The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

I colored in replying that I believed it was.

  “Oh!” said Miss Dartle. “Now I am glad to know it. He thinks you young and innocent; and so you are his friend? Well, that’s quite delightful!”

  Theodore Sorensen (known as “Ted”) noticed that Robert Kennedy bristled at “Bobby,” yet the President kept using that name. After the assassination, a note from Robert let Sorensen know where the diminutive belonged. It began “Teddy old pal” and ended “Bob.”

  If the gofers of the rich are a convenience to them—someone to run into town for supplies during a party—they also demand some care and servicing. Loyalty can be presumed, but only if it is prudently re-recruited at sufficiently close intervals. Besides, real affection is normally engaged on both sides. Perhaps the gofers who most entered the Kennedy affections were Ann and Joseph Gargan, the cousins who lost their own parents in childhood. The Kennedy family nursed pious Ann through a period when she seemed to have multiple sclerosis, and she repaid their tenderness a thousandfold when she became the Ambassador’s indefatigable nurse after his stroke.

  Joseph Gargan went to law school, but subjected his own career to that of Edward Kennedy, with whom he grew up, an almost-brother to the youngest brother, male company to the “stranded” last Kennedy son. Gargan was always ready to clean up after a race, put the sails away—only partly a Kennedy, but a Super-Kennedy because of that. The Ambassador sent Gargan to fetch his car, and forgave him when he hit a tree with it. The father was as forgiving to him as to any of his sons—but only because he expected less of him. Time magazine wrote, after Chappaquiddick: “Gargan is used by [Edward] Kennedy largely as companion for carrying out miscellaneous chores—making reservations, ordering food, emptying glasses and drawing baths.”

  The extra thing Gargan could supply in the pell-mell world of Kennedy competition was thoughtfulness for less privileged gofers. The reminder of a birthday, the joke that deflects a quarrel, the inclusion of a forgotten retainer—it was he who smoothed the social life for his admired patrons.

  [I] was amply recompensed by seeing an exact and punctilious practice of the arts of a courtier, in all the stratagems of endearment, the gradations of respect, and variations of courtesy. I remarked with what justice of distribution he divided his talk to a wide circle; with what address he offered to every man an occasion of indulging some favourite topick, or displaying some particular attainment; the judgement with which he regulated his enquiries after the absent; and the care with which he shewed all the companions of his early years how strongly they were infixed in his memory, by the mention of past incidents, and the recital of puerile kindnesses, dangers, and frolicks. (Johnson, Rambler No. 147)

  Gargan, who shared Edward Kennedy’s “puerile kindnesses, dangers, and frolicks,” had also worked in the campaign of Robert Kennedy, where part of his social duty to fellow gofers led him to joke with the “boiler room girls.” With his customary thoughtfulness, he did not let them go unremembered. He arranged the first party for them at Hyannis Port; and, the next summer, invited them to the Edgartown regatta. Performing such services not only benefited “the girls,” but gratified him. Part of his claim to favored position was his ability to produce a Kennedy at parties where that is the ultimate distinction. And part of Kennedy’s debt to this loyalest of gofers was to allow himself to be, periodically, produced.

  The last Kennedy has to service all the inherited gofers as well as his own—and all the honorary Kennedys, veterans of 1960 and 1968, who suggest new campaigns, send speeches, line up supporters. These may come in handy some day—though the 1980 race proved that many old speechwriters took more time than they were worth. They all feel they have the one essential bit of advice the candidate must hear. In 1980 Edward Kennedy sought surcease from the buzz of them all by turning off his advice-receiver almost entirely. He is not good at hurting the feelings of those who have some old bond with the family. The tendered services are never entirely refusable, once he has heard them. And the demands made can become quite bizarre—one stalwart from the past even asked that Kennedy inform his own child that its mother had died. (“He is so used to dealing with sorrow.”) There are endless weddings, funerals, graduations the family heir must go to, to express the family’s gratitude.

  That was the meaning of Chappaquiddick. Kennedy was trammeled up in other people’s lives because they had suffered at his brother’s death. He had to brace himself for endless reminiscings about Robert’s campaign—the only thing that bound “the girls,” through Gargan and his peers, to “the Senator.” Popular gossip made of Chappaquiddick a kind of tawdry orgy. Actually, like many “celebrations” Kennedy is compelled to attend, it was part of his extended death watch or permanent floating Irish wake. Friends have to be sorted out according to which brother they accompanied to meet his killer.

  Though Gargan could produce the Senator to awe the “girls,” that did not mean he could attract any other people of consequence to this very minor entertainment. The others were friends of Gargan, fellow gofers—the Kennedy chauffeur, John Crimmins; Ray LaRosa, who also drove for Kennedy when called on; Charles Tretter, who had done advance work for the Kennedys; and Paul Markham, whom Burton Hersh calls “Joey Gargan’s Gargan.” Markham and Gargan went to Georgetown Prep together. Through Gargan, Markham received the Kennedy patronage that helped him become United States Attorney for the state of Massachusetts. Markham had fetched the Kennedy boat to Edgartown, where he was supposed to serve on its crew; but he banged his leg sailing there, and could not race after all. Furthermore, the Shiretown Inn was so crowded he had to give up his room to Kennedy, to stay with Crimmins and the others at the rented house on Chappaquiddick. One who rises by virtue of friendship with a gofer remains a gofer even when he holds the highest federal prosecutor’s post in the state. Chappaquiddick was a roll call of the well-paid errand-runners, to honor the errand-dispatchers from campaigns past.

  Crimmins, who had brought the Kennedy car over to Martha’s Vineyard on the ferry, met Kennedy at the little island airport, early in the afternoon, and drove him to the hotel in Edgartown, where Kennedy dropped his luggage (and turned Markham out of a room). The men then crossed to Chappaquiddick for a swim at the beach just over Dyke Bridge. (Less than twelve hours later the same car would go off this bridge.) Then Kennedy went back to Edgartown and the regatta heat, a competitive chore when (as then) his back was hurting from fatigue and travel—the Victura came in ninth.

  Kennedy had a postrace drink with fellow skippers and dressed for the cottage cookout; for the twilight milling of sun-dazed people at a resort town, for the maudlin laughter at campaign tales told over again, a listing of glad things remembered across an abyss of sadness. Someone always has his or her “Hooray for Hollywood” at such a gathering, and Kennedy must summon up his brothers’ laughter out of the past. It was an important time for the boiler room workers, whose lives (they thought) would never again be as meaningful as when they worked for Robert Kennedy—unless they should get the opportunity, some time, to campaign for the Kennedy whose attention now flattered them. They stayed on and on—past the departure time of the last ferry. Kennedy, of course, claims that he and Mary Jo Kopechne dashed for the ferry and turned by accident onto the dirt road leading to Dyke Bridge. But his story is so unsupported, contradictory, or improbable in various of its parts, that we cannot know for sure what happened during that time for which he is the only witness.

  Perhaps he does not know what happened. Fatigue, drink, panic were at work on him. Did he black out? He could have left the car before Miss Kopechne crossed the bridge, and pieced events together later (Jack Olsen’s thesis). Any number of things could have happened—including the presence of another passenger in the car. Even the testimony of those left at the party is suspect. Robert Sherrill, in The Last Kennedy, has shown how jumbled is their account of comings and goings and mutual time-checks—though the synchronized support for Senator Kennedy’s testimony about when he left (11:15) emerges with suspicious clarity f
rom this chaos. The later silence kept by all involved does not inspire confidence. After every other scandal of this period, journalistic enterprise and checkbooks have led to interviews, books, movie or TV presentations based on at least one of the witness’s accounts. There have been none out of Chappaquiddick. The loyalty of Robert’s workers carried over to Edward’s troubles. In the first week after the accident, Esther Newberg was deputed to give the partygoers’ account of the night in two interviews. But that experience taught the Kennedy team to impose a total silence: she admitted in both interviews that she did not remember when the Senator and Ms. Kopechne left the cottage; her watch was “not working properly”—though she would later testify to the Grand Jury that she marked the time by looking at her watch. Apart from these canceled experiments in minimal candor, the coordinated testimony before the Grand Jury remains the participants’ first and last public account.

  Three men at the party (Gargan, Markham, and Tretter) were lawyers, and they invoked a client relationship with Kennedy to justify their silence. But there is little doubt that they would be loyal to Kennedy with their silence, even if they were not attorneys. What else are loyalists for? In fact, this episode resembles the Manchester affair as a tale of the way honorary Kennedys flock to rescue one of the family in his troubles.

  If Chappaquiddick resembles the Manchester controversy in one respect, it began with a fainter but more poignant echo from another night of crisis for the family. After the interval in which something happened that led to Ms. Kopechne’s death, Kennedy reappeared, but only dimly, at the rented cottage where the party’s aimless milling continued after midnight. Standing by the other car the party was using, Kennedy called out softly to the one man outside the doorway, Ray LaRosa: “Ray, get me Joe.” Kennedy sat inside the car waiting for Gargan—and, when he arrived, asked him to get Markham. Why had he not asked for both in the first place? Was Gargan too drunk, fuddled, or panicky at the sight of Kennedy alone? Was a cooler head needed? All we know is that the first loyalist, ever since boyhood, was turned to first—and that Gargan soon brought “Joey Gargan’s Gargan” out to the car. The three went off, they say, to dive over and over into Poucha Pond trying to rescue the woman in the car.

  Little over a year before this, Kennedy had awakened another loyalist with a whisper through the night—Arthur Schlesinger, sleeping at Hickory Hill where the family was locked in debate over the political future of Robert Kennedy. Then Edward went on to wake Sorensen. He had been probing around the edges of a slumbrous house to report back Eugene McCarthy’s refusal to cooperate in the 1968 primaries. He came to the cottage at Chappaquiddick with more disastrous news; but very early the people he called began to consider his own future of primaries and campaigns, and how this night would affect them. The spookiest point of resemblance is that Mary Jo Kopechne had been present, hardly noticed, at Hickory Hill the night of Robert Kennedy’s decision to run. She stayed late to type up Sorensen’s and Schlesinger’s declaration of Robert’s candidacy.

  Gargan and Markham, both lawyers, did not call for professional help—divers are available at a resort for rescue work, if that was their goal. Nor did they inform authorities that an accident, perhaps a crime, had occurred. They say they left the scene of the accident, drove Kennedy to the crossing for Edgartown, watched him dive into the channel and swim off into the night, then returned to the cottage and—at Kennedy’s request—told the women nothing. The next morning they managed to show up at Kennedy’s hotel room without being seen by the ferry operator. If all this happened as they say, the two men enter the pantheon of all official friends. And if it didn’t happen that way, they ascend even higher for saying that it did. These gofers would go for a human body without complaining, though Markham thereby lost any hope for higher public office.

  Kennedy could rely on such loyalty absolutely. That is why he considered for many hours whether to report the accident at all. Though we do not know for sure what happened on Chappaquiddick, there is outside testimony to his actions back at Edgartown; and, in conjunction, those actions plainly indicate that until 9:30 on the morning after the accident, Kennedy either did not know for sure about Ms. Kopechne’s death, or pretended not to know. He was confident that, whatever story he told, his two confidants would support him.

  Kennedy’s secret return to his hotel (either by swimming, as he says, or in a borrowed boat) would allow him to claim he had left Chappaquiddick before the accident occurred, without any inconveniencing testimony from the ferry operator. Back at the inn, Kennedy was either awakened by a noisy party, or pretended to be, and let the innkeeper see him at 2:55 A.M. By 7:30 he was outside the inn, where he met the winner of the previous day’s regatta heat, and accompanied him to the hotel’s second-story porch where the two talked casually about upcoming races (with no indication on Kennedy’s part that he would not be participating in that day’s heat).

  At 8:00 Gargan and Markham arrived, and went into Kennedy’s room. When Charles Tretter, who had trailed Gargan and Markham back to the main island, saw the three men in heated conversation through a window, he began to enter but was waved off angrily by Kennedy. At 8:30 Kennedy went to the inn’s desk, ordered the New York and Boston papers, and borrowed a dime for the public phone (Kennedys never have money on them). Gargan says he urged Kennedy to return to Chappaquiddick, where he could find a safely private telephone for the series of messages he had begun to send, calling in other loyalists to salvage the situation. The three men had reached the other side by 9:00, and Kennedy was still at the pay phone near the landing when the ferry returned to fetch the recently discovered body of Ms. Kopechne. Asked if he had heard of the accident, Kennedy said yes, and took the ferry to Edgartown, where Gargan was dispatched to the women’s motel. While Gargan finally (and sketchily) told the women what had happened to their friend, Kennedy told the police there had been an accident.

  Gargan and Markham, to defend their failure to inform the police earlier, claim that Kennedy assured them, before swimming off the night before, that he would report as soon as he arrived on the other shore. But the two men went back to the cottage, said nothing to the others there, and slept till dawn. They did not warn the others that police were about to descend on them with disorienting news, because—obviously—they expected no report to trigger that result. In the morning, they hurried the women back to their hotel without telling them a word. Only when Kennedy was actually walking toward the police station did Gargan let them know about the accident. Until then, all options were being maintained—including the option of denial that Kennedy had been involved at all.

  One of the early theories about Chappaquiddick was invented by Jack Anderson, who supposed that Gargan was scheduled to take the blame. Whether this was seriously considered, the theory naturally arose, since those who know Gargan have little doubt that he would take the fall if asked. Such loyalty is touching, and a little scary. It gives its recipient a kind of parachute for bailing out of sticky situations. But it also tempts that recipient to take risks, on the assumption that he can always walk away untroubled. Kennedy later accused himself of inexcusable delay in reporting the death; but he could only entertain thoughts of delay because he knew the loyalists around him would not challenge him or his story, whatever that turned out to be. Once again, the sources of strength debilitated. He leaned too long on their passivity. They had nothing to offer but obsequiousness, when he needed stringency and hard talk.

  Even in his panic, Kennedy knew that he needed sharper advice than Gargan could give him—or than he could give himself. One of the first phone calls he made was to Burke Marshall. Marshall had been one of Robert’s shrewdest and toughest assistants in the Justice Department. Before Robert’s death, Marshall was considered the leading contender for the Attorney General post in a second Kennedy administration. Burton Hersh says Marshall was known to the family as a “defuser of blockbusters.” So Edward Kennedy, with three lawyers on the scene, was going for a super-lawyer—itself a signal o
f the danger he was in. In Hersh’s words, “Importing Burke Marshall to deal with a motor vehicle code violation was tantamount to whipping frosting with the great screw propeller of the Queen Elizabeth.” There was a precedent for this. John Corry says that the Manchester struggle looked serious only when Burke Marshall appeared to represent the Kennedys. Everyone knew, then, that “bigger guns had taken over.”

  Kennedy was busy at the telephone. He had to seek out his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, who was on vacation in Europe. Once the campaign manager was alerted, the campaigners would troop in—the old team attracted toward Hyannis Port, in the next several days, as by some magnetizing of their PT tie pins. Robert McNamara showed up, and Sorensen, and Goodwin, offering help and advice. Others had already been dispatched on cleanup chores—William vanden Heuvel to tell the Kopechnes what little he knew of their daughter’s death, Dun Gifford to take away the body, an act which, as it turned out, made an immediate autopsy impossible. Gargan held the hands of other gofers. Sorensen wrote the TV defense Kennedy would make after his Grand Jury testimony. Eight lawyers were representing Kennedy by that time. Loyalists were everywhere, putting the best face they could on what had happened.

  If Gargan and Markham passed the ultimate test for gofers on that muddled night, the bigger names in the Kennedy entourage performed an equivalent service in the next few weeks. It seems that Kennedy told few of them (if any) much more than he told the rest of us. They submitted to the test of silence, and rallied nonetheless. Men with their own careers, they used their reputations to cover Kennedy’s shame. These were not people who could be bought or intimidated. If they helped cover up what happened, they did it out of a primal sense of loyalty, out of the honor code of honorary Kennedys.

  Once again newspapers compared this convening of heavyweight talent to the time of the missile crisis. Missiles in Cuba, Manchester writing a book, Robert deciding to run, a girl dead by accident—public and private events mingle around the Kennedy reputation; perspective alters according to the engagement of the family in events that would otherwise be minor, however sad in themselves. Each crisis is major if a Kennedy is involved; and the missile team gathers. The frightening thing is not that courtiers should assemble to help Edward Kennedy after a car accident. The frightening thing is that making Kennedys look good was no doubt an important motive for these courtiers during the missile crisis itself.