Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (14 page)

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.

· · ·

T
WO 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.”

A
LTHOUGH 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

B
OBBY’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.

F
OR 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 Chappaquiddick—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.

*1
More than ten years later, on March 12, 1980, the
New York Times
ran a frontpage article headlined GAPS FOUND IN CHAPPAQUIDDICK PHONE DATA. The
Times
reported: “Records of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s telephone calls in the hours after the accident at Chappaquiddick were withheld by the telephone company from an inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne without the knowledge of the Assistant District Attorney who asked for them.”

*2
Joe Kopechne died in 2003 at the age of ninety. Gwen died four years later at age eighty-four in the Valley Nursing Home in Plains Township, Pennsylvania. They were buried next to Mary Jo in St. Vincent’s Cemetery in Larksville, Pennsylvania.

PART THREE
“A Second
Chappaquiddick”

12

O
N TED KENNEDY’S
first day back in the United States Senate following Chappaquiddick, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield made a public display of greeting him warmly and escorting him to his desk. But Mansfield’s gesture did little to sweeten the reception Ted received from his colleagues.

Among the one hundred senators in the 91st Congress, fifty-seven were Democrats and forty-three were Republicans. There was only one woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, and one African American, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Many senators, both Democrats and Republicans, had once flocked to Ted Kennedy’s committee hearings and press conferences to bask in his celebrity and get their faces on TV. Now, after Chappaquiddick, a number of them went out of their way to avoid being seen in his presence.

Few senators were in a position to cast the first stone, and in time, a number of them would achieve their own public infamy. Herman Talmadge of Georgia would be “denounced” by the Senate
for his unethical conduct; John Tower of Texas would fail to be confirmed as secretary of defense because of his extramarital affairs and heavy drinking. Harrison A. Williams of New Jersey would be convicted of taking bribes in the Abscam sting operation. And Ted Stevens of Alaska would be convicted of seven felony counts for failing to report illegal gifts (though the decision would eventually be reversed following revelations that the prosecution had withheld evidence).

It was an open secret that many senators sexually harassed their female staffers, that others tried to seduce young female interns, and that still others sold their votes in return for campaign donations. The most powerful senator in the 91st Congress—Richard Brevard Russell Jr. of Georgia—was a white supremacist and unapologetic segregationist, which didn’t stop his colleagues from naming a Senate office building after him.

Without doubt, many senators derived pleasure in flaunting their righteous indignation over Ted Kennedy’s behavior on Chappaquiddick Island. But there was also a tinge of envy in their sanctimony. It’s about time, these senators seemed to be saying,
that the Kennedys got their comeuppance
.

W
ITH HIS COLLEAGUES’
disrespect came diminished influence. Many bills that Ted Kennedy supported—on health care, tax reform, gun control, and a lowered voting age—went down to defeat. His vulnerability invited petty personal attacks by his political opponents. They held hearings to consider a bill that would have changed the name Cape Kennedy back to Cape Canaveral. The proposal did not pass, but the fact that such an affront to the assassinated president could even come up for consideration in the United States Senate indicated just how far Ted’s star had fallen. Dejected, depressed, and stressed out, Ted fell ill with pneumonia.