Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water is a direct fictional reimagining of the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, a national scandal that halted a potential presidential campaign by Senator Ted Kennedy. On July 18, 1969, Kennedy drove his car off a narrow bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts; his passenger, a 28-year-old political strategist named Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned inside the submerged vehicle. Kennedy escaped but waited approximately 10 hours before reporting the accident to the police, a delay that permanently damaged his public image and is widely believed to have cost him a chance at the presidency. Oates mirrors these events directly, with the charismatic “Senator” and the idealistic “Kelly Kelleher” standing in for Kennedy and Kopechne.

While the event occurred in 1969, Oates sets her novel in the early 1990s, filtering the scandal through a later era of liberal disillusionment. The story unfolds in the wake of the conservative Reagan years and the decisive Republican victory in the 1988 presidential election. This context is embodied in Kelly’s despair following her work on Michael Dukakis’s “doomed campaign.” By retelling the Chappaquiddick story through the lens of this later period, Oates examines the tarnished legacy of 1960s liberalism, portraying