In January of 2003, I wrote a piece for The Boston Globe Magazine ruminating on the 40 years that Edward Kennedy has been in the United States Senate. At one point early on, I decided to deal with The Great Unmentionable at the heart of that career, so I wrote:
And what of the dead woman? On July 18, 1969, on the weekend that man first walked on the moon, a 28-year-old named Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in his automobile. Plutocrats' justice and an implausible (but effective) coverup ensued. And, ever since, she's always been there: during Watergate, when Barry Goldwater told Kennedy that even Richard Nixon didn't need lectures from him; in 1980, when his presidential campaign was shot down virtually at its launch; during the hearings into the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, when Kennedy's transgressions gagged him and made him the butt of all the jokes. She's always there. Even if she doesn't fit in the narrative line, she is so much of the dark energy behind it. She denies to him forever the moral credibility that lay behind not merely all those rhetorical thunderclaps that came so easily in the New Frontier but also Robert Kennedy's anguished appeals to the country's better angels.And then, a few paragraphs later, I concluded the passage with the following:
If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.Now, I thought that was a tough, but fair, shot. Some people disagreed. The following Saturday, some veteran liberals chided me over the hors d'oeuvres at a dinner party. Some other people agreed. James Taranto of OpinionJournal cited it as evidence that I didn't like the senior senator very much. And my friend Dan Kennedy called it a "paragraph of pure poison." I didn't necessarily agree with them, but they rather obviously got my point -- which is about as good as a writer can hope for these days from the public discourse.
Ah, but I didn't reckon with the VRWC -- most notably, that tireless band of bloodthirsty shut-ins in the employ of L. Brent Bozell and his Media Research Center (MRC), who spend their days wolfing snack foods and looking for subtle anti-Christian messages in Digimon episodes, and the relentlessly obtuse Bernard Goldberg, last seen channeling Reed Irvine through his fillings and taping his latest work to a series of recycling bins on the sidewalk outside the CBS building in Manhattan.
The first salvo came from the latter. In his last book, entitled (I think) The Voices Told Me I Was The News God Of The Undying Sun, Bernie used the last line quoted above as an entire chapter of his book. (Aside to long-suffering agent: Please get me a contract to write books with two-sentence chapters. I have plenty of crayons.) He ran it under the heading, "You Can't Make This Stuff Up," with which I completely agree, since my work had apparently fallen into the hands of a man with the reading comprehension of a ferret. Did he really think I had used that line as a way of using Kennedy's subsequent career as a legislator to excuse his actions at Chappaquiddick? Is Bernie really that much dumber than James Taranto? And is it possible that there is anyone writing on the starboard side of things that is a bigger charlatan than Bernie Goldberg?
Well, yes.
Came then the MRC, tireless guardians of the public airwaves and the only people on earth who believe Peter Jennings is Rosa Luxembourg. They mustered up their vast collective intellectual energy and fought all the way through Bernie's two-sentence chapter, coming to the same inexplicable conclusion. They then celebrated their barely vertebrate exegesis of my work by giving my kicker line their "Quote Of The Year."
I was a bit nonplussed. I was honored to be chosen, surely. (If what I wrote managed to get under the skin of Bozell and his legion of human V-chips, I'm doing something right.) However, the interpretation was so clearly meretricious, I felt I might be accepting the award -- and what I was sure would be a healthy check from somewhere in the Scaife empire -- under false pretenses. I figured I'd clear it all up at the awards banquet in March.
Except nobody invited me to the awards banquet in March.
I was crushed. This is a big event in Washington every year. Hundreds of sweaty fat guys in tuxedos lust across the ballroom at Laura Ingraham and my gal, Annie Coulter. A hip evening for people who haven't been hip since the night they quoted Ayn Rand to their dates at the Junior Prom. A night of lechery and drunkenness among people who should confine their involvement with the seven deadly sins to Envy, Gluttony, and Rage. I was owed this spectacle.
Hey, I was an award-winner here. I know where to get a tux in D.C. I even had a speech prepared. This is how it started:
"Thank you all. It's nice to be here and to see everyone in such a fine mood. I've never seen Bill Bennett this happy with anything that didn't have a handle on its side.
"Oh, come on, Rush. Twenty more milligrams and that would've been damn funny."
I would have killed, I tell you.
Instead, accepting in my place was ... Mohair Sam Donaldson.
Sam Freaking Donaldson?
Apparently, Sam was gracious. He said one day he hoped to write as well as I do, which apparently got a big laugh. But Sam's no Sacheen Littlefeather, I'll tell you that.
Anyway, last August, I ran into Mohair Sam in the press area at the Republican convention. I introduced myself, thanked him for accepting on my behalf, and asked him if he had my trophy. (I'd long ago given up on the check.) "I think the award stays with them," he told me.
I guess it's there in the Gentlemen's Smoking Room of the MRC, in a trophy case, with my name carved in with those of the other winners, like the trophies for the club four-ball championships at some muni course where men watch the chat shows in the 19th hole and dream hopeless dreams about Kellyanne Conway. It's an honor, I guess, but somebody still owes me chicken.
Or fish.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
