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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  In the end, the senator’s speech was just thirteen minutes long, broadcast in color on all three networks. During it, Kennedy described the party for the Boiler Room Girls by saying it was “for a devoted group of Kennedy campaign secretaries.” He strongly denied rumors that he had been intoxicated or had engaged in any “immoral conduct,” claiming that “only reasons of health” had prevented Joan from being with him. He recalled the feeling of “almost drowning.” He said that his failure to report the accident immediately was “indefensible” and he described the “scrambled thoughts” he had that night as being “irrational.” He also stated that he “felt morally obligated to plead guilty [that morning] to the charge of leaving the scene of an accident.” He didn’t give much more information than that, though, other than to say he felt terrible about what happened, had no excuse for it, and that his conduct in the hours after the accident “made no sense to me at all.” As expected, he said that he couldn’t help but wonder “whether some awful curse did hang over all of the Kennedys,” and “whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what had happened to delay my report,” and “whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might in some way pass from my shoulders.”

  Ted further stated that he well understood why there might be some who would prefer that he retire from politics. But, he said, “The opportunity to work with you and serve Massachusetts has made my life worthwhile. And so I ask you tonight, the people of Massachusetts, to think this through with me. In facing this decision, I seek your advice and opinion. In making it, I seek your prayers—for this is a decision that I will have finally to make on my own.”

  No further charges would be brought against Ted Kennedy in the matter of Chappaquiddick even though a January 1970 inquest into the accident would result in more questions than answers. Some of the revelations from the inquest made things much worse for Ted, such as the discovery that Mary Jo hadn’t really drowned. Diver John Ferrar, who was one of the first on the scene, testified, “The girl suffocated. She was totally conscious and able to hold her face deep into the foot well and availing herself of the last air in the automobile. I think she survived at least an hour, possibly as long as two. There’s no question that if we had been notified of the accident, if the fire department had been notified approximately one half to one hour of the time of the accident, we would have saved her life.” As such damning evidence began to emerge, and the Kopechnes didn’t so much as file a civil suit against Kennedy, much of the public and media began to believe that Ted or his family or his lawyers had paid them off. However, the Kopechnes always denied any kind of payout, saying that they had received only a small amount of money from Ted and the Kennedys’ insurance carrier—a total of $140,000, to be exact—for a down payment on a house.

  Almost twenty years after Chappaquiddick, Leo Damore’s damning book about the event, Senatorial Privilege, brought forth even more revelations. In it, some witnesses reported to Damore that Ted had been intoxicated before driving away from the party he and Mary Jo had attended that night and had enjoyed five rum and Coke cocktails on an empty stomach. Others, though, said he may have had as many as fifteen drinks! Had he been waiting for the effects of the alcohol to wear off before reporting the accident to the police, and is that why it took so long for him to do it? Moreover, a deputy sheriff testified that he saw Kennedy’s car on a side road and that when he approached it to find out if the occupants were perhaps lost, the car sped off, heading in the direction of the bridge at a dangerous speed. Was it because Ted—who was, it was later learned, driving with a suspended license—was drunk and in a car with a woman who was not his wife that he sped off, rather than be questioned in such an inebriated state by a uniformed officer? Moreover, it turned out that there were other cottages in the area with their lights still on at that hour of the night. Why hadn’t Ted knocked on someone’s door and asked to use the phone to report the accident, instead of going back to the site of the party, a mile away, to summon his friends?* Of course, some of Kennedy’s behavior could be explained by saying he was in total shock. However, none of this evidence was available to the grand jury, because certain witnesses were not truthful at the time and it was alleged that Ted Kennedy and some of those working for him had found ways to use their power and influence to suppress damaging evidence, thereby jeopardizing the jury’s ability to gather evidence. The grand jury’s foreman, Leslie Leyland, would say in 2010 that if the jury had this information in 1970, he has no doubt it would have returned with a manslaughter charge against the senator, not to mention charges having to do with witness tampering.

  Luckily for Ted Kennedy, most of the revelations surrounding the events of Chappaquiddick would come too late for anyone to do anything about them—not that the information would have changed anything in 1970 anyway. At the time, the country had a warm, familial kind of feeling for Kennedy and it was difficult for many people to want to indict him, even if some didn’t find his story plausible. He was the last great hope of the Kennedy dynasty, of the so-called Camelot era. If he had been anyone else, any other government official, he probably would never have been able to continue a political career. In fact, a Times-Harris poll conducted after the speech revealed that more than half of all Americans did not believe his explanation of why he was present at a party with so many single women.

  There was something about what Ted Kennedy represented back then that kept most of America, for lack of a better word, hooked. It had to do with sentiment, with the loss of his brothers, with everything his family had endured—the recent images were indelible: His sister-in-law Jackie, so strong in the face of such great tragedy on the day of JFK’s funeral. His other sister-in-law, Ethel, at Arlington saying goodbye to Bobby while surrounded by their many children, and pregnant with a baby he would never know. His devastated mother and father. His grief-stricken sisters. All of it was represented in snapshot images of history that could still be called instantly to mind by most Americans. The emotion engendered by his family’s epic journey was what tugged at the heartstrings of most Americans, not whether or not Kennedy had made a difference in the Senate. And though much of the country would remain torn in its opinion of Senator Kennedy when it came to the Chappaquiddick incident—as it would remain for the rest of his life—he was still forgiven. Of course, some critics, some cynics, some of the less enchanted felt Kennedy had gotten away with murder—but there weren’t enough of them to make a difference, and certainly not in Massachusetts. The telegrams, letters, and phone calls received by his office immediately following his speech made it clear that Massachusetts voters still overwhelmingly supported his upcoming run for the Senate.

  Somehow, Ted Kennedy would manage to emerge from this imbroglio relatively unscathed. However, let there be no mistake, the man himself knew the truth: Any chance he had at ever being elected president of the United States was now laid waste, a casualty of bad luck, poor judgment, and whatever else conspired to curse him that fateful night in July 1969. He suggested as much to his friend and adviser Dun Gifford in the days immediately following his speech. “I may not be going to prison,” he said at the time. “But I’ve been sentenced just the same. I can kiss the White House goodbye.”

  Ethel Kennedy, who was ever loyal to her brother-in-law, just as Bobby would have expected of her, didn’t see things quite the same way. “You are a good man, Teddy,” she told him in front of Rose Kennedy, Barbara Gibson, and several others. It was right after Ted had delivered his speech to the nation; he was exhausted and seemed near collapse. “This, too, shall pass,” she told him as she stood before him clasping both of his hands. “You must believe me.” Rose Kennedy nodded in agreement. “Don’t let this stop you from doing what you have to do,” Ethel continued. “Remember that all people make mistakes, Teddy. Not just Kennedys.”

  Joseph Kennedy Dies

  Upon hearing the news of Ted’s Chappaquiddick debacle in 1969, his father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., seemed ready to fold hi
s tent and open his arms to embrace his Creator. He’d been quite sick for a good many years, ever since his stroke in 1961.

  On November 17, Joseph fell into a coma.

  Jackie was the first to arrive, from Greece. Then Pat from New York; Eunice and Sargent Shriver from Paris; and Jean and Stephen Smith, who had also been in Europe, showed up. Joan, Ted, and Ethel all came from Virginia.

  As the family encircled Joseph’s bed, Rose was barely able to stand under the emotional weight of the moment. Ted supported her with strong arms until finally she sank to her knees, her head resting on Joseph’s chest. There she stayed for ten minutes, sobbing and praying. Rose rarely cried. In fact, her children could not remember the last time they actually saw her cry, despite all of the tragedies the Kennedys had experienced. She was just that stoic. But losing Joseph after fifty-five years of marriage was apparently more than she could bear. Her tears would not stop.

  Finally, Rose asked that someone bring her the rosary she had cherished for years. Jackie went to fetch it from atop a dresser in the room. She gave it to Rose, who clutched it tightly and then put it to Joseph’s lips. The family, still encircling their patriarch, then recited the Our Father. Emotionally drained, they spoke the verses almost as if in a trance, slowly and deliberately, while Joseph Patrick Kennedy slipped away from them forever.

  Dealing with the Fallout

  With the new decade of the 1970s in the offing, the Kennedy family hoped that they might enjoy a renaissance of sorts, a new beginning. So much had happened in the 1960s, much of it filled with pain and sorrow; it had left most of the family shell-shocked and in some ways fractured. Because the election for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat was to occur in November 1970, he and Joan would spend the next couple of months campaigning for votes and, as Joan put it at the time, “wondering how the fallout from what had happened would affect us both personally and professionally.” Ted told the New York Times, “The voters need to see me, to be convinced that I’m reliable and mature. You can’t counter the Chappaquiddick thing directly. The answer has to be implicit in what you are, what you stand for and how they see you.” Apparently, voters in Massachusetts were still on Ted’s side, though, because he did win that election and retained his seat in the Senate. But a couple of months later, on January 21, 1971, he lost to Robert Byrd of West Virginia as Democratic whip. Apparently his Senate colleagues were not quite as forgiving as his Massachusetts constituency. (The whip is elected by fellow Senate majority party members to assist the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader in coordinating and generating bicameral congressional support for proposed legislation that fits the majority party’s agenda.)

  “He had viewed his winning the majority whip position from Russell Long in January 1969 as a highlight of his career in the Senate, so losing the position was a real blow to him,” recalled California senator John Tunney, who was Ted’s roommate at the University of Virginia Law School in 1959 and remained a very close friend. “He wasn’t surprised, though. Even though he had managed to keep his seat in the Senate, he wasn’t naive. He knew that his political support had eroded a great deal as a result of what happened on Chappaquiddick Island.” That said, there was still a small groundswell of support for his possible presidential nomination in 1972, the general consensus by a lot of Democrats being that the passing of time might be enough for critics to put the accident into new perspective and realize that, despite it, Ted was still a viable candidate.

  Ted had made it clear when he returned to the Senate after Chappaquiddick that the presidency was not on his mind—or at least that’s what he said publicly. However, it was hard for the media and the public to let it go. Even though his chances were greatly diminished and he knew it, there was still great momentum from pundits and columnists and, by extension, the public for him to at least try. It was a difficult proposition to resist—he was a Kennedy, after all. A flawed one, but a Kennedy just the same.

  His friend Joe Klein, who met with Ted on Memorial Day 1970, recalled, “He seemed a ghost the day I met him… he didn’t smile, seemed grim even when shaking hands with civilians; his demeanor all the more striking because we were at a classic grip-and-grin event, the annual Greek picnic in Lowell, Mass. He was scared catatonic, of course. Scared of death, obviously. There was no reason to believe, in a nation of nutballs, that he would be allowed to continue, unshot. But he was frightened of more profound things as well—overwhelmed by his own humanity in the face of his brothers’ immortality, convinced that he’d never measure up, that Joe and Jack and Bobby had been the best of the Kennedys… and even after he somehow allowed a young woman to die, they still wanted him to run for president.”

  Though the subject of a possible future in the White House for Ted would not die in the public arena, it was rarely discussed at home. In fact, every time anyone mentioned the 1972 presidential election, Joan seemed to crumble. She couldn’t even bear thinking about it, she was so worried for his safety. “I worry all the time about whether Ted will be shot like Jack and Bobby,” she told Ladies’ Home Journal in July 1970. “I try not to but I can’t help myself. Ted tries to keep things from me, serious threats against his life—but I know what’s going on. I know he worries about it, too. A few months ago we were in a plane and a child exploded a balloon right behind us. It sounded just like a gun shot. Ted jumped so. What a terrible thing. A balloon pops and my husband thinks he’s being shot. I could read his mind, and I could have cried for him.”

  Ted decided to consider the disappointment of losing the whip position as an opportunity to more fully immerse himself in his senatorial duties, and in doing so he would lay what would turn out to be the groundwork for his commitment to health care reform. As the new chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on health, he lobbied hard for an increase in cancer research money. In fact, he fought for an increase to $1.3 billion over the next three years, which was four times the amount President Richard Nixon had in mind. Amazingly enough, not only was Ted’s plan approved, but he secured $1.5 billion. Encouraged by that victory, and feeling once again a real sense of purpose, he devoted himself more than ever to his senatorial duties or, as he later put it, to “becoming interested in every aspect of the Senate, its arcane rules both permanent and new; its parliamentary procedure, the functions of its many committees and subcommittees, some of which were well known and others half forgotten or unsuspected of potentially great use. I doubt that anyone has ever managed to completely internalize the immense font of knowledge that these areas comprise, but I committed myself to learning it as thoroughly and in as much minute detail as I could.”

  As Ted worked on his political career, Joan Kennedy began to work on her life. At the end of August 1969, she lost the baby she’d been carrying—her third miscarriage. She still had three children to tend to, though, and she knew in her heart, as she would later tell it, that she needed to do something about the unhappiness that had led to her drinking. Ted was no help. In fact, he was a big part of the problem. “Why was it, she wondered, that he would go all the way to Greece to negotiate a deal for Jackie to marry Onassis, yet he couldn’t find his way to the bedroom to take care of Joan as she was lying across their bed, crying?” recalled Richard Burke, Ted’s administrative assistant from 1978 to 1981. “It didn’t take much to see that, for Ted, Jackie was a priority. Ethel, too, obviously. But not necessarily Joan.”

  During her time at the Cape in the summer of 1969 when Ted was in the midst of his Chappaquiddick ordeal, it was Jackie who suggested therapy to Joan. “I think it will help you,” she told her sister-in-law. “I think you need to try.” After careful consideration, Joan decided that she would do it. This was not an easy decision. For Joan, keeping Kennedy family secrets had become as much second nature as breathing; talking about such things to a complete stranger was a leap. But when she actually started therapy, it turned out to be not quite as difficult as she had expected. In fact, she had so much anxiety and confusion bottled up about the way her life h
ad unfolded since becoming a Kennedy wife that once stories began to tumble forth, “they just came and came and came,” she later said, “and I thought, my gosh, no wonder I have been so unhappy and confused! Look at how much I’ve been suppressing.”

  Joan Kennedy’s involvement in therapy was in large part influenced by the growing feminist movement of the time, aspects of which today seem almost quaint, but back in 1970 were considered revolutionary. Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s, a woman’s place really was in the home and beside her man while raising her children, and this was especially true for a Kennedy woman. Anyone who thought otherwise was looked upon by much of society with curiosity. Why wouldn’t a woman want to be the loving heart and soul of her home? But in the 1970s, there was a strong movement toward female empowerment, and one with which Joan fell in step a lot easier than she expected—though it would be with baby steps.*

  In October 1970, Joan surprised many people when she made her concert debut in front of three thousand people at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, playing with the sixty-member Philadelphia Orchestra in a fund-raiser for Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp. “I guess that for much of the public, this musical appearance by Joan came out of the blue,” said her sister, Candace McMurrey. “Since when was she such an accomplished pianist? In fact, though, Joan always had a love for classical music and was actually classically trained and quite proficient at the piano, as everyone in our family well knew. Whenever there was a family gathering, it would find Joan at the piano, playing with ease and leading the rest in joyous song. She played for her brother-in-law Jack during his campaign for president—‘September Song’ was a favorite of theirs, with Jack singing and Joan playing—and she played for Bobby when he ran, too.”