Damn.

When I wrote my few words about Edward Kennedy I had at the back of my mind John Profumo. But I did not make the link.

So Mark Steyn has done so, brilliantly (emphasis added):

An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo’s – but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile?

If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not?

At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she’d feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test.

Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done…

Which hits the nail on the head.

It is not that Kennedy behaved so badly on so many occasions. It is tough being a leader and having to take responsibility for far-reaching decisions, balancing pragmatically and even cynically what is ‘for the best’ and for whom.

It’s rather that almost uniquely in political life Kennedy faced a personal life and death crisis, and in that existential self-defining moment left someone else to die.

But the true evil is not that grisly act of cowardice. It is not even that Kennedy knew what he had done and then made jokes about it all afterwards.

It is that so many otherwise sensible people who realised what he had done then lauded him and brushed those oh-so-awkward lapses aside, perhaps horrified and yet also somehow exultant at their own dark evil acceptance of his evil, thereby diminishing us all.

As Ayn Rand said:

The soul is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on – and the man is yours. You won’t need a whip – he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped.

John Profumo showed us one way to make amends and respect the soul. Edward Kennedy showed us the other.

Last word with Mark Steyn:

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay.