Teddy Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick Incident

by Read Listen Learn

Chappaquiddick Island is a beautiful part of the Massachusetts coastline. The whole area is one of great natural beauty and a popular choice with families on summer holidays. Close enough to Washington, New York, Boston and other East Coast cities, Chappaquiddick has always been a favourite of the very rich and of politicians – often the same people.

On 18th July, 1969, in the small hours, a politician was driving a young woman, a campaign assistant, away from a small party they had both been at, to the ferry that took cars to and from the mainland. However, just as they got near to the ferry station and came to the last turning, the car moved away and went down a side road that led to a deserted beach where both the driver and his passenger had been earlier that day.

To get to the beach, they needed to cross a bridge over the sea. The bridge was old and wooden and had no side walls; side walls that could have stopped the car from plunging into the sea when the driver lost control and drove off the edge.

The man, the driver, was able to get out of the car but the young woman did not appear and the car was filling quickly with sea water. There were no witnesses to all this but the driver said that he dived into the dark, fast-moving waters to rescue his female friend but could not. Maybe he did do this. It’s impossible to say. What we can say with certainty is that, at some point, he swam away leaving his friend still underwater inside the car.

He went back to his hotel and went to bed. The next day would bring trouble – a lot of trouble – because the driver was Edward (or ‘Ted’) Kennedy, a son of America’s best known political family and possible winner of the next presidential election.

Ted’s father, Joe, was the man who had built the Kennedy family into a powerful political clan, based in Boston. Joe wasn’t a very nice man, not nice at all. He had a huge amount of money and had made a lot of it selling illegal alcohol during America’s Prohibition from 1919 to 1933. It was a murderous business based on corruption and peopled by gangsters, and Joe Kennedy had been quite hard enough for it. He was a very successful legal businessman as well, getting into Hollywood and defence contracts or anything that would bring in lots of money.

His private persona was no nicer than his business one. He was unfaithful to his wife and taught his sons to be the same. He was a bitter racist, so much so that even other white Americans noticed. He had an especial hatred for blacks and the English. Perhaps it was his racism that made Germany’s Nazi movement so attractive to him. At least, he kept friendly contact with the Nazis and had trouble hiding his contempt for democracy.

In fact, his Nazi sympathies and Anglophobia got him fired as U.S. Ambassador to London at the beginning of the Second World War: he was simply lying to his boss, the U.S. President, about the British mood and their wish to continue fighting the Nazis. This was to stop America sending help to the British. Joe Kennedy wanted to see Hitler conquer London.

He had his own political ambitions and, typically, he wanted to be ‘number one’, the president of the U.S.A. but his criminal past in the 1920s and his support of Hitler and the Nazis meant that he would never win the presidency; his enemies would see to that, and Joe had made a lot of enemies.

Common sense outweighed personal ambition and Joe transferred his political hopes to his four sons. First the oldest, Joe Jr., was the family future but he died in a plane crash while serving as a pilot during the war – ironically, defending England from the Nazis. This was a tragedy but Joe was a practical man and he switched his political aspirations to his second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who had not only won a medal during the war but, more important, was still alive.

All three boys went into national politics but John went all the way. In 1960, to his father’s absolute delight, he was elected president of the U.S.A. Joe immediately became the most powerful man in America.

The dream ended only three years later when someone shot John Kennedy through the neck and head while he was visiting Dallas. Even with two sons now dead, Joe still had two left. The next oldest was Robert, who ran for president in 1968. It looked very much like he would win until someone shot him dead as he walked through a hotel kitchen in California.

Mary Jo Kopechne was a pretty young woman who had been one of a team of female campaign workers for Robert Kennedy. They worked very hard to get Robert into the White House only to see one young man with a revolver end that dream. Mary Jo and the other girls were, of course, heartbroken and so the last remaining Kennedy brother, Ted, would organise a reunion now and then. He rented a small house on Chappaquiddick and they had a private party, just the six young women and six men, including Ted, to balance the sexes.

It was nothing very wild: a little music, a few drinks and probably a lot of political talk; especially now that Ted was going to run for president in 1972 – he could not afford any scandal in the next three years. It seems likely that Mary Jo Kopechne and Ted Kennedy were having an affair. It had probably started during Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign the year before. The frequent ‘reunions’ for the campaign workers may well have just been an excuse for Ted to get away from his wife and see his girlfriend. When they left the party together, they said they were going to the ferry but, when faced with the choice, they chose to go in the direction of a beach that was often used for ‘in-car romance’ by local couples at night, when there was no-one else around.

Almost certainly quite drunk at this stage, Ted drove the car off the bridge. We may never know if he did dive down to rescue Mary Jo or if he just left immediately but, whichever it was, he left the scene of a serious accident and he left a young woman underwater in a car for nine hours while he went off to his hotel to sleep. He contacted the police late the next day.

Of course, the Kennedy political machine went into action to limit the damage to Ted and the family. Mary Jo’s body was quickly taken away and buried by her family without an autopsy. Some have suggested that she was pregnant by Ted and that her family did not want this to come out any more than the married Ted Kennedy did.

Ted Kennedy apologised on T.V. but could not explain why he left the accident and a drowning woman. The courts gave him two months’ prison time for leaving like that but suspended the sentence. It didn’t matter much, Ted’s chances of winning the presidency died the night Mary Jo Kopechne drowned alone. As did Joe Kennedy’s ambition to see another of his boys as president.

Ted Kennedy did start a presidential run in 1980 but it quickly went nowhere. He became, instead, a very decent senior politician and voice for liberal America, often working especially hard for the poor and ethnic minorities. Born in 1932, he died of a brain tumour on 25th August, 2009, at his home in Hyannis Port, not all that far from Chappaquiddick Island.