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Edward Moore Kennedy was born in Boston
February 22, 1932. He graduated from Harvard University in 1956 and from
the University of Virginia Law School in 1959. He ran in 1962 for the Senate,
surprising many people. He was only 30 years old, the minimum age for a
senator, but he won easily. On June 19, 1964 he was critically injured
in plane crash. The Senator remained hospitalized for six months. He still
suffers the effects of a broken back. Nevertheless, he continued his political
career and became the Democratic whip (assistant leader) of the Senate
from 1969 to 1971. From 1979 to 1981, he served as chairman of the Senate's
Judiciary Committee. He was chairman of the Labor and Human Resources committee
from 1987 to 1995. Kennedy is known as a national spokesman and defender
of liberal causes. He has supported greater government spending on programs
to help the poor, the working class, minorities, and other disadvantaged
groups. In the Senate, he supported arms control, stronger antitrust laws,
and tax reform. He also called for a program of national health insurance.
Kennedy was an unsuccessful candidate for
the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. He lost the nomination
to President Jimmy Carter. He failed to gain the presidential nomination,
largely because of questions about his delay in reporting a car crash at
Chappaquiddick Island, near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1969, in which
his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was drowned. She had been a staff worker
of Robert Kennedy.
According to later testimony, sometime
after 11 p.m.--the precise time has never been quite clear--Ted Kennedy
announced that he was tired and wanted to return to his room in Edgartown.
Kopechne said she, too, was tired and asked for a ride. Kennedy coaxed
the keys to the rented Oldsmobile from his chauffeur, and left with Kopechne.
At some point after that--again, the time line is unclear--Kennedy steered
the car onto a rutted dirt road, rather than following the paved road that
led back to the ferry landing. About a half-mile down the dirt road, he
reached Dike Bridge, a narrow, unrailed wooden span that veered to the
left as it crossed a tidal pond. Instead of jogging left, Kennedy went
straight, careening off the bridge fast enough for the car to pitch over
on its roof.
"There was complete blackness," Kennedy
testified at the inquest after the accident. "Water seemed to rush in from
every point . . . I was sure that I was going to drown." Somehow, he managed
to escape, the tide washing him to the shore. He said he called Kopechne's
name, then swam back to the car at least seven times, diving in the hope
of freeing her. Each time, he said, the current pushed him away.
Next, according to his testimony, he walked
more than a mile to the cottage where the party had been held. The route
took him past four houses and a volunteer fire station, but he claimed
to have noticed none of them. Once back at the cottage, Kennedy recruited
Gargan and former U.S. Attorney Paul Markham to drive him back to the bridge,
where the two fresh
swimmers also tried to free Kopechne.
The current battered them as well.
Gargan, Damore reported, told the senator
he had only one option: to report the accident immediately. The three men
piled into Gargan's Valiant and steered toward the ferry landing, where
Kennedy could summon the boat to take him across the channel to Edgartown.
Gargan later recounted how, during the ride, Kennedy suggested that the
accident could be "discovered" and the blame placed on Kopechne. The idea
was dismissed out of hand as a complicated conspiracy requiring prevarication,
silence, or both from too many people. Besides, Gargan reminded Kennedy,
"You told me you were driving." Back in the Valiant, Gargan told Kennedy
to call his administrative assistant, David Burke, and a lawyer named Burke
Marshall, and then go to the police. The senator, agitated, sat silently
in the back seat. At the water's edge, according to Damore's book, he snapped,
"All right, all right, Joey! I'm tired of listening to you. I'll take care
of it." Then Kennedy climbed out of the car and dived into the water. Gargan,
watching him swim away, was furious. "I hope he drowns," he said, "the
son of a ... ." Kennedy made it across the channel to Edgartown, climbed
to his second-floor room in the Shiretown Inn, and fell asleep.
Early the next morning, he borrowed a
dime from the inn's desk clerk so he could use the pay phone to call his
lawyer. Then he tried to track down his brother-in-law Steve Smith, who
handled damage control for the clan. Next he called Kopechne's mother,
Gwen, and told her that her daughter was dead. Then he called his own mother,
and, finally, his wife. In any case, by the time Gargan and Markham made
it to the Shiretown Inn, Kennedy still hadn't notified the police. "What
the ... is going on?" Gargan bellowed, according to Damore's book. "You
were supposed to report the ... accident."
Kennedy, Gargan later recounted, told
him: "I'm going to say that Mary Jo was driving." Fearing Kennedy might
not tell the truth, Gargan managed to convince him to report the accident.
The three men left the Shiretown Inn and crossed the channel on the ferry,
so Kennedy could call lawyers and aides from a more private pay phone on
the Chappaquiddick side. As the senator talked on the phone, a tow truck
rolled past on its way to Dike Bridge. The Oldsmobile had already been
discovered by two fishermen, who notified the police chief, who in turn
called in a diver to search the overturned car.
John Farrar, the diver, found Kopechne
in the back seat stiffened by rigor mortis, her face craned into the upended
rear foot well, her hands clawed around the edge of the back seat, as if
she had stretched for her last gulps of air. Meanwhile, the police chief,
Jim Arena, had already traced the plate number to Kennedy. A few minutes
after Kopechne's corpse was retrieved from the pond, Arena called the station
to order that Kennedy be located. The senator was already there with Markham,
waiting to report the accident. Kennedy had known for nearly 10 hours that
he had left the woman in the back of the sunken sedan.
The many unanswered questions concerning
this incident derailed any presidential ambitions.
His 1983 divorce from Virginia Joan (Bennet)
Kennedy whom he had married in November 29, 1958 was followed by increasingly
erratic personal behavior. The latter should have reached some sort of
nadir in 1987 when, in a much celebrated incident, he was interrupted in
flagrante delicto with a female lobbyist on the floor of a Capitol Hill
restaurant after a wine-soaked lunch. In the face of widespread public
disillusion and the threat of political defeat as a consequence, Teddy
Kennedy sought to clean up his act. He made a highly publicized speech
at Harvard in 1991, acknowledging “the
disappointment of friends and many others
who rely on me” and promised to overcome “the faults in the conduct of
my private life” as he continued to “fight the good fight” in the Senate.
The following year he married Victoria Reggie, and in the years since appears
to have lived up to his pledge. |
