Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (12 page)

At one o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, July 18, 1969, Ted
arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, exhausted and strung out. He was met by his driver, Jack Crimmins, a foulmouthed grouch, who took Ted to Chappaquiddick Island, a short ferry ride across from Edgartown. There, in a modest two-bedroom cottage that had been rented by Joey Gargan for the reunion party later that night, Ted changed into a bathing suit. Then he and Crimmins drove down a narrow paved road onto the rough gravel of Dike Road and over a narrow, ramshackle seventy-five-foot-long hump-backed bridge and out to East Beach, where Mary Jo and the other Boiler Room girls were frolicking in the water.

The Edgartown Regatta began at three o’clock, and the Boiler Room girls—Mary Jo, Esther Newberg, Susan Tannenbaum, Rosemary “Cricket” Keough, and the sisters Nance and Maryellen Lyons—watched the race from a boat that had been rented for the occasion by Paul Markham, a former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts and, like Joey Gargan, a Kennedy acolyte. Ted Kennedy’s boat came in ninth in a field of thirty-one.

By nine o’clock that night, everyone was at the rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island. Altogether, there were twelve partygoers—six Boiler Room girls and six men, including Ted Kennedy, Jack Crimmins, Joey Gargan, Paul Markham, and two Kennedy advance men, Charles Tretter and Raymond La Rosa. The fact that all the women were young and single and most of the men were married and without their wives would later raise a number of eyebrows.

“The mood was kind of mixed,” recalled Charles Tretter. “I remember listening to the girls, the long string of reminiscences I myself wasn’t really privy to, anecdotes, stories that came out of the Bobby campaign. What I’m getting at is, I worked for [Ted Kennedy] for a long time, and I think I know him pretty well, well enough to realize that he was—he was not exuberant. He was not having a helluva good time.”

Tretter continued: “There was getting to be long lapses in the evening, people were standing up and Kennedy was working hard at being a good host. If there was a girl not saying much he would try and draw her out. It was just that the conversation, what was said—
Bobby
. He was a presence.”
⁴

Afterward, there were contradictory accounts of the amount of alcohol consumed at the party. “It was a steak cookout, not a Roman orgy,” insisted Esther Newberg. “No one was drinking heavily.” But Joey Gargan painted a different picture. He said that Paul Markham was drinking heavily, as was Ted Kennedy’s chauffeur, Jack Crimmins.

“Jack had become his usual arrogant self, as only he can get after five or six Scotches,” said Gargan.
⁵

The curmudgeonly Crimmins was eager that everyone leave the cottage. “Get all these douche bags out of here,” he said. “I want to get some sleep. The last ferry leaves at twelve o’clock. I want everybody out.”

“Jesus, Jack,” Ted Kennedy said, “you’re stiff! How am I going to get home?”

“Take a fucking cab!” Crimmins replied.

“They talked that way to each other all the time,” Gargan said. “It sounded hostile, but it really wasn’t. And here you have another party, and Ted is kidding Crimmins again, because Jack’s had quite a few. And Jack is saying, ‘Get these broads out of here. I want to go to sleep. I don’t give a shit how you get home, Kennedy. I’m not driving you.’ And the senator’s saying, ‘Okay, Jack. That’s what we’re doing. We’re going. We’re leaving right now.’”
⁶

Ted Kennedy asked Crimmins for the keys to his car. He was going to drive himself back to Edgartown, and he was taking Mary Jo with him.

· · ·

I
T WAS NOW
nearing midnight, and Ted had been drinking steadily for nearly eight hours, since the conclusion of the regatta. He later claimed he had had only five rum-and-Cokes, or about ten ounces of alcohol. But people familiar with his binge drinking doubted those figures. If Ted had been behaving true to form, he would have consumed at least ten to fifteen drinks in that amount of time. It was well known among his friends that Ted became tipsy after only two drinks, so he was almost certainly drunk when he left the party with Mary Jo. However, that fact was never officially established, because the police did not test his blood-alcohol level after the fatal accident. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have done them much good, since Ted delayed his appearance at the police station long enough for his body to have metabolized most of the alcohol.

When Mary Jo left the party with the senator, she was wearing a white long-sleeved blouse, dark slacks, sandals, two bracelets, and a ring. However, she didn’t have her pocketbook with her—a curious omission for a woman as fastidious as Mary Jo. Nor did she ask Esther Newberg, her roommate for the weekend, for the key to their room at the Katama Shores Motor Inn in Edgartown. In short, Mary Jo behaved as though she planned to return to the party after a brief midnight rendezvous with Ted Kennedy.

At the time, no one paid much attention to her departure. But later, her friends expressed astonishment that a devout Catholic like Mary Jo, whose morals had never been questioned, had disappeared into the night in the company of a married man with the lecherous reputation of Ted Kennedy. It wasn’t like Mary Jo to go “for a roll in the hay,” as one writer put it. But Dr. John J. McHugh, the Massachusetts State Police chemist, provided a possible explanation for Mary Jo’s behavior. He tested the alcohol content of Mary Jo’s
blood after her death. It measured .09 percent, which Dr. McHugh said “would be consistent with about 3.75 to 5 ounces of 80- to 90-proof liquor within one hour of death.” That meant Mary Jo, who had little experience with alcohol, had at least two or more drinks during the last hour of the party.

“At that rate,” wrote Robert Sherrill in his exhaustive 1974 investigation of Chappaquiddick for the New York Times Magazine, “Ms. Kopechne would appear to be perhaps the heaviest drinker at the party—assuming that the others were telling the truth about their own alcohol consumption.”
⁷

A
S TED AND
Mary Jo pulled away from the cottage, he was behind the wheel of his four-door Oldsmobile Delmont 88. Under the best of circumstances, when he was stone-cold sober, Ted was a terrible driver. He paid no attention to posted speed limits, and he often forgot to look out the windshield while he was talking to the person in the passenger seat. Apparently, his driving skills were no better that night, for instead of turning left on Chappaquiddick Road and heading toward the Edgartown ferry slip, he made a sharp right turn onto the gravel of Dike Road—the very same road that his driver Jack Crimmins had taken earlier in the day when he drove the senator to the swimming beach. Just before the hump of the rickety Dike Bridge, Ted’s Oldsmobile crashed through the shallow railing and plunged into Poucha Pond.

The Olds flipped over onto its roof and sank under six to seven feet of water. According to Ted’s later testimony, he somehow managed to wriggle out of a car window and claw his way to the surface for air. Then, he claimed, he made seven or eight attempts to dive down and rescue Mary Jo. Only after his efforts proved futile did he leave the scene and stagger the mile and a quarter to the rented
cottage. On his way, he passed a summerhouse. Some of the lights were on inside the house, where there was a telephone that Ted could have used to call the police.

“There’s been a terrible accident,” Ted told Joey Gargan and Paul Markham when he got back to the cottage. “The car’s gone off the bridge down by the beach, and Mary Jo is in it.”
⁸

Instead of immediately notifying the police, Gargan and Markham acted on an impulse to protect Ted Kennedy. The three men got into a white Plymouth Valiant and raced to the scene of the accident. On the way, Ted was sobbing, “This couldn’t have happened. This couldn’t have happened. What am I going to do? What can I do?”
⁹

Arriving at the bridge, Gargan and Markham saw the upside-down Oldsmobile submerged in the water.

“As soon as I saw that, I got sort of butterflies in my stomach,” Gargan said. “I realized if Mary Jo was in that car, there was no hope. I said to myself, ‘Oh, shit, this is over! This is done. She’s gone.’”

Nonetheless, Gargan and Markham stripped off their clothes and dove into the cold water. The strong current flowing through the channel nearly swept them away.

“All I was interested in was saving the girl; I wasn’t thinking about anything else,” Gargan said. “I felt there was only one thing to do, and that was get into that car as quickly as possible. Because if we didn’t, there was just no chance in the world of saving Mary Jo.”
¹⁰

From the shore, Ted Kennedy called out several times: “Can you see her? Is she there?”
¹¹

Gargan looked across the dark surface of the water. Framed in the headlights of the Plymouth Valiant, he could see the senator, lying on his back. He was rocking back and forth and moaning: “Oh, my God. What am I going to do?”

When it became apparent that rescue was impossible, Gargan
and Markham helped Ted Kennedy into the Valiant, and they headed for the Edgartown ferry slip.

“There was a discussion—’What do we do now?’—that was done in a sort of half-trance, like sleepwalking,” Gargan said. “We were all stunned; we were all horrified. We were discussing the situation, trying to decide what to do, trying to get the story together prior to reporting the accident. The accident is over. We’re reporting the situation now. How that was to be done.”

Leo Damore, whose 1988 book
Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up
is still considered the definitive account of the accident and its aftermath, interviewed scores of people associated with the tragedy. Among them was Joey Gargan, who broke the Kennedy code of
omertà
to give Damore his version of events.

“The senator was silent about his intentions, but it appeared he did not want to report the accident at this time,” Damore wrote on the basis of his interviews with Gargan. “Kennedy was having alternative ideas about the situation: Why couldn’t Mary Jo have been driving the car? Why couldn’t she have let him off, and driven to the ferry herself and made a wrong turn?

“Kennedy asked to be brought back to the cottage to establish the story,” Damore continued. “After a while he could leave. Kennedy suggested that when he was back at the Shiretown Inn [where he was staying in Edgartown], Gargan could ‘discover’ the accident and report to police that Mary Jo had been alone in the car. How this was going to be worked out insofar as ‘details’ were concerned, the senator didn’t say.”
¹²

Gargan had never before refused to do his cousin Ted’s bidding. Orphaned in childhood, he had been raised by his aunt, Rose Kennedy, who taught him that his chief role in life was to take care of Ted, regardless of the price to be paid or the effort needed. But this time, Gargan flatly refused to assume responsibility for Ted’s
screwup. He would not make a false report to the police and risk losing his license to practice law. As the three men pulled up to the ferry landing, Gargan suggested that they go together to the Edgartown police station and report what had happened.

“As we drove down that road,” Ted later recalled, “I was almost looking out the front window and windows trying to see her walking down that road. I related this to Gargan and Markham, and they said they understood this feeling, but it was necessary to report it….

“All right, all right, Joey!” Ted yelled at Joey Gargan. “I’m tired of listening to you. I’ll take charge of it. You go back. Don’t upset the girls. Don’t get them involved.”

And with that, Ted leaped from the car, took a few steps, and dove off the pier into the narrow channel of water that separated Edgartown from Chappaquiddick Island. Fully clothed, he began swimming across the inlet to the far shore, where the ferry landing looked deserted. Gargan jumped out and watched him go.

“I hope he drowns, the son of a bitch!” Gargan mumbled under his breath.
¹³

Later, Ted recalled his nocturnal swim: “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 the middle of the channel, a little further than that, the tide was much calmer, gentler, and I began to … make some progress, and finally was able to reach the other shore….”
¹⁴

· · ·

B
ACK AT THE
Shiretown Inn, Ted Kennedy exchanged his wet clothes for dry ones and lay down on the bed to collect his thoughts. He had made it back safely, without the ferry operator or any of the motel employees seeing him. That was good, because it would allow him to claim that he was in Edgartown when the accident occurred on Chappaquiddick.

In an apparent effort to nail down his alibi, he went to the lobby and found Russell Peachy, the innkeeper. He told Peachy that a noisy party had awakened him from sleep. Then he made a point of asking Peachy for the time. It was 2:55
A.M
., Peachy replied. With that time firmly established in Peachy’s memory for use in any future police investigation, Ted returned to his room. He slept for a few hours, then showered, shaved, and dressed in fresh yachting clothes.

At some point that morning, he began placing a rapid-fire series of phone calls—seventeen in all, many of them charged to his credit card. Perhaps the most important was to attorney Burke Marshall, one of Bobby’s assistants at the Justice Department and a man known to the Kennedy family as a “defuser of blockbusters.” It was Marshall who had represented the Kennedy family in its successful effort to bowdlerize William Manchester’s book
The Death of a President
.