Ted Kennedy’s Book Deal: Will He Mention Mary Jo?
WASHINGTON - Senator Edward M. Kennedy has agreed to a multimillion dollar deal with Hachette Book Group USA to pen his memoirs, giving the veteran Massachusetts lawmaker a forum for his own perspective on a life and career that has been examined by others in countless books and articles, negotiators of the deal confirmed yesterday.
“I’ve been fortunate in my life to grow up in an extraordinary family and to have a front row seat at many key events in our nation’s history,” the 75-year-old Kennedy said in a statement. “I hope my reflections can contribute to a deeper understanding of many events in the history of this great country and to a more in-depth picture of an American family.”
The book is scheduled to be released in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the election of the senator’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, and will cover the Kennedy administration, the assassinations of his brothers, the civil rights movement, and later events.
“It’s going to be one of the most important memoirs of our time. He’s been a seminal figure on the leading issues of post-World War II America,” said Douglas Brinkley, a noted historian at Tulane University in Louisiana. “He’s probably the most durable and interesting American politician that’s had a sustained career, decade after decade, since Franklin Roosevelt.”
No one involved in the negotiation could say if Kennedy would address the events at Chappaquiddick, where Kennedy’s car went over a bridge in 1969, killing his passenger and campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne.
The then-youthful senator pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given a two-month, suspended jail sentence.
But the episode forever tainted Kennedy’s image, and political analysts believe it contributed heavily to the senator’s failure to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1980.
Nine publishing houses competed for six days for the rights to the book, according to two sources close to the deal.
The winner was Twelve, a subdivision of Hachette Book Group USA.
The amount is considered large even for a famous figure as Kennedy.
Full article by Susan Milligan at Globe.com.
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The amount, not mentioned here, is guesstimated at $8-10M.
How much of the text will be made up of excuses for the deaths he’s caused directly and indirectly is hard to say, but I suspect it will top 75%.
November 27th, 2007 at 12:12 pmThe audio version of this book will be the sound of a bag of marbles spilling on the floor over and over again, with only the faint sound of belching in the background.
November 27th, 2007 at 1:18 pmPossible cover photos:
http://fatboy.cc/fatboyscrapbook.htm
November 27th, 2007 at 2:42 pmLike the Cape Cod Orca doesn’t already have a ton of money. I can’t make up my mind whose worse. His bootlegging old man who stole an election or Fast Teddy, the fuckhead who helped engineer HMO’s,the pullout of funds for the SVN, and, oh yeah, let a young woman named Mary Jo drown in his sumerged car, while Teddy-me-boy was out trying to save his political skin.
Fuck him.
November 27th, 2007 at 5:55 pmdrillanwr-
Couldn’t you have just taken one for the team and described those nauseating photos for us? Thanks to that link, I will forever have that horrific image indelibly burned into my brain. That was even worse than Billary in bathing suits on that island dancing and kissing.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:12 pmWith any luck, it’ll tank, and the publisher, enablers that they are, will take a bath.
November 29th, 2007 at 3:52 pm