Sometimes, it’s impossible to burn bridges.
With Sen. Edward Kennedy having passed away nearly 10 years ago, and the tragedy of Chappaquiddick nearly 50 years old, you’d think the scandal that erupted after that muggy July weekend in 1969 would be but a distant memory by now.
But like a bad check, it has returned.
Thanks to director John Curran, the motion picture “Chappaquiddick” (written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan) and produced by Entertainment Studios, hits theaters nationwide on April 6.
The film explores the mysterious events surrounding the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne (played by Kate Mara) after Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., landing upside down in eight feet of water.
According to published reports, Curran avoids indicting or absolving Kennedy in the film. After depicting the facts of the case, the New York born director and screenwriter leaves it up to the audience to draw their own conclusions.
What exactly happened at Chappaquiddick?
The Chappaquiddick incident couldn’t have come at a worse time for Ted Kennedy, who was only 37 at the time. His star was rising in the U.S. Senate and was being heavily favored by most public opinion polls as the candidate most likely to be nominated by the Democratic Party for the 1972 presidential election.
But then, in a blink of an eye, his hopes and dreams were shattered on that fateful July weekend in 1969, just two days before the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.
Ted Kennedy's submerged 1967 Oldsmobile and a picture of Mary Jo Kopechne who drowned in the car. She was 28.
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On the weekend of July 18-19, 1969, Sen. Kennedy invited six women who had worked for his late brother Robert to attend a reunion at the annual Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta race (a sail boating race) to honor their supervisor, Dave Hackett.
The party or cookout (after the race) took place at a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, accessible by ferry from the town of Edgartown on the nearby larger island, Martha's Vineyard.
The party was attended by six married men (including Sen. Kennedy) and six unmarried women.
Sometime during the evening on July 18, Sen. Kennedy claimed he wanted to head back to the Shiretown Inn in Edgartown.
According to testimony, one of the campaign workers at the reunion, Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, feeling tired, expressed to Mr. Kennedy that she would like to catch a ride with him so that she could catch the ferry, which was closing at midnight.
For reasons never fully explained, Kopechne, left behind her purse and hotel room key at the cottage. She also never informed anyone that she was leaving.
After the young campaign worker hopped into the car with the senator, what exactly took place over the next few hours is a matter of speculation.
Kennedy maintained that they were driving toward the ferry but made the wrong turn on Dike Road (an unlit, dirt road) that led to Dike Bridge. Moments before reaching the bridge, according to his testimony, he slammed on the brakes, before driving off a side of the bridge, landing upside down in eight feet of water of Poucha Pond.
Many question the “wrong road’’ scenario, reasoning that it would be virtually impossible to have turned on Dike Road without immediately being aware of the mistake.
The biggest shroud of mystery centers on why it took the senator nearly 10 hours to report the accident?
He testified that he made seven or eight attempts to dive into the water to rescue Kopechne but had trouble breathing. So, he began walking and running for help, but couldn’t make out any shapes and was only able to stay on the road from the silhouettes of the trees.
But evidence subsequently emerged that Kennedy would have, in fact, come across at least three lit cottages (only 500 feet from the bridge) where he could have asked for help.
Kennedy described that night as a "jumble of emotions-grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock.”
According to medical reports, he suffered a concussion.
The fire department dispatched a diver, Capt. John Farrar, to recover the body submerged in the pond. He told reporters, she, [Kopechne] "was in what I call a very conscious position, meaning she’d been alive and functional after the car had entered the water, roof first. Her head was at the floorboards, where the last bit of air would have been. It seems likely she was holding herself into a pocket of air to breathe.”
The diver thought the car Kennedy was driving “must have been going at a pretty good clip to land almost in the middle of the channel.” He also said that had he been called soon after the accident, “there was a good chance the girl could have been saved.”
Kopechne’s body was recovered at 8:45 a.m., the morning after the accident.
Edgartown Police Chief Jim Arena, filed a complaint in Edgartown District Court, charging Kennedy with “leaving the scene of an accident without negligence involved.” The special prosecutor, in his report, stressed that Kennedy had been driving “with extreme caution” at the time of the accident.
More alarm bells were set off when it was learned that an associate medical examiner took less than five minutes to determine Kopechne’s “death by drowning,” while never fully undressing her, and never turning her body over from front to back. He said no autopsy was needed.
The chief medical examiner who was off duty at the time of the drowning, told reporters that there was no conclusive evidence of death by drowning. Contradicting the associate medical examiner, he said, “we don’t know if the girl died of a heart attack, stroke, or from drowning.”
Within hours of Kopechne's death, K. Dun Gifford, a Kennedy aide, flew a chartered plane into Edgartown (the Martha's Vineyard town of which Chappaquiddick is a part), with orders to get her body off the island, beyond the state’s jurisdiction.
When Kennedy finally did arrive at the Shiretown Inn (after swimming or paddling a boat through the 500-foot channel), he reportedly made 12 calls from a pay phone before giving his statement to police.
Cynics question if the senator was really in a state of “exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock,” how could he have made so many phone calls?
In 1969, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his wife, Joan, after a court appearance on the Chappaquiddick Island car accident.
Photo Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times
***
Since it took the senator more than a week to address the tragedy in public, rumors about the accident were running wild, including rumors that Mary Jo Kopechne was pregnant and the car plunging off the bridge was no accident. Others picked up whispers that Joseph Gargan, a Kennedy cousin, was initially willing to take the rap for Ted Kennedy.
There was also the "third girl in the car'' theory advanced, which suggests that Rosemary (“Cricket”) Keough, one of the girls who attended the cookout, was in the car with Kennedy, and Kopechene was sleeping in the backseat. When the car was recovered, Keough's handbag was found in the car.
Deputy Sheriff Christopher "Huck" Look acting as a special officer for a private party the night of the accident, came forth with testimony that between 12:30 a.m. and 12:45 a.m. he noticed a dark car approaching the intersection of Dike Road. The car, according to Look, was driven by a man with a female passenger in the front seat. The car drove onto the private Cemetery Road and stopped. He thought they were lost and approached the car. The driver then put the car in reverse and headed east toward the ocean (not the ferry), along Dike Road. The Deputy Sheriff said he did catch a glimpse of the license plate of the car, which he thought began with an "L" and contained two "7's, which did indeed match Kennedy's license plate number: L78-207.
Look reportedly said he saw "a man driving . . . someone next to him" and possibly (although he wasn't 100 percent sure)"someone else in the back seat."
Look's testimony punched damaging holes in Kennedy's testimony that they were headed for the ferry. It also contradicts the time element, suggesting that Kennedy had been with Kopechene for more than an hour before the car plunged off the bridge.
On the 25th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the BBC developed a theory that when Kennedy was driving Kopechne, he noticed an off-duty police officer in his patrol car. Alarmed that the officer may question why he’s in the car with a young beautiful woman, Kennedy got out of the car and returned to the party. And it was Kopechne who then took over the wheel of the car before driving off the bridge. For those who subscribe to this theory, this would account for the long gap between the drowning and when Kennedy reported the incident to police.
Whatever conspiracy theory anyone clung to, the end result was that on July 25, 1969, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence, and had his license suspended for a year.
The Massachusetts senator resumed his senatorial duties at the end of July, 1969.
Case closed.
Though the circumstances surrounding the drowning was never prosecuted, the younger brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy was never able to carry the torch of the Kennedy legacy that would propel him into the White House.
Ted Kennedy did go on to have a remarkable career in the United States Senate as the “Liberal Lion,” rising to senior Democratic Party member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; the Immigration Subcommittee; and the Armed Services Committee. In 2006, Time Magazine named him as one of America’s top 10 senators.
Still, Chappaquiddick forever hung over him like a dark, ominous cloud.
The Chappaquiddick scandal ultimately derailed his attempt to unseat Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. After losing 24 primaries to Carter (he won 10) Kennedy dropped out of the race, never to throw his hat into the ring again.
To get a sense of the newspaper coverage Ted Kennedy received in the weeks and months after Chappaquiddick, I gathered some snippets of columns in 1969 from a variety of newspapers.
Press Reacts to Chappaquiddick
"For the third time in less than six years, sudden death has touched the Kennedy family and thereby altered everyone's picture of the American political future."
-David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 27, 1969
"One need only to look at what the handsome Massachusetts senator has been, or might be, accused of to realize that once all the legal questions are cared for the important accusations against Kennedy will probably be the kind that never get tried in any place but the court of public opinion."
--Carl Rowan, Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 1969
"Every passing day for the last seven weeks Edward Kennedy has been faced with a dilemma more cruel and oppressive than it was the day before. For it has become increasingly likely that for him to survive in public life and be allowed merely to serve what he regards as the continuing causes of his dead brothers-let alone achieve the Presidency--there can be no escaping a candid and complete account of his behavior before and after the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned."
--Joseph Lelyveld, New York Times, September 7, 1969
"Instead of a more complete explanation that might wipe away those doubts, Kennedy has chosen silence--amid hope by some of his supporters that time will erase memories of the tragedy. Therein lies Kennedy's political trap. His refusal to talk will receive nationwide exposure at the inevitable first confrontation between Kennedy and the press. That can only multiply suspicions that there was something to hide on Martha's Vineyard."
--Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1969
"If the political consequences of Edward Kennedy's personal difficulties prove as disastrous for him as seems indicated, the likelihood of his being the Democratic nominee for President in 1972 is greatly diminished and perhaps destroyed. This could have extraordinary consequences for American politics."
--Tom Wicker, The New York Times, July 27, 1969
"The power of genuine tragedy, as defined by Aristotle and understood by every later generation, lies in its demonstration that even the mighty and powerful among us are, because they are mortal and have flaws, liable to suffer judgements that no human standard of justice would impose."
--David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 31, 1969.
The real test is not really here in a courtroom in Edgartown or in the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston. What is at stake here is the public man's credibility--whether the public really believes that Sen. Kennedy has leveled with them in this case."
--Robert Healy, The Boston Globe, September 3, 1969
"The other Bostonian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would have been intrigued by the Kennedy triumphs and the Kennedy tragedies. In his essay on the duality of life, he argued that every human excess causes a defect, and every defect an excess; every good an evil; for everything you have missed, a gain, and everything you have gained, a loss."
--James Reston, The New York Times, August 15, 1969
"Whatever the answers, one can reasonably conclude that Kennedy-by his own words-showed that in this episode, at age 37, he could not command himself in a critical situation. It was bad luck for him, perhaps, to have been in a dazed condition and to have to rely on sycophants like Markham and Gargan for counsel during those horrible hours. Too bad there wasn't a hard-nosed guy around to coldly tell Teddy the score. It is also clear that the power of the Kennedy name and wealth provided a treatment by the law which ordinary citizens don't enjoy. Big names cow small-town cops."
--Nick Thimmesch, Newsday, August 1, 1969
"What he now faces is a very long struggle. His assets are his name, his talents and his wealth. His liabilities are Chappaquiddick. He will now have to make it more or less on his own. Chappaquiddick having apparently broken the natural line of succession. If, over the next four or five or ten years, he is able to show by his achievements a sobriety of purpose, a strategic manliness, a sense of destiny and resolution, then he will transcend the affair” [of July 18 ].
--William F. Buckley Jr., Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1969
"Kennedy will come back with the passage of time. Someday he will be effective again in the Senate debates that he will have to pass up in the immediate future. Until then, however, there are painful reminders that one of the voices which carried some authority in the Senate won't be effective."
--Reg Murphy, the Atlanta Constitution, July 31, 1969
"Like all strong men whom an unkind fate forces to traverse the valley of the shadow, the senator himself further seems to have gained in strength and self-knowledge. If the present chapter ends as seems most likely, he will thus appear in the next chapter as a major leader of very special promise. And if one may look ahead, a major leader is likely to be badly needed in 1976."
--Joseph Alsop, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1969
***
Chappaquiddick Facts
"Chappaquiddick" is an Indian word that means “separate island."
The automobile Ted Kennedy was driving the night of the accident was a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88. License Plate Number: L78 207 .
Mary Jo Kopechne’s blood-alcohol level at the time of death was determined to be .09 percent.
Edgartown Police Chief Jim Arena took a written statement from Kennedy after the accident. He never administered a test as to determine whether he had been drinking.
Ed Hanify, Kennedy's lawyer, made arrangements to have the senator's car destroyed by a compactor. Mary Jo's clothing that she had worn that night—including a blouse that had bloodstains on the back—was burned.
Senator Ted Kennedy's televised address (July 25th) to the nation in 1969 was delivered in the library of his father's house. The speech was written chiefly by Ted Sorenson, President John F. Kennedy’s principle speechwriter.
In addition to Mary Jo Kopechne's, the other women at the party on the night of the accident were: Susan Tannenbaum, Esther Newberg, and Rosemary Keough. Two others, Maryellen and Nance Lyons, arrived the next day. They were known as "Boiler Room Girls," for working the phone room (boiler room) for delegate counts during Bobby Kennedy's 1968 ill-fated presidential run.
Also present at the party were Kennedy's cousin, Joseph Gargan, and Paul F. Markham, previously, a U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Attorney Charles Tretter, Raymond La Rosa, and John Crimmins (Kennedy's part-time driver).
The people who gathered at the Kennedy compound (Hyannis Port, Mass.) after the tragedy were: Ethel Kennedy, Harvard Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, Stephen Smith (business and campaign manager to Kennedy), former Sec. of Defense, Robert McNamara, Theodore Sorensen, Burke Marshall (Kennedy family lawyer), and Richard Goodwin (speech writer to the Kennedy's).
Kopechne remained in the car until her body was recovered by a Fire Department diver at 8:45 the next morning.
When Kennedy reported the accident to the Edgartown police, it was 9:45 a.m. -- some nine or 10 hours after he left Kopechne in his car.
Ted Kennedy's wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, suffered her third miscarriage a month after the incident at Chappaquiddick.
The Kopechnes family reportedly received a financial settlement of $140,923 through a Kennedy insurer.
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Additional Reading on Chappaquiddick
Chappaquiddick FBI Files
Excerpts from the Testimony of Senator Kennedy at Inquest into Kopechne Death (New York Times).
What Happened at Chappaquiddick By Vivian Cadden, McCall's. August 1974
The End of Camelot, Vanity Fair Magazine, September, 1993
Chappaquiddick's unanswered questions By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, July 21, 1994
NOTE: I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the kind folks at ProQuest for allowing me to access the Los Angeles Times Historic Archives. Thanks too to Rick Mastroianni, Research and Library Director, at the Newseum, for providing me with some historic pdfs from 1969.
--Bill Lucey
April 2, 2018
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