Conflicted ambitions, then, Chappaquiddick
Kennedy appeared White House bound, until a fatal car accident and lingering questions derailed his plans
On a humid Friday in July of 1969, as his plane took off from Boston bound for Martha's Vineyard, Senator Edward M. Kennedy seemed locked in a sure, unstoppable ascent to the White House.
It had been just a year since Bobby Kennedy was killed, gunned down by an assassin 80 days into his hope-flooded run for the presidency, a year since the youngest Kennedy had stood up in St. Patrick's Cathedral and delivered his brother's eulogy.
Now Ted had replaced his brother in the spotlight. Just 37 years old, he had faced months of unrelenting speculation about his presidential aspirations. Polls showed 79 percent of voters thought he would be the Democratic nominee for president in 1972. President Richard Nixon was fixated on him as a threat, counting his TV airtime and assigning political operatives to track his every move.
"There was all this rising, boiling feeling about this meteor getting ready to take off," recalls Robert Bates, a former Kennedy aide. "Everybody wanted to be connected with Ted."
It seemed sometimes as if there was no escape. At a raucous St. Patrick's Day party that spring, Congressmen Tip O'Neill and Ed Boland serenaded Kennedy with an old JFK campaign song. "It's Kennedy," they belted out as other party guests joined in. Kennedy looked embarrassed and swiftly retreated to the bar to get a drink.
The senator spoke little of the pressure. But it was clear he was conflicted.
At times he tried recklessly to slip his burdens. His heavy drinking on a flight back to Washington from Alaska, where he had gone for hearings on Eskimo education, became legend among reporters who were present.
But he had also taken on more responsibility in the Senate, winning the role of majority whip in a step considered a boost to his resume for the White House.
Some friends saw him steeling himself to his duty. "I thought he was willing himself to go through everything he had to go through, to do what had to be done, because he was the last surviving son," says Charles Tretter, a former aide.
At home, Kennedy's three children were frightened by the talk of his running for president. So were the 13 fatherless nieces and nephews who needed his guidance, and his fragile, beautiful wife.
So on this midsummer weekend as his plane approached the Vineyard, Kennedy looked forward to time on the ocean, where he had always sought refuge from inner conflicts. He was going to sail in the annual Edgartown regatta, a family tradition, and to attend a party that night for a group of young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy's campaign for president.
His longtime chauffeur Jack Crimmins had brought Kennedy's car, a black Oldsmobile, to the Vineyard on the ferry. He had also brought a supply of liquor for the weekend: vodka, Scotch, rum, a couple of cases of beer.
Now, after a stop for fried clams, the two men headed for Chappaquiddick, a smaller, sparsely populated island separated from Edgartown by a narrow inlet. They made the quick crossing on a simple, barge-like ferry and continued on their way, through a landscape of sandy marsh and dense scrub pine and oak.
Kennedy wanted a swim before his race. He changed clothes at the gray-shingled cottage where the party would be held that night. Then Crimmins drove him to East Beach: a half mile back toward the ferry, slowing at the sharp, L-shaped curve, then a deliberate right turn onto sandy Dike Road.
A mile down the dirt road, the woods fell away, and the narrow, wooden Dike Bridge came into view.
Crimmins steered carefully across the one-lane span, above the swirling tidal flow of an inlet known as Poucha Pond. At the beach, he waited in the torpid afternoon as Kennedy dove below the crashing surf.
It was not the first reunion of Robert Kennedy's staffers.
The six young women who gathered that weekend on the Vineyard — sisters Nance and Maryellen Lyons, Rosemary "Cricket" Keough, Mary Jo Kopechne, Esther Newberg, and Susan Tannenbaum — had come together several times already to reminisce about their days in the campaign's "boiler room." The Kennedys had hosted one such affair at Hyannis Port the previous summer.
"It was almost like war veterans getting together," says one family friend.
The women had worked in the buzzing nerve center of the campaign, housed in a windowless room for secrecy. Each was responsible for courting and tracking delegates in several states.
Mary Jo Kopechne had known Robert Kennedy well, once staying up all night at his Virginia home to type a landmark speech on Vietnam. After he was killed, Kopechne told a former teacher she felt unable to return to Capitol Hill "because it will never be the same again."
She took a job with a Washington consulting firm after his death.
"Politics was her life," her father, Joseph, would tell reporters.
Being with friends who felt the same way was comforting, and the "boiler room girls" began their Vineyard weekend in good spirits. Friday morning, they swam at a beach on Chappaquiddick. Then they took a chartered boat to watch the sailing races.
Back at the cottage after the regatta, Kennedy soaked in the bathtub to sooth his aching back while Gargan baked frozen hors d'oeuvres and fired up the grill in the fading light outside.
The mood was easygoing. Kennedy asked Crimmins to mix him a rum and Coke and teased his chauffeur about the level in the bottle, jokingly demanding, "Who's been drinking all the rum?"
Tretter, who was also along for the party, headed back to town to buy ice and cigarettes. Another guest was Paul Markham, a former US attorney and Kennedy friend. Gargan's gofer, Ray LaRosa, picked up the young women at their Edgartown hotel.
It was, on the surface, a Camelot-style gathering, of older married men and younger, unmarried women — but in an oddly modest, remote setting, with women who were unusually skilled and ambitious.
Guests drifted from the cramped cottage to the mosquito-ridden front yard. Stories were told; Bobby Kennedy was a presence. Some people danced. Everyone present would later insist that the drinking was moderate. Analysis of Kopechne's blood would show her alcohol level was .09 percent — perhaps the equivalent of three to five drinks.
According to Crimmins, it was 11:15 p.m. when Kennedy asked for the car keys. The senator said he was tired and wanted to return to his hotel on the last ferry. He said he would drive Kopechne back to Edgartown, too, because she'd had too much sun and wasn't feeling well.
His request was unusual. The senator rarely drove himself anywhere, in Washington or Massachusetts. And his departure left behind one car for 10 people, most of them planning to return that night to rooms in Edgartown.
But the pair's departure caused hardly a ripple. Kopechne told no one she was ill, or that she was leaving, her friends said. She left behind her purse and the key to her hotel room.
They headed for the L-shaped intersection, where the paved road curved left toward the ferry and the hard-to-see right turn led to the bridge.
Kennedy's story has not changed in 40 years: He was confused. He thought the ferry was the other way. He turned right.
There were no lights or signs to alert a nighttime driver to the bridge, which was at an odd angle to the road. By the time Kennedy knew what was happening, it was too late. The front tires of the Oldsmobile lifted up, over the stacked planks that were the only barrier on the right edge of the bridge.
The black sedan was in flight. It hit the water and sank, settling upside down in the pond.
The next thing Kennedy knew was that he was going to die.
"There was complete blackness," he said later, according to a court transcript. "Water seemed to rush in from every point, from the windshield, from underneath me, above me."
Conscious of Kopechne struggling beside him, he lifted the driver's door handle and pressed. Nothing happened.
He drew what he believed was his last breath.
And then, somehow, he escaped, "pushing, pressing, and coming up to the surface" with "no idea in the world how I got out of that car."
He would recall being swept away by the tide, calling out Kopechne's name as he drifted. He said he recovered his footing and waded back to the car through waist-deep water, guided by the glow of the headlights underwater.
He dove below the surface, trying to get to Kopechne. He failed, and tried again, seven or eight times in all. By then he was exhausted, barely able to hold his breath.
Finally, he let himself float away. He crawled onto shore and lay there, coughing and gasping. Then he staggered up the bank and started back up Dike Road, "walking, trotting, jogging, stumbling, as fast as I possibly could."
Back at the cottage, spent and soaking wet, Kennedy collapsed in the car parked outside. Then he called Gargan and Markham, both lawyers, to help him.
There was no phone in the cottage, but there were houses nearby and a volunteer fire station with an alarm. The three men never paused, though, as they raced to the pond.
Later, in court, Gargan tried to explain why.
"I felt there was only one thing to do and that was to get into the car and as quickly as possible, because I knew if I did not there wasn't a chance in the world of saving Mary Jo," he said.
At the bridge, Gargan and Markham said, they stripped off their clothes and dove in, but the current kept them from Kopechne. "When we failed in that . . . I didn't think that there was anything more that could be done," Gargan said.
As they headed back up Dike Road — passing the same houses but again not stopping — Kennedy broke down, according to his friends.
"He was sobbing," Markham said. "He said, 'This couldn't have happened.' "
Kennedy's future loomed, suddenly uncertain. "What am I going to do, what can I do?" Kennedy asked.
It had been two hours since the accident. Gargan drove to the ferry landing — steps from a working payphone. The night was still, the narrow inlet calm as glass.
All kinds of theories would surface about what the men said then: that Kennedy wanted to tell the police that Kopechne was driving; that he asked his cousin Joe to take the rap.
Kennedy denied every story. But later, in his testimony, he acknowledged the powerful, dreamlike longing that came over him that night, the "wish and desire and the hope that suddenly this whole accident would disappear."
He thought about the phone calls he would have to make, to Mary Jo's mother, to his own parents. And somewhere in the man who had already borne so much, the will to do the right thing bent and buckled.
Maybe, he thought, Kopechne had escaped. Maybe she was back at the cottage. Meanwhile, Gargan and Markham were insisting he report the accident.
When the senator stood and gave his orders, they were simple and direct: "You take care of the girls; I will take care of the accident."
But Kennedy went back to his room. He did not go to police.
In the morning, he confessed to his friends that he "couldn't gain . . . the moral strength to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead." He said he'd hoped the rising sun would erase the night's events.
But it was no bad dream, the mess he'd left on Chappaquiddick.
Kennedy began making phone calls to lawyers. Two fishermen, meanwhile, had spotted the car in the pond.
By the time the senator made it to the police station, about 10 a.m., Kopechne's body had already been recovered.
Edgartown Police Chief Dominick Arena returned from the bridge to his office to find Kennedy there making phone calls.
"I was the driver," Kennedy said.
"What would you like for me to do?" the senator asked then. "We must do what is right or we will both be criticized for it."
Arena asked for a statement. Kennedy complied, writing 230 words with Markham's help. He did not mention the party or Gargan's and Markham's rescue attempts. He left out Kopechne's last name because he could not spell it. And he brushed aside the 10-hour delay in reporting the crash.
"When I fully realized what had happened this morning," he wrote, "I immediately contacted the police."
In spite of the gaps, Arena asked no questions. It was too late to determine how much Kennedy had been drinking. By midday, Kennedy was on his way to the airport.
His advisers were assembling in Hyannis Port. They included lawyers, speechwriters, strategists, and friends: Richard Goodwin and Ted Sorensen; Milton Gwirtzman, David Burke and Burke Marshall; brother-in-law Stephen Smith; congressmen John Culver and John Tunney.
K. Dun Gifford, a former Robert Kennedy aide who had overseen the campaign "boiler room," was sent to escort Kopechne's body to Pennsylvania. He denies the allegation, made repeatedly over the years, that he rushed the body off the island to avoid an autopsy.
But he says he understood at once that the world had changed.
"You just knew it would never be the same again," he says. "It didn't mean he couldn't have a life in public service, but it wouldn't be a charmed life. It was going to be different."
The press had descended and soon unearthed news of the party, but by then the guests had left the island.
More confounding, a sheriff's deputy named Huck Look had contradicted Kennedy. Coming home that night through the Dike Road intersection, Look said, he had seen a car like Kennedy's, with a man and woman inside and a similar plate number, at 12:45 a.m. - an hour and a half after Kennedy said the accident happened and 45 minutes after the last scheduled ferry.
The medical examiner declared Kopechne's cause of death was drowning and saw no need for an autopsy. The district attorney kept his distance. The police chief prepared the only charge he believed he could make: leaving the scene of an accident, a misdemeanor punishable by two months in prison.
The nation was demanding answers from Kennedy. But the senator was in crisis, seriously weighing the wisdom of leaving the Senate.
Outside the compound walls, the rhetoric was brutal. A Newsweek cover story claimed Kennedy's friends had recently been "powerfully concerned with his indulgent drinking habits, his daredevil driving, and his ever-ready eye for a pretty face."
Frank Mankiewicz, former press secretary for Robert Kennedy, says he became increasingly impatient as he consulted by phone with the team in Hyannis Port.
"My advice in all situations is to tell the truth, tell it all, and tell it now, and as it dragged on, I was troubled by it," he recalls. "I said, 'Jesus, why don't they say something?' "
Nantucket Sound was choppy and shrouded in fog Friday morning as Kennedy sailed to his court hearing on the Vineyard. In the century-old courtroom, he sat with his head down while Joan listened from the wooden jury box.
He quietly entered his plea. The clerk asked him to repeat it.
"Guilty," he said in a louder voice. The packed courtroom stirred.
His lawyer asked that his sentence be suspended. Judge James Boyle consented.
"It is my understanding that he has already been, and will continue to be, punished far beyond anything this court can impose," said Boyle.
The hearing lasted less than 10 minutes. Afterward, the police chief told reporters his investigation was closed.
Kennedy flew back to the Cape to prepare for an even more public reckoning. That night, he would appear on national television to explain the events on Chappaquiddick.
Believing Massachusetts voters would urge Kennedy to stay, Milton Gwirtzman had suggested asking them for guidance. Gwirtzman says he assumed their reaction would be shaped by their long history with the Kennedy family — by their grief at the loss of the senator's brothers and by "what he meant to Catholics as the last surviving son."
Kennedy spoke for 13 minutes. He described the cookout "for a devoted group of Kennedy campaign secretaries" and denied the rumors of "immoral conduct" between himself and Kopechne. He also denied driving drunk.
He acknowledged his failure to report the accident promptly and described the "irrational" thoughts that consumed him that night, such as wondering "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys." But he insisted he did not seek to escape responsibility by blaming physical or emotional trauma.
"I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately," he said.
Finally, he asked the voters what he should do next.
Within hours, it was clear that Gwirtzman's gamble had paid off.
Phone calls to the Globe were two-to-one in Kennedy's favor. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine voiced his faith in the senator's "straightforward story." Even Gwen Kopechne, Mary Jo's mother, said she hoped he would stay in the Senate.
Western Union delivered more than 10,000 telegrams to the compound. An aide said they backed Kennedy by a 100-to-1 ratio.
By Tuesday, his staff confirmed he would stay on in the Senate.
But if Massachusetts had accepted his transgression, he faced a tougher crowd in Washington and around the country.
A national Gallup poll conducted after his speech found a sharp drop in the number of people with "extremely favorable" attitudes toward him.
"Pro-Kennedy Democrats who had optimistically suspended judgment before Kennedy's Friday night television appearance are now deeply saddened and deeply critical," Robert Novak and Rowland Evans wrote in the
As long as he failed to answer the lingering questions, they wrote, Kennedy's political future would be clouded.
And it was.
"Come in, Ted," said Mansfield. "You're right back where you belong."
The scene was one of a return to normalcy. But Chappaquiddick had changed everything.
The accident remained a front-page story. The district attorney for Martha's Vineyard was now seeking an inquest into Kopechne's death and asking Pennsylvania authorities to exhume her body for an autopsy.
The tragedy had shaken the Kennedy family. In August, Joan Kennedy suffered her fourth miscarriage. She blamed the loss in part on Chappaquiddick. Because of her previous miscarriages, her doctor had advised her to stay in bed. But when her husband asked her to go with him to Kopechne's funeral in Pennsylvania, she felt obliged to play the part of the dutiful wife.
"So I stood next to Ted," she recalls, adding, painfully, "I felt like it was choosing politics over our baby."
The senator suffered another loss that November, when his father slipped into a coma and died, as he and his sisters prayed at the bedside.
In January, the Chappaquiddick inquest was held on Martha's Vineyard. Kennedy's lawyers had prevailed, and the four days of testimony were closed to the public and press, the transcript locked away until a later date.
That spring, Kennedy campaigned for the Senate as the final legal chapters in the Chappaquiddick saga played out.
A grand jury on Martha's Vineyard opened its investigation of the accident in April and closed it two days later, issuing no indictment.
Within days of its decision, Judge Boyle released the 764-page inquest transcript — including his own stunning conclusion that Kennedy's negligence had contributed to Kopechne's death.
Based on testimony at the inquest, Boyle concluded that Kennedy had lied; he "did not intend to drive to the ferry slip and his turn onto Dike Road was intentional."
Furthermore, the judge wrote, because the bridge was a hazard to be crossed with caution, Kennedy "would at least be negligent and, possibly, reckless" when he approached it, as he testified, at 20 miles per hour.
But under the odd, archaic rules of the inquest, Judge Boyle was not required to act on his findings, released just days before he retired. The district attorney made no move to action either.
Kennedy condemned the report as "not justified."
The Massachusetts voters were untroubled. They reelected him a few months later over his poorly funded Republican rival, Josiah Spaulding, by almost 500,000 votes.
He suffered a loss of standing in 1971, when his colleagues chose Senator Robert Byrd to replace him as whip. Kennedy was bitter, but later saw his loss as a lucky break that led him to embrace committee work.
He took charge of the Senate's subcommittee on health and fought hard to increase cancer research funding. Stepping up his interest in foreign affairs, he advocated against incendiary weapons and for the protection of civilians, and successfully pushed for the creation of a United Nations relief force to respond to human and natural disasters.
Kennedy was also working for the poor at home, helping to establish programs to feed the elderly and poor women and children and introducing legislation that improved schools on Indian reservations.
Battling for the least powerful, the senator may have felt energized by a return to the simple lessons of his childhood, "the sense that to whom much is given, much is expected," says Paul Kirk, his longtime friend and colleague.
He was in a comfortable, familiar place, where he could immerse himself with little fear of failing.
"He just went about his business, and didn't let it overcome him, and I began to see a change in him," recalls Edward Brooke, Kennedy's Republican colleague from Massachusetts, who was not particularly close to him. "I saw a very serious young man, a man who had been hurt and who was sorry, and I saw him rise above it and go on with his life. You had to respect that — he was standing up like a man."
Kennedy had made it clear after Chappaquiddick that he would not run for president in 1972.
By 1971, that pledge seemed long forgotten.
Almost anything he did was seen as proof that he would run: A cross-country trip to survey the state of healthcare; a speech that recalled his brother's presidency and said it was "time to rekindle that spirit."
"Short of self immolation, nothing he can say will convince me he is not a candidate," wrote the editor of the Republican National Committee publication Monday.
Kennedy had acknowledged in a New York Times interview in May that he would like to be president one day. "That's where the power is," he said.
But the timing "feels wrong in my gut," he explained. What he needed was "breathing time," to gain experience and care for his family.
Meanwhile, his Senate work was satisfying. He freely criticized the war in Vietnam, while President Nixon, fearing his potential candidacy, lashed back sharply.
Senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president, tried to recruit Kennedy as his running mate. Mankiewicz, who was then McGovern's press secretary, says that Chappaquiddick loomed large, but Kennedy's resurgent popularity seemed larger.
Kennedy resisted, and McGovern eventually chose his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver instead.
"Unlike either of his brothers, [Kennedy] loved the Senate and took to it like a duck to water," says Mankiewicz. "By '72 and '76, he had an alternate route."
His oldest son, Edward Jr., also known as Teddy, was 12 years old, a tow-headed boy with a mischievous streak and an ingrained concern for others.
But as the 10th anniversary of Jack's assassination approached, the senator got devastating news.
A bruise on the boy's right leg, X-rayed at the urging of his worried governess, was found to be cancer, and doctors believed it had spread. The leg would have to be amputated.
The senator "was as devastated as any parent would be," recalls his longtime aide Melody Miller.
Kennedy told his son the bad news the day before the surgery. Both of them wept.
The next morning, Ted and Joan escorted their son to the operating room at Georgetown University Hospital. Then the senator rushed to Holy Trinity Church to walk his niece Kathleen down the aisle at her wedding to David Townsend.
Teddy's cancer turned out to be a rare type, chondrosarcoma, which attacks cartilage. Slower to spread than bone cancer, it is also less lethal.
But a recurrence could not be ruled out, and the family decided on aggressive treatment. Teddy would be injected with massive doses of an anti-cancer drug, and an antidote to offset the harmful effects, every three or four weeks for two years.
"They couldn't give Ted and me a good prognosis, or a prognosis at all," says Joan Kennedy, "because they just didn't know."
Undone by the uncertainty, she drank more. In June, she was hospitalized for "emotional strain." In September, she checked into a clinic in California.
Ted called in a priest to counsel Joan, a family friend says. When the couple had an evening event to attend, he called home often during the day to assess his wife's condition.
"You never heard an unkind word about Joan," according to the friend. "It was just matter of fact — 'She can't make it.' "
His troubles at home did not keep Kennedy from his work. Teddy's cancer had helped him understand other families' struggles, and he redoubled his push for national healthcare.
Stepping up his engagement in foreign affairs, he led a Senate fight to block further funding of the war in Vietnam, and he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he met with Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist leader, and proposed a ban on all nuclear tests.
If you were president now, Brezhnev told him, we would sign an agreement.
Back in the United States, however, amid the latest preelection clamor, Kennedy's gut again told him the timing was wrong.
He could not be sure his older son was free of cancer. His younger son, Patrick, suffered severe asthma attacks. Kara, Ted Jr., and Patrick fretted about their father's safety. His wife was troubled, in and out of institutions.
And Chappaquiddick was back in the headlines. Several news organizations, believing Kennedy would soon be running for president, had launched new investigations of the accident. The Boston Globe was deep into its reassessment. A story in The New York Times Magazine highlighted discrepancies in the purported timeline of events.
At the end of September 1974, Kennedy, now 42, returned to Boston to announce his "firm, final and unconditional" decision not to run for president in 1976.
"Clearly he knew that if he ran, Chappaquiddick would be an issue, but I believe it was much more his obligations, his worries about his own children, having watched what their cousins went through," Kirk says. "It's so searing, parental love and fear."
In interviews after his announcement, friends and fellow Democrats voiced certainty that Kennedy would one day run. His family would gain stability; his influence would grow. The Chappaquiddick echoes would wane.
But more than one friend privately acknowledged another possibility: that Kennedy, deep down, did not really want the job, even if he felt it was his duty to run.
"I don't think the fire was in the gut," says one. "I don't think he needed to be president."
Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com