Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (13 page)

At eight o’clock in the morning, Gargan and Markham showed up at the Shiretown Inn. They were eager to hear directly from Ted what he had told the police. Instead, they found him on the porch, casually chatting with a group of friends as though nothing was wrong.

“What happened?” Gargan asked when they were behind the closed door of Ted’s room and safely out of earshot of the others.

“I didn’t report it,” Ted admitted.

“What the fuck is going on?” Gargan screamed. “You were supposed to report the fucking accident.”

It soon dawned on Gargan that, despite his strenuous objections the night before, Ted had expected him to take care of things. That was what Joey was supposed to do—regardless of the price to be paid. As far as Ted was concerned, Joey should have told the police that Mary Jo, not Ted Kennedy, had been driving the fatal car.

“This thing is worse now than it was before,” Gargan said. “We’ve got to do something. We’re reporting the accident right now.”

“I’m going to say that Mary Jo was driving,” Ted insisted.

“There’s no way you can say that!” Gargan said. “You can be placed at the scene.”
¹⁵

Even then, however, Gargan and Markham did not take Ted Kennedy to the police station to report the accident. Instead, the three men returned to Chappaquiddick Island to make some phone calls and decide on their next step.
^*1
There, they ran into some of the Boiler Room girls—Esther Newberg and the Lyons sisters—walking toward the ferry landing. Gargan assembled everyone back at the cottage and told them that Ted had been in an automobile accident and that Mary Jo was “missing.”

“Can’t you do something?” Nance Lyons asked. “Isn’t there some way we can have somebody else as driver of the car?”

“That would be impossible,” Gargan said.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t be driving the car,” Nance
Lyons said, looking at Joey Gargan. “Can’t somebody else take the blame?”

“We can’t, that’s all!” Gargan fired back. “The senator was driving.”
¹⁶

B
Y THEN, TWO
amateur fishermen had notified Edgartown police chief Dominick J. “Jim” Arena that they had spotted the wrecked car in Poucha Pond. Chief Arena summoned John Farrar, an expert scuba diver on the Edgartown Search and Rescue Squad. On one of his first dives, Farrar located Mary Jo’s body in the well of the backseat of the Oldsmobile. The body was stiff with rigor mortis. Her hands clasped the backseat. Her face was turned upward.

“It looked as if she were holding herself up to get a last breath of air,” Farrar said. “It was a consciously assumed position.”
¹⁷

Farrar tied a rope around Mary Jo’s neck, so that her body would not be swept away by the tide as he pulled it to shore.

“She didn’t drown,” Farrar said later. “She died of suffocation in her own air void. It took her at least three or four hours to die. I could have had her out of that car twenty-five minutes after I got the call. But he [Ted Kennedy] didn’t call.”
¹⁸

Dr. Donald R. Mills, the on-duty medical examiner, and Eugene Frieh, a local undertaker, examined Mary Jo’s corpse. At the funeral home, Frieh removed Mary Jo’s clothes—the white long-sleeved blouse, the dark slacks, the sandals, the two bracelets, and the ring.

By now, Chief Arena had traced the license plate on the wrecked car to its owner—Edward M. Kennedy. When he called the police station to order the officer on duty to find the senator, he was informed that Ted was already there.

“I am sorry,” Chief Arena told Ted when the senator came to
the phone. “I have some bad news. Your car was in an accident and the young lady is dead.”

“I know,” Kennedy replied.

I
N HIS STATEMENT
to the police which Ted dictated and Paul Markham wrote out in block letters—the senator declared: “When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.”

That, of course, was not true. More than nine hours had transpired between the time of the accident and the time Ted showed up at the Edgartown police station. And although Ted admitted he had driven the car in which Mary Jo lost her life, he admitted little else. He did not, for instance, mention the fact that he and Mary Jo had attended a party, along with five other women and five other men, at which alcoholic beverages had been served. He did not mention that the party guests were still on Chappaquiddick Island, and could be interviewed as witnesses by the police. He did not mention that Joey Gargan and Paul Markham had tried to rescue Mary Jo instead of summoning the police for help. He did not mention that, after Gargan and Markham failed to bring up her body, they still did not call the police.

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.”

S
EVERAL 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.

I
N 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.”

J
OSEPH 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.