In the final dramatic hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, eight ‘ordinary citizens’ spend a wakeful night contemplating life, death and grocery lists – among them, Lee Harvey Oswald and his young Russian bride, a Havana baseball star, a Presidential candidate’s lover and the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. is an erotic, darkly humorous study of personal and political crisis.
The Cuban Missile Crisis erupted in October 1962, when American U2 spy planes confirmed the presence of Soviet missile sites in newly socialist Cuba. For “thirteen days” the world held its breath as ultimatum after ultimatum passed between the Pentagon and Kremlin. A full scale nuclear confrontation was only averted at the last minute when, according to which historian one reads, Khruschev backed down or Kennedy compromised.
The incident at Chappaquiddick Island occurred in July 1969, when an Oldsmobile driven by the surviving Kennedy brother, Edward, veered off a narrow bridge at night, plunging the car into the water below. The Senator escaped with only minor injuries, but his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a young woman in her twenties, drowned.
The previous year Mary Jo had worked on Robert Kennedy’s doomed campaign for President as part of the team nicknamed ‘The Boiler-House Girls’ due to the demanding backroom work they did. Edward Kennedy himself recorded, “She was a gentle, kind and idealistic person … [after Bobby’s death] all of us tried to help her feel she still had a home with the family.”
Despite her contribution to the Kennedy political machine, Mary Jo’s legacy is one of association rather than of individual merit, and the circumstances of her death – like those of Jack and Bobby – have become the stuff of conspiracy theory and urban myth.
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