The House of Kennedy Read online

  But Crimmins won’t be driving that evening.

  Instead, the senator leaves with the keys—and Mary Jo Kopechne.

  Testimony as to what happens next runs to 763 pages in the inquest document released nearly eighteen months later, on April 29, 1970.

  In short: Ted was driving the Olds, with Mary Jo as his passenger, when they went off Dike Bridge into eight feet of water in Poucha Pond.

  He lives. She drowns.

  His next actions shadow him forever after. The consequences of the accident are compounded by questionable choices. When Ted gets out of the water, his first instinct is not to seek help from police, but to return on foot to his friends at the party, a little over a mile away. “So then he [Ted] went back up to the house and he was very badly advised by others who had probably had too many drinks as well,” Ted’s best friend John Tunney, who is not at the party, later relates. “So everything fell apart over the next several hours.”

  “That was the tragedy of it. All of the people there [at the party] were dependent upon him in one form or another,” Tunney declares. “It’s so sad. It was so sad that he didn’t have somebody at that party to say we’ve got to get hold of the police immediately.”

  Instead, Joe Gargan recalls fellow party guest Ray LaRosa, who works for the Massachusetts Department of Civil Defense, calling him and attorney Paul Markham out to the rented white Plymouth Valiant parked in the driveway, where Ted has collapsed. “The senator said to me, ‘The car has gone off the bridge down by the beach and Mary Jo is in it,’” Gargan says. “With that I backed up the car and went just as fast as I could toward the bridge.”

  When a second attempt to rescue Mary Jo fails, Kennedy later testifies that he instructs Gargan and Markham, “You take care of the girls; I’ll take care of the accident.” Gargan and Markham return to the “Boiler Room Girls” and the cottage, while Ted, who’s missed the last ferry of the night, swims across the five-hundred-foot channel to Edgartown and the Shiretown Inn.

  Once there, Ted makes a number of phone calls—but not to the police. Nor does he call his wife, Joan, but Gargan has also suggested his cousin call Kennedy family lawyer Burke Marshall and personal assistant David Burke. Ted pauses his phone calls at 2:25 a.m. to interact with the innkeeper, Russell Peachey—an encounter, some later surmise, meant to start establishing a timeline of his actions over the past several hours. He doesn’t mention the accident to Peachey.

  He does reach Helga Wagner, his companion during Bobby’s California campaign, a “tall, slim, blond, athletic” woman whom one admirer calls “a veritable female 007.” Helga later insists to People magazine that she’s a friend to “all the Kennedys,” and Ted’s call that night is only to get the phone number where he can reach his brother-in-law (and known family fixer) Stephen Smith, vacationing in Spain.

  Christopher Lawford remembers how his mother, Pat Kennedy Lawford, exhibits telltale Kennedy secretive behavior. “Nobody said a word about what happened. There were all these hushed phone conversations and then my mother packed her bags and said she had to go to the Cape. That was the way we were always informed of crises—someone arriving in a hurry, or someone leaving in a hurry.”

  John Tunney receives one of those urgent calls. “I was in California campaigning for the Senate,” he recalls. “I got a call from Pat Lawford. She said, ‘Your best friend is in terrible trouble. He’s had a terrible accident and you’d better come back right now. You’ve got to get back here with him.’”

  “It was a terrible thing,” Ted tells Tunney. “I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have been in a car when I’ve had a few drinks. I tried to save her but I couldn’t. I tried to dive down and I couldn’t. I almost drowned myself. I had water in my lungs. I didn’t see her and I thought she had gotten out.” Despite the beach being a well-known “lovers’ lane” spot, Ted insists to his friend that “he’d never had any kind of sexual relationship with that girl.”

  As to “the morality of her death,” however, “I don’t feel guilty,” Ted says. “Obviously, I can be faulted terribly from a judgment point of view, but from the point of view of was it a killing, absolutely not. It was an accident.”

  Chapter 41

  Police Chief Dominick “Jim” Arena responds to an 8:30 a.m. call from two young fishermen who spot the Oldsmobile submerged in Poucha Pond.

  Arena has been on the job in Edgartown for two years, and he swims out to make a routine survey of the wreck. He’s unable to enter the car, but is struck by a chilling thought. “Something told me it was more than just a car in the water. Sitting there [on the undercarriage], I had the feeling that there was someone in that car.”

  Deputy Sheriff Christopher S. “Huck” Look Jr. witnesses the vehicle being pulled from the water and has a startling revelation—it’s the same big black car he’d noticed while patrolling the night before about 12:45 a.m. (contradicting the police statement Ted gives on Saturday morning, July 19, where he notes the time he was driving the car as “approximately 11:15 p.m.” When Walter Steele, special prosecutor for the Vineyard learns of the incident, he says, “That’s impossible. They [the Kennedys] don’t drive anywhere”).

  Look had specifically noticed two sevens in the license plate number, just like his high school jersey. Police confirm that the wrecked car with license plate L78207 is registered to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

  After a diver retrieves Mary Jo’s body, the associate county medical examiner, Dr. Donald Mills, examines it at around 9:30 a.m. Though he does not perform an autopsy, Dr. Mills puts Mary Jo’s time of death at no earlier than 12:30 in the early hours of that morning, and her cause of death as drowning. The doctor’s time line doesn’t square with Ted’s—that the accident happened shortly after 11:15 p.m., and that there was a second rescue attempt made at 12:20 a.m. in the rented white Valiant (license Y98-746).

  “I believe,” Look, who in 1971 will be appointed sheriff, says, “that I know the difference between a big black car and a little white car.”

  Look is speaking as an investigator seeking to prepare a criminal case. Though local law enforcement is first on the scene, the FBI is the first to break the news to the White House.

  On Saturday, July 19, J. Edgar Hoover, still FBI director, receives a teletype “flashing the first news of the drowning, initially misidentifying Ms. Kopechne as ‘Mary Palporki.’” The communication is entered into Ted’s FBI file with a notation that the “fact Senator Kennedy was driver is not being revealed to anyone.”

  Diaries kept by White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reveal that Nixon becomes obsessed with the Chappaquiddick incident, ordering aide John Ehrlichman to get investigators “working on what really happened.”

  According to the Boston Globe’s Robert Healy, “He had a fixation, Nixon did, on the Kennedys. Of course, what the hell? He was looking down the barrel of a gun at Bobby and Jack, and the guy was paranoid anyway and the Kennedys just wiped him out…[A]ll he wanted to talk about was Ted Kennedy.”

  The Boston-area papers, led by the Globe, are in the incredible situation of having to decide whether to “lead with the moonwalk or Chappaquiddick.” Robert Healy describes the front-page layout: “We did a dual job that [Saturday] night”—in advance of the Sunday, July 20, paper. “Split right in half.”

  “It was the greatest moment in John F. Kennedy’s presidential [legacy] happening at the worst possible moment for Ted Kennedy—the senator’s personal legacy,” Taylor Allen, screenwriter of the 2017 film Chappaquiddick, opines.

  But attempts at in-depth reporting on the story prove frustrating. In terms of first-person fact-finding, Adam Clymer of the New York Times, who later becomes Ted’s biographer, is completely shut out. “I tried to interview people about it. Not only Kennedy, but I knew a couple of the women who were there. They wouldn’t discuss it with me.”

  “You knew you weren’t going to get anything from the Kennedys,” Robert Healy says of the Globe’s strategy on reporting the case. They t
ried to get info out of Police Chief Arena, but even though “he wasn’t a pal [of the Kennedys]…I think he was being careful about dealing with the United States Senator from Massachusetts.”

  “I was the driver,” Ted admits to Chief Arena, though he doesn’t say as much when he calls Mary Jo’s mother, Gwen Kopechne, on Saturday morning. By noon, he has boarded a short flight to Hyannis Port, where he must face his father.

  In the presence of Rita Dallas, Ted begins his awful story. “Dad,” he says, “I’m in some trouble. There’s been an accident, and you’re going to hear all sorts of things about me from now on. Terrible things. But, Dad, I want you to know they’re not true. It was an accident. I’m telling you the truth, Dad; it was an accident.”

  Jackie has her own opinion, and it implicates Joe and the ethos he created in the House of Kennedy. “I believe Ted has an unconscious drive to self-destruct,” Jackie tells Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli. “I think it comes from the fact that he knows he’ll never live up to what people expect of him. He’s not Jack. He’s not Bobby. And he believes that what he is, is just not enough.”

  Rita Dallas recalls Ted undergoing a medical examination by a doctor in Hyannis Port, who “recommended that Teddy’s spine be tapped. This was done at Teddy’s house on Squaw Island. The diagnosis was ‘wear your neck brace,’ but Teddy shook his head saying, ‘No, I can’t do it. I can’t let people think I’d be trying to get their sympathy. I can’t.’” The doctor also detects a mild concussion, similar to the one Ted sustained in the 1964 plane crash he also survived.

  In the aftermath of Chappaquiddick, Joan (then thirty-two years old and four months pregnant) hears of the scandal directly from her husband’s mouth—though he’s not talking to her. According to Joan’s secretary, Marcia Chellis, Joan picks up a phone extension only to overhear a conversation between Ted and Helga Wagner.

  “Ted called his girlfriend, Helga, before he or anyone else told me what was going on,” Joan tells Chellis. “I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, I had to stay upstairs.”

  Three days after the incident, on July 22, Ted and Joan, along with Ethel, travel from Hyannis Port to attend Mary Jo’s funeral at St. Vincent’s Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The congregation of five hundred buzzes when the Kennedy party enters, observing, “The senator, wearing a heavy neck brace, seemed to have trouble kneeling after they entered the front pew.” The three highly visible mourners then travel to the cemetery in Larksville by chauffeured limousine.

  That same day, the Boston Globe reports on the findings of Edgartown’s associate medical examiner, Dr. Mills. Mary Jo’s blood tests showed “a degree of alcohol, but it was very well down. She was not drunk at the time this happened. She was not drinking immoderately,” he said. (In 1969, the Massachusetts blood alcohol concentration [BAC] limit was .15 percent; in 2000, the national limit dropped to .08 percent; Mary Jo’s blood tested for .09.)

  Chief Arena didn’t test Ted’s blood alcohol levels, explaining, “If a man comes into my station clear-eyed and walking steadily on his feet with no semblance of alcohol on his breath,” he explains, “I have no business in giving a Breathalyzer.”

  On Friday, July 25, Ted, Joan, and Stephen Smith cross Nantucket Sound by Kennedy yacht for a hearing at the Edgartown courthouse presided over by Judge James Boyle. Ted pleads a barely audible “Guilty” to a misdemeanor charge (lacking evidence of criminal negligence, the most serious possible charge) of leaving the scene of an accident.

  After handing down a suspended two-month sentence, Judge Boyle says, “It is my understanding that he [Ted] has already been and will continue to be punished far beyond anything this court can impose.”

  The bewildered public has endured seven days of silence from the Kennedys, but on that same Friday night, Ted makes a thirteen-minute nationally televised speech from the library of the family’s Hyannis Port home. While Ted is the one to deliver the speech, however, the message is crafted by Jack and Bobby’s finest wordsmiths and political operatives.

  According to Lester Hyman, however, key influencers—speechwriters Ted Sorensen and Richard Goodwin, aides Milton Gwirtzman and David Burke, lawyer Burke Marshall, and brother-in-law Stephen Smith—“were John Kennedy’s people. I believe that they were there to preserve John Kennedy’s reputation, not Teddy’s, and I think they disserved him [Ted].”

  Viewers now know that Ted’s wife, Joan, was absent from the party at the cottage on the night of July 18 “for reasons of health” (a euphemism for her pregnancy with their expected fourth child), and that Ted feels grief and remorse over Mary Jo’s death. Part of this is a prelude to a political appeal, as Ted directly addresses the voters of Massachusetts, asking “whether my standing among the people of my state has been so impaired that I should resign my seat in the United States Senate.”

  A quickly commissioned Gallup poll shows that “extremely favorable” ratings of the senator have dropped fifteen points (from 49 to 34 percent) following his televised speech, but Ted’s Boston office is besieged with favorable calls. The polished senatorial rhetoric has convinced one crucial person: Mary Jo’s grieving mother, Gwen Kopechne, who passes a handwritten note to the reporters surrounding her house during Ted’s broadcast. “I am satisfied with the senator’s statement, and do hope he decides to stay in the Senate.”

  The Kopechnes decide not to sue. “We figured that people would think we were looking for blood money,” Mary Jo’s father, Joseph Kopechne, explains, though the family does accept $90,904 from Ted, as well as $50,000 from his insurance company. The money “was damn little, considering,” Joseph Kopechne angrily tells Ladies Home Journal in 1989.

  * * *

  Ted and his family spend the August Senate recess at the family compound in Hyannis Port. On August 28, Ted goes on the annual Kennedy family camping trip, but Joan feels too ill to join him. That night, her sisters-in-law Jean and Ethel take her to Cape Cod Hospital, where she suffers a miscarriage, her third. “Asked by a newsman whether the miscarriage was the result of a fall or accident,” the Desert Sun reports, Ted, who visits Joan on August 29, says, “No, she just didn’t carry.”

  The couple’s personal tragedy counts among yet another life lost—among the Kennedys, and those who dare to get close to them.

  * * *

  On Ted’s first day back in the Senate, he invites Lester Hyman to lunch at his desk. Hyman recalls Ted “raised his hand just like a little kid” in an oath as he begins to tell his story.

  “Lester, I swear to God,” Ted says, “I had nothing to do with Mary Jo Kopechne, and I was not drunk,” Hyman relates. “I said, Ted, I believe you, I really do. But the problem is not so much that but your conduct afterwards. And he said, Well, let me explain that to you. I said, Good. At that point, the buzzers rang in the Senatorial office for a vote call and he had to leave. By the time he came back, he wasn’t ready to talk any more, and I always wondered what he would have said.”

  Ever mindful of the looming 1972 campaign, President Nixon is already actively working every advantageous angle. In a 2010 interview with the New York Times, John W. Dean III, who rose from an assistant in the Justice Department to White House counsel, explains that if Nixon were to face the senator he wanted to make certain “that he could hang Chappaquiddick around Kennedy’s neck.” On October 17, 1969, Dean requests that the FBI research the activities of Mary Jo Kopechne, specifically stating in his memo, “both the deputy attorney general and the attorney general are anxious to discretely find out if Mary Jo Kopechne (deceased) had visited Greece in August, 1968,” when Ted is known to have traveled with Jackie on his way to meet with Aristotle Onassis.

  At clubby Sans Souci Restaurant in Washington, Lester Hyman and Senator Eugene McCarthy are seated at separate tables, but McCarthy is “talking about Chappaquiddick, and dripping with sarcasm” at a volume loud enough for Hyman to overhear McCarthy say, “Isn’t it ironic that the entire Kennedy dynasty has been brought down by a mere Polish secreta
ry?”

  The judicial inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne is set to begin on January 5, 1970, six months after the fatal accident. In advance, Stephen Smith has secured witness testimony from an insider source, the Massachusetts state detective Bernard J. Flynn. At Boston’s Logan International Airport, Flynn advises Smith and a Kennedy attorney, “Have Ted Kennedy tell the truth. We don’t have any other witnesses. He has nothing to fear.”

  More than twenty witnesses are called, including Senator Kennedy. He testifies for more than two hours, although, per standard inquest procedure, he is not cross-examined. Questioning closes January 8.

  Just two weeks later, Ted Kennedy experiences another blow. On January 21, the New York Times front-page headline screams “KENNEDY OUSTED AS WHIP” in bold, capital letters. Ted loses to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia in what the press describes as a political coup capitalizing on Ted’s vulnerabilities in the wake of Chappaquiddick. Byrd takes a stance against the stiff-drink negotiations that Ted has favored both on and off the Hill. “I despise cocktail parties,” he says. “You just stand around and waste time.”

  Yet if cocktails will keep Ted’s inhibitions loosened, the next round is on President Nixon. While Ted’s reputation has been severely damaged, he’s still a Kennedy, and the Kennedys are still widely beloved. On June 23, 1971, White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, strategizes about capitalizing on reports of Ted’s continued philandering. “We need to take advantage of this opportunity and get him [Ted] in a compromising situation if we can.”

  A grand jury declines to take further legal action against Ted in the Chappaquiddick case, yet his peers stand in extended public judgment. In a 1979 essay titled “Prelude to the Bridge,” New York Times columnist William Safire compiles a list of Ted’s damning actions—from his expulsion from Harvard to his excessive speeding in Virginia to leaving the scene of a deadly accident—for which Ted has seemingly suffered no consequences. “When in big trouble,” Safire writes, “Ted Kennedy’s repeated history has been to run, to hide, to get caught, and to get away with it.”