Ted Kennedy

by Edward Klein

  About three o’clock that afternoon, Ted Kennedy, Joey Gargan, and Paul Markham were driven in police cruisers to the Martha’s Vineyard airport, where they boarded a chartered plane and flew to Hyannis Port. The Boiler Room girls were hustled off the island without being interviewed by the police. Mary Jo’s body was embalmed and prepared for shipment to her parents’ home in Pennsylvania. No autopsy was ever performed.

  The news of Mary Jo’s death was being carried by the wire services by the time Ted arrived in Hyannis Port. He went to see his paralyzed father to tell him what had happened.

  “I was in an accident, Dad, and a girl [died],” he said. “That’s all there was to it, but you’re going to be hearing a lot about it on TV.” Then, covering his face with his hand, he sobbed, “I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know….”

  Over the next several days, family consigliere Steve Smith, freshly back from a vacation in Majorca, assembled a group of Kennedy loyalists at Ted’s home on Squaw Island—speechwriters Theodore Sorensen, Milton Gwirtzman, and Richard Goodwin; Kennedy son-in-law Sargent Shriver; Ted’s political guru David Burke; two of Ted’s closest friends, Senators John Culver and John Tunney; former defense secretary Robert McNamara; and former assistant attorney general Burke Marshall. In addition, Steve Smith hired no fewer than nine attorneys, including Edward Hanify, who had powerful political connections in Massachusetts.

  However, it was the presence of the legal heavy-hitter Burke Marshall that alerted the media to the fact that the Kennedys were treating a motor-vehicle case like a major political crisis. Over the next several days, scores of reporters descended on the Kennedy Compound, demanding that Ted hold a press conference and explain himself. Burke Marshall nixed the idea.

  “The reason I thought he should not make a statement to the press,” said Marshall, “was that I did not know enough about his legal situation. A lawyer’s instinct with his friends and clients is to shut up. Politically, it was a bad thing, I suppose….”

  “Our prime concern,” Steve Smith explained, “was whether the guy [Ted] survived the thing. Whether he rode out the still-possible charge of manslaughter.”

  Dick Goodwin, who was the savviest member of the group when it came to handling the press, did not agree with the gag rule imposed by Marshall and Smith. Goodwin was in favor of getting the full story out as quickly as possible. But, said Goodwin, Ted was “obviously panicky still. Obviously really shaken up, and yet nobody else was really willing to make the kind of serious decisions a situation of this sort required. We had there a great, headless, talented monster. Nobody could decide what to do. So, finally, by the middle of the week they transformed it into a political problem, which they could deal with…. [T]hey were trying to say something and still avoid the connotation of immorality—the old Irish Catholic fear of ever suggesting that you were screwing anybody outside of marriage. Drink and sex acquired a disproportionate size.”

  SEVERAL OF TED Kennedy’s oldest friends and associates were excluded from the Squaw Island crisis team, a slight they naturally resented. When they got wind of the confab, they tried to reach Ted to offer their advice.

  “I called out there,” said family friend Larry Newman, “and got Joan. I said, ‘Joan, will you get a message to Teddy?’ She said, ‘Larry, how can I get a message to him when they won’t let me talk to him?’”

  “No one told me anything,” Joan said later. “Probably because I was pregnant, I was told to stay upstairs in my bedroom. Downstairs, the house was full of people, aides, friends, lawyers. And when I picked up the extension phone I could hear Ted talking to Helga [Wagner, a former German airline stewardess with whom Ted was having an affair]. Ted called his girlfriend Helga before he or anyone told me what was going on. It was the worst experience of my life. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it…. Nothing ever seemed the same after that.”19

  Lester Hyman, the Democratic operative with close ties to the Kennedys, was at his home in the Berkshires when he heard the news about Chappaquiddick.

  “I called down to Hyannis Port to see how [Ted] was getting on,” Hyman recalled, “and I got Dick Goodwin. He was the first person I talked to, and he sort of brushed it off. Then I talked to another one…. And I’ll never forget it so long as I live. I said, ‘Look, obviously from what you are all telling me, Ted is in shock. That’s what it sounds like to me. And if I were you, I would immediately have him go to the hospital so he can have time to recover from this shock, and then discuss things, instead of you all being down there….’ And the answer to me was, ‘Oh, don’t worry. It’s a one-day story.’”20

  But Chappaquiddick was a story with legs. Newsweek ran a cover story, based in large part on a memo that its Washington correspondent, John Lindsay, had written after Ted’s drunken Alaskan trip the previous April. The story said that the senator’s “closest associates” had been “powerfully concerned over his indulgent drinking habits, his daredevil driving, and his ever-ready eye for a pretty face.” This broke new ground; no one had ever written anything as personal as that about a Kennedy before.

  At the time of Chappaquiddick, Jack Kennedy had been dead for nearly six years, but his closest political associates still dreamed of a Kennedy Restoration. Until now, they had looked upon Ted Kennedy as the vehicle that would carry them back to power. But now Ted had dashed their hopes, and one of Jack’s closest friends and advisers, Ted Sorensen, found it hard to forgive him.

  Sorensen’s ambivalent feelings for Ted were on full display in a speech he crafted for the senator. For the first time, words seemed to fail Sorensen. In one draft, he had Ted Kennedy declare: “I will never follow the path of my brothers, I will never seek the presidency.” But the Kennedy sisters objected, and the phrase was excised. The final Sorensen text was full of holes and contradictions and evasions and unnecessary admissions and bloated rhetoric. It created far more problems than it solved.

  “There is no truth, no truth whatsoever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and [Mary Jo’s] regarding that evening,” Ted said in his fifteen-minute televised speech that was carried live by all three television networks on July 25, 1969. “There has never been a private relationship between us of any kind…. Nor was I driving under the influence of liquor….

  “All kinds of scrambled thoughts … went through my mind,” he continued, “whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area, whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what had happened and to delay my report, whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might in some way pass from my shoulders. I was overcome … by a jumble of emotions—grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock.”

  Then, Ted made an urgent plea to “the people of Massachusetts.” Looking directly into the camera, he asked his constituents to send him their “advice and opinion” on whether he should stay in public life or resign his seat in the Senate. The appeal was an echo of Richard Nixon’s demagogic 1952 Checkers speech, in which Nixon took his case directly to the American people via television in order to remain the running mate of presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. Ted’s aides later referred to this part of his speech as “send in your box tops.”

  “Almost anything he could have said would have been better than what did happen,” said Dick Goodwin. “He did the worst thing he could have, he Nixonized the situation.”

  Nonetheless, Ted’s appeal was successful. As he and Ted Sorensen had hoped, thousands of phone calls, telegrams, and letters poured into Ted’s office, urging him to remain in the Senate.

  IN NOVEMBER 1969—four months after Chappaquiddick—Joe Kennedy began refusing nourishment, and the Kennedy family gathered in Hyannis Port for the deathwatch. Jackie, now married to Aristotle Onassis, flew in from Greece to be near Joe during his final hours. There, in Joe’s room, she found Ted in a sleeping bag on the floor.

  “If
God does not take him straight to heaven, I will be really mad at God,” Jackie said after Joe died on November 18. “Look how valiant and loving he [was] in all this sickness.”

  “Joe Kennedy put the first Catholic in the White House,” said family friend Eddie Dowling. “In my book, this would make him the greatest man of accomplishment in all history…. Here is a man who didn’t understand failure. It doesn’t make any difference what it is. If it’s a train you’ve gotta catch, catch it…. If you’re sent out to get a loaf of bread, come back with a loaf of bread…. If he said to you,’… at one o’clock tomorrow, Wednesday, the thirteenth of November, I’m going to be at the South Pole,’ he’d be there, at the South Pole…. he’d find a way to get there. This is the kind of training [his] boys have had.”

  JOSEPH KENNEDY’S DEATH spared him the pain of the official inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. The inquest was held in January 1970 in Edgartown, the Dukes County seat. Ted Kennedy and twenty-six other witnesses were called to testify at the closed inquest. Among them was Deputy Sheriff Christopher “Huck” Look, who testified that he had seen Ted and Mary Jo in Kennedy’s car at the intersection of Dike Road and Main Street more than an hour after Ted claimed he had left the party. Deputy Look’s testimony cast serious doubt on the timeline of Ted’s story.

  Deputy Look testified that between 12:30 and 12:45 on the morning of the accident, he had seen the headlights of a car coming toward him near the curve at the intersection of Dike Road.

  “Knowing the road, I slowed down because there’s a sharp corner that people will cut too close,” Look said. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t get sideswiped.”

  Deputy Look was “positive there was a man driving, and a woman next to him…. I observed in my rearview mirror that the car was parked, and it looked like they were going to back up. I thought they wanted information, that they were lost or something….”21

  Look pulled over and got out of his car and walked toward the other car. When he was twenty-five to thirty feet away, the car took off down Dike Road in a cloud of gravel and dust. The driver of the car appeared to be in a “confused state,” Look said. The deputy sheriff made a mental note of the license plate: it began with an “L” and contained the number “7”—both details that were found on the license plate of Ted’s 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88.

  The judge presiding over the inquest, Massachusetts district judge James A. Boyle, concluded that Ted had lied about where he was taking Mary Jo when they left the party. “I infer,” wrote Judge Boyle, “… that Kennedy and Kopechne did not intend to return to Edgartown at that time.” In addition, Judge Boyle found “probable cause to believe that Edward M. Kennedy operated his motor vehicle negligently … and that such operation appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.”

  Nonetheless, Dukes County district attorney Edmund S. Dinis chose not to seek an indictment for involuntary manslaughter. Instead, Ted got off with a two months’ suspended sentence and the temporary loss of his driver’s license.

  · · ·

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the inquest, in March 1970, Leslie Leland, the Dukes County grand jury foreman, requested that the jury be convened to investigate the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

  “We weren’t out to get Kennedy,” Leland said. “We just wanted to get to the truth.”

  However, District Attorney Edmund Dinis blocked Leland’s efforts to subpoena key witnesses, including Ted Kennedy, Joey Gargan, Paul Markham, and the five surviving Boiler Room girls. Leland then asked to see the transcript of the inquest. But that request was denied him as well.

  “I was dejected,” Leland said. “We had tried to do our job, to get at the truth, but we couldn’t.”

  “There was definitely a cover-up,” said another grand juror, Lloyd Mayhew. “We were all madder than hell that we couldn’t subpoena anyone we wanted. Our hands were tied.”

  ALTHOUGH TED MANAGED to escape Chappaquiddick with the lightest possible legal slap on the wrist, the Kennedys blamed Joey Gargan even for that. He had failed in his role as Ted’s Protector. No one was angrier with Joey than Rose Kennedy. After Chappaquiddick, Rose ordered her attorney to cut Joey out of her will—the severest form of punishment she could think of. Rose later relented and wrote Joey back into her will, but Ted banned Joey from all further involvement in his political and personal life.

  “As long as my mother’s alive, you can come over to see her,” Ted told Joey. “But you have to ask first. If I’m here, you can’t come over. And after she dies, you can never come again.”22

  However, as time passed, Ted softened and let bygones be bygones. He invited Joey and his family to the Kennedy Compound, where the two men embraced each other again like brothers.

  “Ted has helped Joey,” said a close friend of the family. “One of Joey’s children had serious medical problems, which Ted has very generously taken care of. He also arranged for Joey to move to a bigger house in Hyannis and to keep the bungalow in Hyannis Port for his kids when they are in town.”23

  BOBBY’S WIDOW, ETHEL, had been given the sensitive task of calling Mary Jo’s parents, Gwen and Joseph Kopechne, who lived in Pennsylvania, and telling them that their daughter was dead.

  “I’ll never forget her words,” Gwen Kopechne recalled many years later in the last interview that she and her husband would ever give.*2 “Ethel said, ‘God has a plan for us all, and Mary Jo is in her rightful place in heaven.’

  “At the funeral,” Gwen Kopechne continued, “Ethel took my arm, and I held on to it so hard I’m sure it was black and blue. But Ethel and Rose seemed to understand our pain. Rose kept in touch with us for over a year. At one point, she invited us to New York, to her apartment, saying she was going to have us for dinner.”

  For a moment, Gwen fell silent, and Joseph Kopechne took up the story.

  “Much of the time we were there in New York, Rose was cleaning her windows with Windex and a cloth,” he said. “She apologized, but said she was so upset that the windows were dirty, she couldn’t leave them that way. We were pretty amazed to see her scrubbing away. You felt like you should pitch in, but we just sat there, not quite knowing what to do. Then, after she ordered some sandwiches, she came out wearing a new dress. She was sort of modeling the dress, and she wanted to know how she looked.”

  Gwen said, “Young Teddy Jr. wrote us several letters over the years. He was just a little boy at the time, but they were very heartfelt and honest. Of course our hearts went out to him for losing his leg, and to his parents as well. The letters really sounded as though he had written them on his own. He wrote that he had met Mary Jo, and had liked her very much. He said she had always paid attention to him, even though he was a little boy surrounded by busy adults, who usually ignored him. There was a lot of sensitivity and emotion in those letters.

  “Twice after Mary Jo’s death, Ted had us come to his house in McLean, saying he wanted to talk to us,” Gwen went on. “But unlike the visit to Rose, which was strange but warm, it was uncomfortable—for all of us. Ted led us to believe he was going to explain what really happened. But when the time came, after plenty of small talk, he said he just couldn’t talk about it. It was very puzzling. Twice we drove all the way down there, and twice he couldn’t talk about how our daughter died.”

  The burden of guilt sat on Ted’s chest like an anvil. He desperately wanted to relieve himself of the guilt, but in the end, he couldn’t find the words to express his feelings. And, in fact, he would never find expiation for his guilt.

  FOR YEARS TO come, Chappaquiddick would be the inextinguishable underground fire of American politics. Every time Ted Kennedy thought the blaze had been stamped out—and that he was free at last to run for president—it would flare up again, smoldering and belching its noxious fumes as intensely as ever. Eventually, the fire burned itself out, and the memory of Chappaquiddick began to disappear into the mists of history. By the time Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008—nearly forty years after Chappaqui
ddick—the median age in America was 35.3 years, and most people no longer immediately associated the name Ted Kennedy with Chappaquiddick.

  Still, Chappaquiddick had a lasting impact. At the time of Chappaquiddick, Ted was probably the only figure in the Democratic Party who could have healed the rift between the Old Left (with its focus on the Cold War, union activism, and other economic issues) and the insurgent New Left (with its focus on the anti-Vietnam War movement and the values of the counterculture).

  “A great historic opportunity to pull the Democratic Party together was lost,” observed political analyst William Schneider. That lost opportunity had profound consequences. With the Democratic Party torn by ideological fratricide, the stage was set for the long conservative ascendancy in American politics.

  Moreover, Chappaquiddick ensured the reelection of President Richard Nixon, and the continuation of the unpopular Vietnam War, along with the war’s casualties—both physical on the battlefield and psychological back home. Chappaquiddick gave Nixon the excuse he had long been looking for to spy on his political enemies. As will be explained later in this book, he hired private detectives to gather damaging information on Ted Kennedy—the first in a series of illegal acts by Nixon that ultimately led to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

  The blow from Chappaquiddick shattered the gentlemen’s agreement that had existed between reporters and politicians and had restrained journalists from covering the private lives of public figures. Chappaquiddick opened the way for a new, more cynical school of journalism, one that took particular delight in exposing the feet of clay of well-known people. After Chappaquiddick, nothing in American life was sacrosanct, not even the glittering legend of Camelot, and Camelot’s last living legatee, Edward Kennedy.