Paterfamilias

REGARDLESS of the outcome of the Palm Beach trial--and the testimony of William Kennedy Smith's accuser was powerfully plausible--the verdict in itself will carry no great implications. Everyone is against rape, if it happened. But proving it is often difficult, especially when the putative victim has made herself vulnerable by going home with the defendant at an ungodly hour and when her own past can be thrown at her. To say she was asking for trouble is not to say she deserved it, but even if she is telling the truth her own indiscretion has given the rapist a chance to get off the hook. And the possibility remains that what happened was not precisely rape in the legal sense.

But it's not too early for a verdict on the conduct of Edward Kennedy, who inaugurated the family's wild and crazy Good Friday night, and whose hereditary moral leadership didn't suffice to deter, outside his window, what was at least a sordid act, and perhaps a cruel and criminal one.

Kennedy showed up commendably clean and sober for the trial and recited a typical litany of tribal sufferings. It seems that the tragic evening had its genesis in the sorrows of the Kennedys. The family had been lamenting the death of Willie's father eight months earlier (this drew a tear from the defendant). Such was the senator's lasting grief for Stephen Smith that he had been unable to sleep that night. Instead of taking a walk on the beach, he had, unwisely in retrospect, invited his son and nephew to join him in bar-hopping.

Prosecutor Moira Lasch showed considerable restraint in not guffawing at this performance. Most of us have lost family members, but it is not common for grief to set off an emotional chain reaction, months later, terminating in sex on the lawn. Rube Goldberg, thou shouldst be living at this hour. It is irresistible to recall Kennedy's strident words over the years on behalf of women's rights, and his warnings of what would befall women at the hands of conservatives. Here is a case in point. Everyone concerned, including Kennedy himself, would have been better off if Robert Bork had been a guest at the Kennedy compound that night.

COPYRIGHT 1991 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning