With that, Ted Kennedy dove, fully clothed—and with his back brace on from his plane crash—right into the cold black water. “Holy shit, Ted!” Paul Markham exclaimed, stunned by his friend’s sudden action. Without turning around, Ted then began to swim frantically toward Edgartown. “And I thought to myself, ‘You know what? Screw him,’ ” Joe Gargan would recall years later. “ ‘I hope the son of a bitch drowns, that’s what I hope.’ That’s how mad I was. And I love Ted. I was raised with Ted. He meant the world to me. But I was just so goddamn mad at him in that moment.”
As his friends drove off, Ted Kennedy continued to swim across the five-hundred-foot channel all the way back to Edgartown, where he had been staying at the Shiretown Inn. He later recalled, “I started to swim out into that tide and [I] felt an extraordinary shove… almost pulling me down again, the water pulling me down and suddenly I realized… that I was in a weakened condition, although as I had looked over that distance between the ferry slip and the other side, it seemed to me an inconsequential swim, but the water got colder, the tide began to draw me out, and for the second time that evening, I knew I was going to drown… and after some time, I think it was in the middle of the channel, a little farther than that, the tide was much calmer, gentler, and I began to make some progress and finally was able to reach the other shore.” Once ashore, Kennedy walked back to the Shiretown Inn and then to his room. By now totally exhausted, he stripped off his wet clothes and crawled into bed. He spent the night tossing and turning and getting up and pacing and staring into the darkness, all the while hoping against hope that, somehow, none of what had just happened had actually occurred or, at the very least, that Mary Jo had somehow found her way out of the car and was not dead.
The next morning, Joe Gargan and Paul Markham showed up at the inn to find Ted having what seemed like a pleasant conversation with a bunch of people on the porch. Gargan grabbed Ted by the arm and pulled him aside.
“So, what did the police say?” he asked his cousin, according to his memory.
“I didn’t report it,” Ted said, his judgment obviously still crippled.
“Goddamn it, Ted!” Gargan exclaimed. “What is wrong with you? This thing just got ten times worse than it was last night.”
“Look, I’ve made up my mind,” Ted said, not making eye contact with his cousin. “I’m going to say I wasn’t there, that Mary Jo was driving alone.”
“Holy shit,” Gargan said. “Have you lost your mind?” Now Joe was almost at a loss for words. “Why, you can be placed at the scene!” he managed to sputter.
“Only by you guys,” Ted countered.
Joe understood where Ted was going with this line of reasoning. “No way,” he told his cousin, according to his memory. “I’m not lying for you, Ted. I’m just not doing it.”
At that, Joe Gargan and Paul Markham got back into the car and drove off, headed back to Chappaquiddick Island, leaving Ted alone with his plan—one that, as it would happen, he did not implement. At around 8:45 a.m., the car he had been driving was found submerged in Poucha Pond by two amateur fishermen, and Mary Jo’s body was extracted from the murky water. Ted heard about it when a year-round resident of the island named Tony Bettencourt approached him and said, “Senator, do you know there’s a girl found dead in your car?” It was only then—almost ten hours after the accident—that Kennedy went to the local police station to report what had happened.
Ted Kennedy
You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Ted,” Joseph Kennedy had told his thirteen-year-old son. “I’ll still love you, whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children who are doing things here that are interesting for me to do much with you.”
Imagine how it might shape a boy to know that his own father might not have much time for him if he wasn’t as ambitious and as productive as his siblings, especially if he believed his dad practically walked on water—the way Ted Kennedy felt about his father, Joseph. After all, it was from Joseph that Ted received the most attention, with him that Ted felt most secure. Imagine how it might have made him feel that perhaps he wasn’t worthy of Joseph’s love. Ted, the youngest member of the Kennedy family, may have grown up feeling inferior, sensing very strongly that he wasn’t worthy of his father’s time, that he paled in comparison to his intellectual siblings, especially his brothers, and then pretty much spent his entire life vacillating between proving this thesis true—and trying to prove it wasn’t true.
Edward Moore Kennedy was born on February 22, 1932, at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Boston. As the baby of the family, he was at once spoiled by a father who doted on him and usually ignored by a mother who was customarily not expressive of her emotions. He was also constantly challenged by his father to compete with his older brothers, but then again, all of the children were encouraged by Joseph to compete with one another. Ted, though, was always impetuous and a little foolhardy. For instance, with the country at war in Korea, he joined the Army and, in an effort to show his independence, impulsively signed up for a four-year hitch assuming it was for two. His father was furious, yelling at his son, “Don’t you ever look at what you’re signing?” The enlistment was shortened to two years thanks to Joe, who then arranged for his cushy assignment to the honor guard at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) outside Paris. Just after his twenty-first birthday, Ted was discharged as a private first class in March 1953. He then went to Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School, where he would earn his law degree. “He was a good football player on the field for Harvard, but in life Ted was never one to play by the rules,” Joe Gargan would observe.
Indeed, in an overzealous desire to be eligible for the varsity squad at Harvard, Ted persuaded a friend to take his Spanish-language final exam. The pair were quickly caught and expelled. However, they were told they could reapply for admission, provided they stayed out of trouble. Having others perform his schoolwork would be repeated in other instances, though, such as when he talked Jackie into writing an art history paper for him, earning him an A and the comment “keen perceptions.”
In 1958, Ted Kennedy interrupted his law school studies again to run JFK’s campaign for his senatorial reelection. Marshaling his abundance of Irish charm, good looks, and an uncanny ability to connect with Democratic voters in the Bay State, he was able to engineer his brother’s record-setting election to reclaim his Senate seat, setting him on the road to fulfill his presidential destiny.
With JFK in the White House by 1960, his Senate seat was vacant. Though Ted felt entitled to it because of his role in securing his brother’s election, at twenty-nine he was shy of the thirty-year age minimum for a senator. He would wait out the period serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, while a Kennedy ally, appointed by the governor, kept the Senate seat warm until a special election was held, which he handily won.
The next eighteen months saw two devastating events in Ted’s life—the assassination of his brother, Jack, in Dallas in 1963 and his own near death in a plane crash a year later. The year of his crash also coincided with the end of his term in the Senate. Using a walking cane to steady himself, he returned to the Senate in January 1965 and was sworn in with Bobby, now New York’s junior senator.
Despite Ted’s seniority in the Senate, Bobby never missed an opportunity to remind his younger brother that he, Bobby, had inherited the mantle of his late brother, not only in the family but politically as well. It was an entitlement Bobby felt was his due by virtue of his longer political career and the reliance placed on him by JFK. “It was always interesting to people who knew the Kennedys that titles mattered to them so much,” recalled Helen Thomas, “almost as a way of reminding each other of their stations in life. For instance, Joseph was almost always called ‘the ambassador,’ even around the house in casual circumstances. ‘Have you seen the ambassador?’ Rose would ask her children, instead of re
ferring to him as their father. JFK was very often called the president. ‘Will the president be joining us for dinner?’ Rose would ask. Similarly, Bobby, when he was named to the position, was usually called ‘the attorney general,’ and Ted was practically always called ‘the senator.’ In fact, Joan very often called him that all through her marriage when referring to him, even when he was in the room. ‘The senator and I are so happy to see you,’ she would say to guests when she and Ted would entertain in their home. Even his second wife, Vicki, would usually refer to him as ‘the senator.’ ”
Ted’s political course would be stayed. Bobby’s would not, unfortunately. What Ted feared most had come to pass, which was Bobby’s death in 1968. Who would ever forget Ted’s moving eulogy at his brother’s funeral? “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it,” he said. “Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.’ ”
At this time, Ted Kennedy was considered a hero by many people. At the very least, there was a lot of sympathy for him by 1969, the tide of popular opinion strong and moving him in the direction of the White House, pushed along by the media and also much of his constituency. In truth, the die had long ago been cast, and without Jack and Bobby to lead the way, there was little doubt that Ted was a presumptive future president of the United States. In a poll taken in 1968, 79 percent of Americans believed that he would one day be leader of the free world. He didn’t know that he wanted the job, though. For her part, Joan was definitely against the idea. In fact, the idea of Ted as president caused her great panic and distress. It didn’t matter, though. After the deaths of his brothers, it had become Ted’s obligation, indeed his duty, to step into the national political spotlight to fulfill his father’s obsessive ambitions and his brothers’ legacy. The problem, of course, was that Ted Kennedy came with a lot of baggage—not the least of which was what happened on Chappaquiddick Island.
Joan Kennedy
Joan, what in the world has happened?” Webster Janssen wanted to know. He was Joan’s second cousin and calling her at her home on Squaw Island after hearing the news reports of Ted’s accident.
“I honestly don’t know,” Joan answered, according to Janssen’s memory of the conversation. She sounded absolutely exhausted. “All I know is what you’ve heard on the news. I guess Ted was in some kind of car accident and… someone died. I guess.”
“But how?” Webster asked.
“Again, I don’t know,” Joan answered.
“Well, have you talked to Ted about it?”
“No,” came the response.
“But how is that possible, Joan?”
She sighed loudly. “How is any of this possible?” she asked.
Indeed, life for Joan as a Kennedy wife had never been easy, presenting one impossible situation after another. First, a little background.
In 1957, Ted Kennedy began to date Virginia Joan Bennett—known to all as Joan—a beauty queen and part-time model whom he had met while delivering a speech at Manhattanville College where she was a student.
Joan was born on September 9, 1936, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York, to wealthy Irish-American Catholics, Joan Stead and Henry Wiggin Bennett Jr., an advertising executive. After growing up in Bronxville, New York, she attended Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, as had future sisters-in-law Jean Kennedy Smith and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. She was a knockout: a stunning blonde and product spokesperson on popular network TV programs such as Coke Time with Eddie Fisher and The Perry Como Show while still in college. She was also a music major with the kind of piano skills that could have earned her a place on the concert stage had she decided to pursue it.
Ted was immediately and totally smitten by the gorgeous coed and after a whirlwind courtship asked for her hand in marriage. But then, the night before his wedding, he got cold feet. He didn’t really know this woman, he told himself and his family members. Maybe he should wait to marry her. He still wanted to date, enjoy his sexual conquests. However, his parents were adamant that Joan was a good catch for him. He would probably never do better, Rose told her son. After all, Joan had impeccable provenance as a prospective Kennedy wife—devoutly Roman Catholic, Sacred Heart education, breathtaking beauty, musical accomplishment, enviable social position, wealth, sparkling personality, Harper’s Bazaar stylishness, and the Kennedy matriarch’s anointment and stamp of approval. She seemed to have everything going for her. She was also nice enough not to mind being told what to do when and if the time ever came. “Besides,” his brother Jack told him, “you can still date and have sex with women. No one is going to stop you from doing that just because you’re married.” And so with all of that on Ted’s mind and nothing on Joan’s but the opportunity to please the man she loved, wedding vows were exchanged on November 29, 1958, at St. Joseph’s R.C. Church in Bronxville, presided over by Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York. In 1960, the couple welcomed a daughter, Kara, followed by sons Ted Jr. in 1961 and Patrick in 1967.
Putting aside for a moment Joan’s glowing list of attributes and accomplishments, when one considers some of the less obvious, darker periods in her formative years—“an overbearing, overprotective, often emotionally abusive, alcoholic mother,” as her second cousin Webster Janssen put it, “as well as a father who also suffered from untreated alcoholism”—it becomes clear that the fragile, sensitive twenty-one-year-old woman was ill-prepared for the turbulent Kennedy landscape that she would be expected to negotiate. A big problem for her in her marriage to Ted would be his chronic self-absorption. Because he was the last remaining son, a great deal of attention was paid to the particulars of what he was going to do in politics, how, and when. That focus, combined with the fact that he was very busy all of the time and usually involved in important legislative matters, made him the kind of man who tended to suck up all of the energy in the room. Sometimes, other matters took precedence, but those were usually issues having to do with his or Jackie’s or Bobby’s children because he felt such a responsibility to his brothers. “In fact, he was much more available to Jackie and to Ethel than he was to his own wife, Joan,” said Sancy Newman, the Kennedys’ neighbor in Hyannis Port. “Also, he was there for his mom when she needed him. But that was about it, and maybe it could be argued that was a lot, and maybe even enough. But one thing was sure, Ted wasn’t there for Joan, and he didn’t expect her to be there for him, either.”
Soon after marrying Joan, Ted began to see other women. Joan felt there wasn’t much she could do about it, though—except to ask her sister-in-law Jackie for advice.
“Forbidden fruit is what is exciting,” Jackie would later write to Joan in the summer of 1979. It was a statement that spoke volumes as to how Jackie felt about an unfaithful husband. “It takes much more of a real man to have a deep relationship with the woman he lives with. The routine of married life can become boring. If you married Mootsie & she had a few miscarriages [Joan would have three] & had to go to the movies at the Cape and on the Marlin with the whole family every day—you’d be sneaking off from her too after a while.”
Jackie suggested that Joan “take vacations with your friends, not the family.” Moreover, she advised her not to be intimidated by the powerful Kennedy sisters or by their mother, Rose. “Make the sisters scared to death of you so they don’t walk all over your house and appropriate your husband,” Jackie wrote. “He’s your husband. That’s more important than being their brother. Tell Eunice everything & be mad when you’re telling her. Say you’d like to talk to his mother about it.
“Don’t explai
n where you will be, don’t speak of yourself as a delicate health problem. Don’t ask permission. Be a bit mysterious. Then he can’t plan things around your absence,” she wrote.
It wasn’t so easy for Joan. Ted’s philandering whittled away at her already diminished self-esteem, and she began drinking. Then Jack’s and Bobby’s deaths just added to Joan’s despair, causing her to drink even more. Now, with whatever had happened at Chappaquiddick, it was difficult to imagine how her marriage could survive. “There was so much pressure,” Joan would recall years later. “I truly didn’t know how to handle it except to drink in order to escape it, if even for a moment.”
Joan recalled one specific moment of heartbreak at the Kennedy compound during those dark days, an incident that, as she has told it, crystallized for her the reality that even though she was his wife, her place in Ted’s life had its limitations. She’d been sequestered in her bedroom, told that she should not be exposed to what was going on because of her emotional fragility and also her pregnancy. But one morning when she picked up the phone to make a call, she heard voices on the line. Someone was talking on an extension. Because she heard what sounded like crying, she listened for a moment. It was Ted. He was confiding his troubles to another woman.
“The End of Camelot”
They were a family in crisis. It hadn’t been the first time, and it certainly would not be the last. The Kennedys would do what they always did in such situations: They would come together.
On July 20, 1969, Eunice and Jean Kennedy arrived in Hyannis Port. Both had been in Europe with their husbands, Jean vacationing with Stephen Smith in Spain and Eunice in Paris where Sargent Shriver was serving as United States ambassador to France. While Stephen would be integral to the Kennedy team as an adviser in trying to figure out how to proceed, Sarge would not. He absented himself on purpose, feeling it would compromise his position as ambassador to fly to Hyannis to help Ted get out of whatever trouble he had gotten himself into. Eunice wasn’t sure how she felt about Sarge’s decision; she thought Sarge should be present if only to show solidarity. He was already not in good standing for having accepted the ambassadorship from LBJ instead of stumping for Bobby, and his not showing up when Ted was in trouble only promised to make things worse for him. However, in the end, he sent his wife, alone. Pat Kennedy Lawford arrived shortly thereafter from California, where she had been with her four children. Now divorced from actor Peter Lawford, she’d gone to Manhattan to rebuild her life after her marriage fell apart, but maintained a residence in California as well. The next day, July 21, Jackie arrived from Greece. The family had wondered whether Jackie would show up in Hyannis Port, not knowing that Ted had called her. In fact, Jackie was the first person Ted called from a pay phone in Edgartown. The second was a close friend of the family’s, the Austrian-born Helga Wagner, with whom, according to many accounts, Ted was romantically involved.* In all, Ted made seventeen calls, including several to attorney Burke Marshall, whom Bobby had appointed assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in the JFK administration. He was now a VP at IBM.
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