After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Ted showed up soon after Jackie’s arrival. Of course, he was elated to see Jackie, overwhelmed that she had made the long journey so quickly and embarrassed by the circumstances. He appeared as if he were still in shock, his eyes hollow and empty. Swaying slightly and seeming unsteady on his feet, he looked at his former sister-in-law for a long moment. Jackie offered him a warm smile and then drew him into her arms, the two embracing for a long time. It appeared, according to one observer, that Ted was about to collapse in Jackie’s arms, but he pulled away and took his leave before that could happen.

  After everyone learned about the trouble Ted had found himself in, there were mixed emotions. Of course, the family was horrified that he had almost lost his life. That said, the senator was extremely evasive about details. His handsome face wiped clean of any expression, he couldn’t seem to articulate the full story. Everything he said and did was by rote and automatic. He seemed to be in shock. “The biggest question—or at least one of the most pressing questions—remained unanswered: Why had he waited ten hours to report the accident to the police?” recalled Leo Damore in a 1994 interview; he wrote the definitive book on Chappaquiddick, Senatorial Privilege. “After all, perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved if the authorities had been summoned. There were other questions—such as what were he and Mary Jo doing in the car together, and where were they going? Ted said he was taking her back to her hotel so she wouldn’t miss the last ferry from Chappaquiddick to Martha’s Vineyard. Others would later speculate that the two were on their way to or had just come from a romantic rendezvous. Maybe she wasn’t his type, but they were both drinking, so who knew for sure? As it happened, Mary Jo left her handbag at the party. Was it because she intended to return after the rendezvous? With so many unanswered questions, the scenario seemed to point to a lack of truthfulness and dependability in Ted, and maybe worse—perhaps even character and integrity.”

  For Rose, a big question was: Why was Ted alone in the car with Mary Jo when Joe Gargan was around, as were other men? One cardinal rule of politics, as far as she was concerned, was that no man in office should ever be alone with a woman he doesn’t know well. “It was very stupid,” she would later tell her son. “You should have known better.” She couldn’t understand why all the men at the party had allowed Ted to drive off alone with Mary Jo—why not one of them had had what she called “gumption enough” to get in the front passenger seat of the car with Ted, and have Mary Jo in the backseat; but in the end she blamed Joe Gargan. After all, it had always been his responsibility to look after Ted; he had failed miserably at his job, and Rose would never forget it. (In fact, she would proceed to cut him out of her will. But then, a few years later, she would have a change of heart and reinstate him.) Another question for Rose, and another one she would never reconcile, was why Gargan and Markham didn’t just report the accident to the police, even if Ted didn’t want to do so. She would later say she found it “brutal” that Mary Jo’s body was in the water—she even used the word “unforgivable”—and that no one reported the accident; and, of course, her questions would mirror those of most people with the passing of the years.

  One of his closest friends who would not speak for attribution recalled a conversation he had with Ted while the two sat in the living room of his parents’ home. It was a rare moment, one in which Ted truly revealed himself, which he was usually not inclined to do. “You know, I had a car accident in Florida last winter,” Ted said, out of the clear blue. “I was driving back to the [Kennedys’ Palm Beach] estate and drove right off the goddamn road.”

  “Did you report it, Teddy?” asked his friend, knowing the answer.

  “No,” Ted said. He explained that he was not hurt, that he walked home and the next day his chauffeur, Frank Saunders, went to the accident site and retrieved the damaged automobile.

  “Were you drinking?” his friend asked.

  Ted nodded solemnly.

  “This time, too?” the friend asked. “Were you drinking this time, too?”

  Again, Ted nodded. “I’m finished,” he added. “I’ll never survive this thing. This is manslaughter.”

  At that, the two men just stared at each other. They then somehow began to discuss Bobby, and Ted’s belief that his brother never should have tried to run for his party’s nomination in 1968. “I knew what would happen,” Ted said. “I knew it in my gut, but I didn’t do anything about it, did I?” In that moment, as his friend recalled it many years later, it became clear that Ted Kennedy was crumbling under the weight of not only whatever had happened at Chappaquiddick, but also what had occurred in Los Angeles back in 1968. It was as if so much tragedy had piled on in such a short time, he was having trouble separating the catastrophic events. “All of this is my fault,” he concluded.

  “It’s okay, Ted,” his friend told him, putting his hand on his shoulder. “You know what? This goddamn thing will blow over eventually and we’ll sing again, I promise you that.”

  “ ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’?” Ted asked with tears in his eyes, referring to the family’s favorite song.

  “ ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,’ ” his friend said, “undoubtedly.”

  Ted could not explain his actions to his family members or even to the fifteen Kennedy aides—some of whom had worked for Jack, and Bobby’s friends, and others working for Ted—who had descended upon the compound for strategy meetings, which, it was decided, would take place at Jackie’s home. Some of those present for these strategy meetings, as well as the aforementioned Burke Marshall, were: Robert McNamara, JFK’s former secretary of defense; Richard Goodwin, one of the Kennedys’ most fluent speechwriters and the husband of respected Kennedy historian Doris Kearns Goodwin; Dun Gifford, a trusted Kennedy confidant—he had been national campaign coordinator for Bobby’s presidential campaign; David Burke, Ted’s assistant; Senators John Culver and John Tunney, two of Ted’s closest friends; as well as nine attorneys brought in by Stephen Smith. Moreover, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ted Sorensen were brought in to fashion a public apology from Ted by way of a speech to his constituents. Schlesinger had been special assistant to President Kennedy. He had collaborated with the president on his Profiles in Courage and also wrote a memoir/history of the administration called A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1965. Sorensen was one of Kennedy’s closest advisers and was viewed by many as one of the greatest American presidential speechwriters.

  “Of course, there was obviously grave concern that Ted hadn’t reported the accident in a timely manner,” Robert McNamara would recall many years later. “As to whether or not anyone questioned his involvement with Mary Jo Kopechne, no one in any meeting I attended would ever have broached that subject. We were just trying to sort it all out, what happened that night. And it was difficult to do because Ted was so traumatized we couldn’t get a straight story.”

  “I know there was a public perception of a cover-up or a master plan to make the Kennedys look good, but that’s not what was going on,” Dun Gifford recalled in 2009. It would actually be Gifford who would be sent to identify Mary Jo Kopechne’s body and would escort her body to the family’s home in Pennsylvania. “Of course, yes, public relations was important; perception was always important to the Kennedys. But Ted was contrite, in my opinion, and wanting to be as forthcoming as possible. A lot was at stake, his entire political career and, it could be said, the entire future of the Kennedy dynasty. The biggest matter was that we knew he had to make a speech to the nation and we needed to be careful in how it was crafted. It was a delicate dance.

  “At the house, the mood was solemn,” Gifford continued. “Ethel had known Mary Jo and liked her very much. Joan knew her, too. As I recall, Joan had even once invited Mary Jo and the other Boiler Room Girls to her home for a cocktail party. So it wasn’t like some stranger had been killed. For us, this tragedy had a very personal face. In a broader sense,” Gifford continued, “it felt like the death of a dream. All o
f Ted’s hopes and aspirations, all of his hard work up until that time, his dreams and those of the whole Kennedy family—those of Joseph—you could just sense them all going up in smoke. For people who had always held on to hope no matter what, it was like another death in the family. It felt like the end of Camelot, if you really want to know the truth.”

  “I think it’s easy to retroactively overdramatize these events given their historical importance,” cautioned David Burke. “I can assure you that most of us were not sitting around contemplating the notion of Camelot or the loss of any such ideal created by the media. Rather, there was very human sadness about the chain of events, and a good deal of confusion. There was a good deal of pensive thought. How did we get from Point A to Point B, and where do we go from here?”

  After Jackie heard Ted’s story, she stayed with the rest of the family for a couple of hours before finally going back to the home she had shared with Jack. From there, she made a telephone call to her friend Roswell Gilpatric. During their conversation, according to what he would remember years later, she told him that she “felt awful” for Joan, that her sister-in-law “looks like a ghost. It’s like the walking dead here,” she concluded. Jackie also said that there was no way she would be able to sleep in her home that evening, that she still had nightmares about what had happened in Dallas in 1963, which was hard for her to believe considering how much time had passed. “But when I am here with these people, it all comes back to me, I’m afraid.”

  As the two old friends spoke, Jackie told Gilpatric she was looking out the window of the sunroom of her home at the vista of sky and ocean, so blue and shimmering as far as her eyes could see. The green lawn in front of her house was perfectly manicured, just as it always had been when she lived there with Jack and the kids. Everywhere she looked, perennials that thrive naturally on the Cape seemed alive with color—geraniums, black-eyed Susans, Russian sage, catmint, and wild morning glories all looking hearty and alive, bursting with vivid color. There were rambling and climbing yellow and white roses covering the wall just outside the sunroom, and multicolored hybrid tea roses on long stems artfully weaving in and out of a nearby trellis. There were ground-cover roses, too, dollops of red, white, and blue. Beyond that could be seen the gentle and rolling waves of Nantucket Sound. “It’s so peaceful out there,” Jackie observed, “which is so ironic because in here, in this house, it’s never peaceful, is it? We are always on the precipice, aren’t we?”

  “I think I now understand Teddy,” Jackie said before ending the conversation. Gilpatric would later say that she seemed to want to choose her words carefully as she lowered her voice to barely a whisper. “I think he has an unconscious drive to self-destruct,” she observed. “And I think it comes from the fact that he knows he’ll never live up to what people expect of him.” Roswell Gilpatric would later say he was somewhat taken aback by Jackie’s observation, and by how astute it was, at least in his own estimation, having known the family for so many years. “I think, perhaps, I agree,” he told Jackie. “You see, he’s not Jack, is he?” Jackie continued. “And he’s not Bobby. And I’m afraid that he believes deep down that what he is, is just not enough.” With that comment, Jackie’s voice seemed to float away. There was a long pause, so much so that Roswell Gilpatric thought for a moment that perhaps the line had become disengaged. “No, I’m here,” Jackie finally murmured. “I was just thinking…”

  Strategizing a Way Out

  The funeral for Mary Jo Kopechne on July 23, 1969, was as difficult as anyone would have imagined. A young lady’s life had been tragically cut short, and the driver of the car, Ted Kennedy, was obviously responsible. Everyone knew it. Therefore, the church and cemetery were swarmed with media and curiosity-seekers. Wearing a neck brace, Ted looked as if he were in physical and emotional anguish. Ethel was quiet, doing her best not to betray her feelings about anything one way or the other. Joan looked vacant-eyed and detached. As she embraced Mary Jo Kopechne’s father, it appeared that she practically collapsed in his arms. Jackie did not attend. By this time, she had left Hyannis and had gone to New York to see about her children’s education.

  Within five days of the accident, Kennedy’s attorneys had arranged for him to plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident involving personal injury. That would later result in a two-month suspension of his driver’s license. After an inquest, there would be no dreaded manslaughter charge, which a lot of people found unbelievable but was true just the same.

  It was hoped that Ted would now be able to save his senatorial seat. He was up for reelection in the Senate in 1970, and it was obviously feared that his present trouble would totally ruin his chances. “Prior to this time, there had been this rising, boiling feeling about this meteor getting ready to take off,” Kennedy aide Robert Bates recalled in 2009. “Everyone wanted to be connected to Ted. But after Chappaquiddick, there was obviously a great deal of concern.”

  As Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen contemplated talking points with Ted, Joan was asked to stay upstairs in the master bedroom. They didn’t want her to hear what they were saying, maybe fearing that she was already under so much stress. Earlier, Ted had asked her to call Mary Jo’s mother to express her condolences, but Joan was reluctant. To her, it seemed like a big manipulation and, according to one trusted Kennedy adviser, she and Ted had a loud disagreement about it. “But Ethie called them,” he told Joan, speaking of Ethel, “so why won’t you?” Joan wasn’t moved by that logic. “Of course, she did!” Joan exclaimed. “Everyone knows that Ethel will do anything you ask her to do,” she said. “But I am not Ethel!” Eventually, she relented and made the call, but she didn’t like it. “So what if he can’t run for president?” she later said angrily to one of Ted’s advisers. “I don’t want him to run. And if you cared about him, you wouldn’t want that either! Look at what happened to Jack, to Bobby? Do you want Ted dead, too?” Her heartfelt plea only served to make her seem emotional and unstable. She was definitely going against the tide, and thus her banishment.

  Most of the Kennedy advisers present felt the odds were stacked against Ted. “There was one moment when the sisters made a fuss over the work being done by those of us trying to figure this thing out,” Arthur Schlesinger once recalled. “A draft of a proposed speech by Ted said quite plainly that, because of what had transpired, he would never run for higher office. It said that he would not follow his brothers in that regard and that any aspirations he may have had to be president were now a thing of the past. ‘Absolutely not,’ said Eunice, with Pat and Jean joining in disapproval. ‘Who knows how this thing will work itself out?’ Eunice said. I remember Ted Sorensen saying to her, ‘Look, Eunice, just let us figure this thing out.’ Eunice looked at him with a surprised expression as if she couldn’t believe he would speak to her like that. ‘You are taking advantage of Ted’s emotions,’ she said angrily. ‘He’s vulnerable right now and will say just about anything you put in front of him. But he will not say that.’ ”

  Once Rose Kennedy weighed in, there was no question about it—the line had to go. “We have to steel ourselves for a good fight now,” Rose insisted. “Now is not the time to make any concessions.”

  There was a disagreement over another passage in Ted’s speech, as well. Ted Sorensen wanted to have Ted say that he feared “some awful curse did actually hang over the Kennedys.” It was a thought that Ted had said crossed his mind that night Mary Jo died, and he passed it on to Sorensen, who thought it was a powerful line. “Over my dead body” was Eunice’s reaction to it when it was brought to her attention, according to someone who was present. She happened to have her rosary beads in her hand, which somehow made the moment seem even more dramatic. “We will never suggest that God has cursed this family! Mother will never approve of it.”

  It was Ted who brought the line to Rose for her opinion. She mulled it over. “I cannot say I disagree,” she said sadly. “I don’t like the line, either. But I don’t like it because I fear it’s the truth,�
� she told Ted. “I won’t stand in your way if you want to use it.” Ted’s mind was made up. “The line stays, then,” he decided. It would be the first time an allusion would be made by a family member to any sort of Kennedy curse.

  “All People Make Mistakes… Not Just Kennedys”

  On July 25, 1969, Senator Edward Kennedy addressed the nation to explain his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Standing in the living room with him at the Big House, and out of camera range, were his male relatives and advisers. In the next room had convened all of the women, watching the broadcast on a monitor. When Joan came into the living room to stand near Ted, he asked her to leave the room and join the other women. “Why doesn’t he just get a Japanese houseboy to wait quietly in the other room while he and his aides discuss his problems,” Jackie would bitterly ask Joan in a letter later sent to her, “and then he can have his girls on the side and his sisters can campaign for him?”