Ronald Reagan, and my reference in the title to Reagan the criminal also has to do with his policies, particularly his foreign policies in Central America, where his beloved war criminal Contras, as well as the Salavdoran "Death Squads" (whom Reagan also enthusiastically supported) committed a whole host of atrocities, including rape.
Reagan's support for the Contras and their proxy wars was well known. He once declared himself "a Contra Too". Here is is, meeting with and offering his support to these hoodlums in the Oval Office
As one human rights organization reported,
Under the Reagan administration, U.S. policy toward Nicaragua's Sandinista government was marked by constant hostility. This hostility yielded, among other things, an inordinate amount of publicity about human rights issues. Almost invariably, U.S. pronouncements on human rights exaggerated and distorted the real human rights violations of the Sandinista regime, and exculpated those of the U.S.-supported insurgents, known as the contras. . . . the contras were major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners.
A list of the human rights abuses by the Contras thus includes:
*targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination.
*kidnapping civilians.
*torturing civilians.
*executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat.
*raping women.
*indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian houses.
*seizing civilian property.
*burning civilian houses in captured towns.
This is what such atrocities looked like,
as well as this, an image of the graves of four American church volunteers who were killed by Reagan's death squads in El Salvador, for the simple act of helping the poor.
The Reagan Administration was well aware of the numerous human rights abuses being committed by its allies in its proxy wars, but did not attempt to stop these abuses; in the course of this, it became an accomplice to these crimes.
So now, when I hear the right bashing Ted Kennedy by bringing up Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne, I am reminded, and I remind them, of Reagan's victims. Ted Kennedy, regardless of whatever personal demons with which he needed to grapple, had the decency and the humanity to have been one of those who stood up to the atrocities of Reagan in Central America, and it is to his credit that he did. He may have taken the high road in response to personal attacks, but we should always stand up to the bullying right and never hesitate to debunk them and to show them that it is actually their side, and not ours, that reveres criminals and rapists - like their revered war criminal Ronald Reagan.