New Deal

The New Deal enters the story through Kelly Kelleher’s academic portrait of The Senator: she studied his career and framed his politics through the contrast between Jeffersonian idealism and New Deal pragmatism. That historical vocabulary of crisis and political strategy acquires a darker resonance when the narrative moves from her thesis to the Senator’s efforts to survive the consequences of the accident.

The New Deal in Kelly’s Thesis

At Brown University, Kelly graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies. Five years before the events surrounding the accident, she wrote a ninety-page senior honors thesis about The Senator. Its subtitle, “Jeffersonian Idealism and 'New Deal' Pragmatism: Liberal Strategies in Crisis,” set his political career within a conflict between ideals and practical responses to crisis.

The thesis was grounded in research rather than passing admiration. Kelly examined The Senator’s three Senate campaigns, his Senate career, his influence within the Democratic Party, and the likelihood that his party would nominate him for president. She received an A, as she usually did in her major, and nearly a page of handwritten commentary and praise from her adviser. The work records both her intellectual seriousness and the distance between the young student who studied The Senator and the woman who later rides with him.

Political Persona and Historical Irony

The book places Kelly’s earlier academic account against The Senator’s conduct on the night of the crash. As he drives, he teases her about being too young to be a Beatles person, then turns sharply onto a sandy track without signaling. His habit of making queries that are really statements gives his conversation the same air of assumption that marks his driving: his mind has already moved on, and he takes no heed of the angered motorist’s horn.

The road is Old Ferry Road, a disused route whose sign has been missing for years. The Senator is not, strictly speaking, lost: he is heading toward Brockden's Landing, but has taken the obsolete turn instead of the newer paved road. The narrative notes that dusk alone could lead a driver to make the mistake; the road, no longer maintained by Grayling Township, should have been officially closed. The language of political strategy in Kelly’s thesis thus meets a material setting in which choices, institutional neglect, and danger cannot be separated neatly.

Crisis, Responsibility, and Political Survival

The accident’s physical circumstances resist the Senator’s later attempt to turn it into a simple story of blame. The Toyota loses control on a hairpin curve; skid marks and damage suggest a speed of about forty-five miles an hour. The narration also speculates that, without the loss of control, the car might have struck the railing of a narrow bridge and fallen into the water. Indian Creek, the stream below, is up to eleven feet deep and runs through marshland toward the Atlantic. These details establish both the peril of the setting and the limits of certainty about what might otherwise have happened.

After escaping the sinking car, The Senator reaches the highway in panic, filthy and injured, with one shoe on and one off. At a public telephone, he calls Buffy St. John's residence and asks for Ray Annick, initially using the name Gerald Ferguson before identifying himself. When Ray answers, The Senator says there has been an accident and that the girl is dead. He immediately offers his own version of the event: Kelly was drunk, became emotional, grabbed the wheel, and caused the car to swerve. He fears that he will be charged with manslaughter. Ray cuts off the account, insists that The Senator give his location, and says he will come for him.

The New Deal reference does not itself explain or cause the crash; it supplies an earlier political lens through which the later emergency can be read. Kelly’s thesis treated The Senator as a figure whose career involved liberal strategies in crisis. In the telephone call, crisis narrows to immediate exposure: legal liability, damage to reputation, and the possibility that his presidential ambitions will fail. The narrative’s juxtaposition makes political pragmatism newly uneasy, as public ideals give way to a private effort to control the account of a young woman’s death.