Teddy's $8 Million Story

Is Ted Kennedy's autobiography worth an advance of $8 million?

From the New York Times:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the most prominent surviving member of the Kennedy family, has agreed to sell his memoirs for an advance of more than $8 million, people with knowledge of the negotiations say.

After a six-day auction that concluded Nov. 19, Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, bought world rights for the autobiography. Before the deal can be completed, Mr. Kennedy must clear his publishing contract with the Senate Ethics Committee.

Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, said he hoped to publish the book in the fall of 2010. Mr. Kennedy is “walking, talking history,” Mr. Karp said, “and there’s no limit to what he can talk about with authority and distinctive personal perspective.”

...Mr. Kennedy has become a leading liberal legislator who has championed causes including the minimum wage, health care and immigration policy. As the youngest of the nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he has a dramatic family history, and he is the first Kennedy of his generation to write an autobiography.

The Times certainly speaks adoringly of their Teddy.

That's no surprise. The Times is a liberal propaganda outlet and Kennedy is the grand poobah of libs.

I don't see how one can look at Kennedy and see a hero or a role model or a champion unless one is wearing rose-colored glasses with very thick lenses.

...Mr. Kennedy, who will work with a co-writer, is expected to write candidly about his personal history, including the 1969 Chappaquiddick accident in which he drove a car off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former member of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s staff. He will also write about his unsuccessful bid for the presidency.

This should be rich.

Is Kennedy really going to be candid about his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, or is he going to be as candid as he was when he addressed the nation about the scandal on July 25, 1969?

There's no way that Kennedy is going to change his story. What new details would he have to offer?

At the time, Kennedy said:

I made immediate and repeated efforts to save Mary Jo by diving into strong and murky current, but succeeded only in increasing my state of utter exhaustion and alarm. My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all.

...Instead of looking directly for a telephone after lying exhausted in the grass for an undetermined time, I walked back to the cottage where the party was being held and requested the help of two friends, my cousin, Joseph Gargan and Phil Markham, and directed them to return immediately to the scene with me -- this was sometime after midnight -- in order to undertake a new effort to dive down and locate Miss Kopechne. Their strenuous efforts, undertaken at some risk to their own lives also proved futile.

All kinds of scrambled thoughts -- all of them confused, some of them irrational, many of them which I cannot recall, and some of which I would not have seriously entertained under normal circumstances -- went through my mind during this period. They were reflected in the various inexplicable, inconsistent, and inconclusive things I said and did, including such questions as whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area, whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what has happened and to delay my report, whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might, in some way, pass from my shoulders. I was overcome, I'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions, grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock.

Instructing Gargan and Markham not to alarm Mary Jo's friends that night, I had them take me to the ferry crossing. The ferry having shut down for the night, I suddenly jumped into the water and impulsively swam across, nearly drowning once again in the effort, and returned to my hotel about 2 A.M. and collapsed in my room.

I remember going out at one point and saying something to the room clerk.

In the morning, with my mind somewhat more lucid, I made an effort to call a family legal advisor, Burke Marshall, from a public telephone on the Chappaquiddick side of the ferry and belatedly reported the accident to the Martha's Vineyard police.

What a load!

It's amazing to me that the people of Massachusetts bought any of that. Absolutely amazing.

If anything, the autobiography will give Kennedy an opportunity to rewrite his history, to put his spin on things from an old man's perspective, to give an authoritative final telling of the events of his life.

You can bet Kennedy won't be giving his story the Kitty Kelley treatment.

I guess one person's candor is another person's fiction.

Jamie Raab, publisher of Grand Central Publishing, declined to comment specifically on the size of the advance. But, Ms. Raab said: “One always feels a bit nervous when you spend a great deal of money. But I don’t feel as nervous as I would with other books at these figures because it touches on so many audiences, and I think we can get them all.”

Let's see...

Kennedy's story will appeal to ALL audiences.

There are the rich and pampered.

There are the dreamers of being rich and pampered.

There are the libs.

There are the Kennedy-philes.

There are the alcoholics.

There are the womanizers.

There are the liars.

There are the blowhards.

There are the pro-death proponents of abortion and other forms of murder.

There are the welfare state beneficiaries.

There are the socialists.

And there are the chronically irresponsible.

While the potential audiences for Kennedy's book are too numerous to mention, Raab is wrong when she predicts it's possible to "can get them all."

There are people in the country who wouldn't waste their time or money on Kennedy's version of the truth.

I think it's legitimate for him to write his memoirs, but I can't ignore how unseemly it is to exploit the death of Mary Jo Kopechne to grab $8 million up front for selling his story.

...Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to Mr. Kennedy, said the senator would donate a “significant proportion of the proceeds” to charity.

Define "significant."