Among the many responsibilities Ted had inherited from his brothers was one for lifting the morale of the family’s loyal campaigners. A cookout on July 18 was meant to do that. The hosts were Ted and several friends; their guests were six girls who had worked as volunteer drudges in the “boiler room”—back room—of Robert Kennedy’s abortive presidential candidacy the year before. The place was Chappaquiddick Island, which lay just 250 yards off another island, Martha’s Vineyard, on Cape Cod’s Nantucket Sound.
According to Kennedy’s testimony at the inquest six months later, he left the party in his Chrysler at about 11:15 P.M. with one of the girls, Mary Jo Kopechne. Mary Jo was attractive, twenty-eight, and known to her friends as “M.J.” The senator said afterward that they were on their way to the two-car ferry which would have carried them back to Martha’s Vineyard, where they were registered at different hotels, but the judge at the inquest didn’t believe him, and neither did a lot of other people. Mary Jo left her pocketbook at the cookout. She told no one there she was departing, and she didn’t ask her roommate for the key to their hotel room. When she and Ted drove off, they left behind ten people (including the Chrysler’s chauffeur) who didn’t intend to spend the night at the cookout and who, with the departure of the big car, were left with only one small rented auto, obviously inadequate for their return. Finally, and most compellingly, there was the question of the turn Kennedy took.
The blacktop road from the cookout to the ferry was the only surfaced road on Chappaquiddick. Ted left it for a bumpy gravel roadway that led to the beach. He said afterward that this was a mistake. But the turn was a hairpin curving back to the right, and the entrance to it was masked by bushes; you almost had to be looking for it to make it. The senator must have known the difference, the judge insisted; he had been driven over both more than once that day.
The bumpy way Ted and Mary Jo took was called the Dike Road, and a half-mile down it was the Dike Bridge, a narrow, humpbacked wooden structure. This span curved off the dirt road in a 25-degree angle to the left, rising to cross a slim channel in the dike which permitted sea water from the sound, on the right, to flow in and out of Poucha Pond. The bridge was their undoing. Ted didn’t make the 25-degree turn. Instead the Chrysler plunged off the right side of the span, rolling as it fell, and hit the bottom of the ten-foot-deep channel wrong side up. At the inquest Kennedy testified that he didn’t know he had turned on the wrong road until “the moment I went off the bridge.”
…the next thing I recall is the movement of Mary Jo next to me, the struggling, perhaps hitting or kicking me, and I at this time opened my eyes and realized I was upside down, that water was crashing in on me, that it was pitch black…. I can remember the last sensation of being completely out of air and inhaling what must have been a half a lung full of water and assuming that I was going to drown and the full realization that no one was going to be looking for us that night until the next morning and that I wasn’t going to get out of the car alive, and then somehow I can remember coming up to the last energy of just pushing, pressing, and coming up to the surface.
Carried to the shore by the current, he waded back and dove into the ten feet of water for Mary Jo. He made seven or eight attempts to rescue her, he testified, but toward the end he was so out of breath that he could only hold his head under the water for a few seconds. For fifteen or twenty minutes he lay on the bank, coughing up water. Then, he said, he returned to the cookout, “walking, trotting, jogging, stumbling, as fast as I possibly could.” There he told his story to two men, Joseph F. Gargan, a cousin, and Paul F. Markham, a Kennedy campaigner. Gargan and Markham returned to the scene with him and dove for Mary Jo without success. Like him, both men were lawyers, and they told him that this must be reported. He was deeply disturbed, they recalled afterward. He kept saying, “I just can’t believe this happened.”
At his request they drove him to the ferry slip. The lights of Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, lay just across the way. He told them to go back to the cookout but not to tell the girls what had happened. Then, he said, he “suddenly jumped into the water and impulsively swam across.” As he crossed the narrow channel “the water got colder, the tide began to draw me out for the second time that evening, I knew I was going to drown.” But he made it, rested on the far shore, and walked to the Shiretown Inn, where he was staying.
At the inn his behavior became increasingly incomprehensible. As he himself said later, “My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all. I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately.” He testified that he “just couldn’t gain the strength within me, the moral strength to call Mrs. Kopechne at two o’clock in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead.”
What he did was to change into dry clothes and then complain to the hotel’s co-owner that a party in the next room was keeping him awake. In the morning he discussed the weekend’s yachting regatta with two couples. Then Gargan and Markham arrived and were aghast to learn that he hadn’t reported the crash. He explained at the inquest: “I told them about my own thoughts and feelings as I swam across that channel and how I always willed that Mary Jo still lived.” He also said that he wanted to make a telephone call, but apparently the phones in Edgartown wouldn’t do; he passed two of them, both outdoors and both public. Taking the ferry back to Chappaquiddick, with Gargan and Markham accompanying him, he used a phone in the ferry-house on the other side. The ferryman asked them if they had heard about the accident. One replied, “We just heard about it.” Only then, nearly eleven hours after the wreck, did Ted try to contact the Edgartown police.
Meanwhile the Chrysler had been discovered. At 7 A.M. two young men had crossed the bridge to fish in the surf; returning, they had noticed that the falling tide had exposed the wheel of a car. They had stopped to tell Mrs. Pierre Malm, who lived fifty yards away, and at 8:20 she had phoned Police Chief Dominick J. Arena. Borrowing trunks, the strapping Arena had come, dived down, radioed the automobile license number back for identification, and asked Fireman John Farrar to bring his scuba equipment. It was Farrar who found Mary Jo inside.
Arena’s headquarters radioed back that the car was registered to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and when the chief returned to Edgartown he found the senator waiting for him. Ted said: “I was driving. What do you want me to do? It has to be right.” One thing he should do, Arena said, was make a proper report. Ted went into a back room with Markham and wrote one out; it was sketchy; he identified the victim as “one Miss Mary—, a former secretary of my brother Robert Kennedy,” omitting the rest of her name because, he said, he didn’t know how to spell it. (Markham didn’t, either.) Markham asked the chief to keep the news from the press until Ted could phone Burke Marshall for legal advice. Arena agreed. He waited three hours. Having heard nothing further from Kennedy by then, he gave the newspaper the story and charged Kennedy with leaving the scene of the accident. Of the senator’s strange trip that morning to use the Chappaquiddick phone the chief said, “If he had time to take the ferry over and back, he had time to see me.”
The medical examiner reported “a positive diagnosis of accidental drowning.” Satisfied that there had been no foul play, he released the girl’s body without an autopsy, and it was flown to her birthplace in Pennsylvania for burial—a move that brought criticism of the authorities later. In Hyannisport Ted went into seclusion. Seven days later he emerged to plead guilty in Edgartown’s century-old courthouse. Judge James A. Boyle gave him the minimum sentence of two months in prison, suspended it, and took away his driver’s license. That evening Kennedy went on nationwide television to explain the inexplicable. The speech was not a success. He answered questions which hadn’t been asked, maintaining that he had not been “driving under the influence of liquor” and that there was “no truth, no truth whatever,” to insinuations of “immoral conduct” by him and Mary Jo. He also seemed to i
mply that the damage to his career was more momentous than her death when he said that among his preoccupations the night after the accident had been “whether some awful curse actually did hang over all the Kennedys.” The talk reminded some people of Nixon’s Checkers performance in 1952. Like Nixon, Ted asked his constituents to help him decide whether he should continue in public life. Massachusetts being passionately pro-Kennedy, the response was favorable, and a week later he returned to his senatorial duties.
After the inquest reporters asked him about the judge’s opinion that there was “probable cause to believe that Edward M. Kennedy operated his motor vehicle negligently,” that “such operation appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne,” and that he found Ted’s insistence that he and Mary Jo had been headed for the ferry incredible. Kennedy said: “In my personal view, the inference and the ultimate findings of the judge’s report are not justified, and I reject them…. At the inquest I truthfully answered all the questions asked of me.”
He also said: “I expect to be a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1972, and I expect to serve out a full six-year term.” The White House, taking no chances, was preparing to discredit him with the episode if he changed his mind and ran for President. Within six hours after the recovery of Mary Jo’s body, presidential aides had sent a retired New York policeman to Chappaquiddick; according to John Dean, the man “posed as a newspaper reporter and always asked the most embarrassing questions at any press gathering.” It was unnecessary. Temporarily, at least, Ted’s national following had been diminished. He was no longer a charismatic figure on Capitol Hill. The following year he touched bottom there when Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia challenged his right to continue as party whip. Kennedy had beaten Long 31 to 26. Now he lost to Byrd 31 to 24. Then, in the aftermath of a meeting at the White House, he was subjected to a new humiliation for a Kennedy: commiseration from Richard Nixon.
Portrait of an American
BENJAMIN McLANE SPOCK, M.D.
The eldest of six children, born to a mother who wouldn’t have a nurse, who wanted to do it all herself, he grew to love the idea of playing parent, feeding the others, even changing their diapers. He came naturally to think of children as very important, and—this from both his parents—was imbued with a New England hair-shirt conscience. Find a stern moral issue, they told him, and fight for it against all odds. He didn’t want that. He decided to rebel. For a long time he thought he was going to succeed.
Hamden Hall Country Day School. Andover. Yale. Scroll and Key, and a flash of conventional glory as an oarsman in the 1924 Olympics. Aspiring briefly to becoming an architect, he fell into his parents’ puritan mold while spending a summer as a counselor in a camp run by the Newington Crippled Children’s Home near Hartford. He watched the orthopedic surgeon working with the children who had polio. Later he said: “I realized how much he was helping them and I decided that I wanted to be a doctor.”
Columbia. An internship at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital. A residency in pediatrics. Another in psychiatry. Six years of psychoanalytic training. His love for children grew and deepened, and they adored him. “The man with the gentle face and eyes,” he was called. In his office toys were everywhere. He built a device for the shy ones—a small flight of steps led through a trap door to the examining table. He wanted them to want to be examined, and they did. Years afterward he said: “One of my faults as a pediatrician has always been that I whoop it up too much with the children.” But he never really tried to change.
The standard handbook for baby care was Dr. John B. Watson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child, published the year after Spock, then a second-year medical student, married Jane Cheney. Watson said: “Never, never kiss your child. Never hold it on your lap. Never rock its carriage.”
Young Dr. Spock set himself against all that. While in the Navy during World War II he wrote his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Its opening words set the tone: “You know more than you think you do.” Jane typed it from his longhand, and he indexed it himself, from abscess to Zwieback, because, he explained, he knew he would have “a better notion of what words mothers would look for in an index.”
Over the next twenty-three years the book sold 22 million copies and was translated into thirty languages. He wrote a column for the Ladies’ Home Journal, then for Redbook; his half-hour television program was seen Sunday afternoons over fifty-two stations of NBC-TV. And all the time Dr. Spock was rising in that most exacting of professions, the teaching of medicine. He taught psychiatry at Minnesota, child psychiatry and development at Pitt, child development in the psychiatry department at Western Reserve in Cleveland. His stand against Watson had made him the champion of indulgence. Troubled by the far swing of the pendulum, he rewrote passages of Baby and Child Care in 1956, explaining, “I find that some uncertain parents are interpreting me as an advocate of extreme permissiveness, so in the revisions I’m making in the book, I’m having to emphasize the limits of permissiveness.”
Then a deeper challenge stirred Spock’s conscience. Raised a conservative Republican, he had been converted to Democratic liberalism by Franklin Roosevelt, and in 1960 he supported John F. Kennedy. But in March 1962, Kennedy resumed nuclear testing. Alarmed, Spock joined the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). He campaigned vigorously for Johnson against Goldwater and felt betrayed when, in February 1965, Johnson escalated the Vietnam War. Spock wrote the White House, protesting, and when that proved futile he took to the streets in demonstrations.
“Excruciatingly embarrassing,” he said of this afterward, “like one of those bad dreams where suddenly you are downtown without any clothes on.” Certainly he was unusually conspicuous—six foot four, with a strong craggy face, always wearing a suit with a vest and a watch chain—a grandfatherly figure articulating, with his taut Yankee twang, moral standards which other, younger demonstrators thought hopelessly old-fashioned. But he grew more militant, not less. His critics, and they were many and scathing in these years, ridiculed his concern as a new expression of permissiveness, which they were now presenting as a national bogey. To him the issue was simple decency and justice.
The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The National Conference for a New Politics. Delivering 992 turned-in draft cards to a coldly furious functionary at the Department of Justice. Submitting to arrest for civil disobedience by crossing a police line at the armed forces induction center on Whitehall Street in Manhattan. Sitting on his long-legged stool at his drafting table, using a ballpoint pen to write—slowly and painfully, as always—“A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.”
Authority finally struck back to salvage the pride of General Hershey, whose orders to draft antiwar demonstrators had been overruled by the Justice Department. Five antiwar leaders, virtual strangers to one another, were charged with conspiracy to subvert the draft law. They were not accused of committing a crime, just of plotting one. In a word, their offense was dissent. The most outstanding leader, literally towering over the other four, was Benjamin M. Spock, M.D.
The trial was held in Boston’s District Court in May and June of 1968. The judge was eighty-five-year-old Francis Ford—rude, vain, and flagrantly partial. The verdict was guilty—“guilty,” a juror explained afterward to a reporter, “as charged by the judge.” The defendants were sentenced to two years in prison, and two of them, Spock and Chaplain William Sloane Coffin of Yale, were fined five thousand dollars each.
Spock said: “There is no shred of legality or constitutionality to this war; it violates the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Accords, and the United States’ promise to obey the laws of international conduct. It is totally, abominably illegal…. I intend to go on working against the war.”
And he did. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit threw out the convictions, citing Judge Ford’s prejudice. Spock went on, and on. They were still killing his children in the endless night of Vietnam, murdering the ge
neration whose mothers he had counseled, and the sense of duty instilled in his own childhood gave him no rest. Sometimes it almost seemed to him that he could hear the dying crying out across half the world for mercy. Dr. Watson would have turned a deaf ear. (“Never, never kiss your child.”) Dr. Spock could not. And slowly, as the nation in its agony turned from the shibboleths of mindless anti-Communism toward the peace of exhaustion, the wisdom of his compassion became clear.
Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
But President Nixon called Dr. Spock a bum.
THIRTY-FIVE
Nattering Nabobs
As America entered the 1970s, the swing generation was in, or about to enter, its fifties, the age at which men begin to discover that the world they have loved is disintegrating. That year the impression carried special force, for there seemed to be an unusual number of reasons for feeling wronged, among them inflation, pollution, crime, the war, the stock market, the generation gap, immorality, riots, cyclamates, traffic, insulting bumper stickers and decals, strikes against the public, racism, and new skyjackings. Nothing worked as it once had. “Not only is there no God,” said Woody Allen, “but try getting a plumber on weekends.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 178