For 50 years, the American elite has denied the truth about Ted Kennedy and the night a blonde died in his car. Now a film exposes the shocking extent of his callous lies – and liberals are in uproar
AROUND midnight on a clear, warm night in July 1969, a large Oldsmobile car was speeding along a dirt track leading to a deserted beach. Suddenly, its headlights picked out a small wooden bridge looming up ahead. Too late, the driver failed to negotiate it and the car went over the edge, flying 34ft through the air before plunging upside down into 8ft of water.
There were two people inside, but only the driver emerged. According to the rescue diver who, at 9am the following day, pulled the body of Mary Jo Kopechne out of the submerged vehicle, ‘her face was pressed into the footwell, and her hands gripped the back of the front seat as if she had been trying to push her head into a pocket of air’.
In testimony that was later backed by experts, the diver estimated she might have survived for three to four hours on the air trapped in the car before suffocating. It would almost certainly have been an even more dreadful demise than instant drowning. The driver was a 37-year-old US senator, Ted Kennedy, by then the only surviving male heir of the Kennedy dynasty and a married father of three.
His 28-year-old passenger had been a member of his late brother Bobby’s staff — one of a group of six known as ‘boiler room girls’.
A pretty, talented blonde who had worked on Bobby’s speeches, she’d opted to join Ted for a mysterious late-night drive after a boozy reunion party in a cottage on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, just off the millionaires’ playground of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Of all the lies that Kennedy and his army of lawyers and cronies later cooked up to explain away the tragedy in an effort to salvage his political career, he was never able to satisfactorily explain why he waited ten hours before reporting the accident.
Even then, he only did so after learning that police had discovered his car with a body inside.
While the tragedy provided his enemies in the Republican party with endless ammunition against him, Ted Kennedy never paid any real price for causing Mary Jo’s death.
Liberal Americans chose to put politics before people, and in 1980 he was a contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination — beaten to it eventually by Jimmy Carter.
In the years that followed, the fate of Miss Kopechne and Kennedy’s appalling, irresponsible behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the accident were persistently overlooked.
Mainstream publishers and producers gave the story a wide berth. Kennedy was revered as the Leftwing ‘Lion of the Senate’, keeping his seat until his death in 2009.
Now, however, Hollywood has finally grasped the nettle — and the keepers of the Kennedy flame are not happy.
CHAPPAQUIDDICK, which stars Australian actor Jason Clarke as Ted Kennedy and Kate Mara (the thrusting young journalist Zoe Barnes in the US version of House Of Cards) as Kopechne is an impressive film which is harsh, but entirely fair, on Kennedy.
And it’s proving that even after 50 years, this scandal hasn’t lost its ability to divide America.
In one corner are those who believe that a fatal accident shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow Ted Kennedy’s legacy.
In the other, those who say nothing epitomises more the liberal hypocrisy over the ‘Camelot’ myth of the Kennedys — JFK and his brothers presiding over a glittering moment in America’s political history — than Chappaquiddick.
‘Unfortunately, there are some very powerful people who tried to put pressure on me not to release this movie,’ claims Byron Allen, an entertainment mogul whose company is releasing the new film.
‘They went out of their way to try to influence me. I made it very clear that I’m not about the Right or the Left. I’m about the truth.’
According to John Curran, the film’s director, one of those ‘powerful people’ was Chris Dodd, a top Hollywood executive, former US senator and old drinking partner of Ted Kennedy.
MR CURRAN, a Democrat himself, says he is repelled by the liberals who are only too ready to flaunt their disapproval of President Trump and disgust at claims made about his private life, but who refuse to acknowledge the reality of the Chappaquiddick scandal.
Both liberals and conservatives can’t ‘keep shouting at the other side’ without taking a ‘pretty hard, unvarnished look’ at their own heroes, he says.
The film industry bible, Variety, hailed Chappaquiddick as the movie ‘every liberal should see’, its chief critic insisting those who ignore it are betraying their ideals.
Astonishingly, even at a time when the US media is obsessed by the subjugation of women by predatory, powerful men following the allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and Mr Trump (neither of whom, as far as we know, has left a dead body in their wake), criticising Kennedy has proved a challenge for many.
The TV news station CNN, currently airing a hagiographic mini-series called The Kennedys, criticised Chappaquiddick’s ‘heavy-handed history’ and even compared it to the far-fetched sci-fi conspiracy series The X-Files. Others have sought to highlight minor factual discrepancies.
The most shameless piece of Kennedy worship so far — sparking a furious social media backlash — has been an article in the liberal New York Times by Neal Gabler, a Democrat writer working on a biography of Ted Kennedy.
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was Miss Kopechne who lost her life, he accused the film of ‘character assassination’ of poor Ted.
He argued that ‘no one but the most lunatic conspiracy theorists see [the incident] as anything but a tragic accident in which nothing much was covered up’.
He dismissed the film as ‘fake history’ and insisted it was riven with factual errors, but only pointed out one (the fact that Joe, the Kennedy patriarch, couldn’t have mumbled the word ‘alibi’ — to encourage Ted to concoct one — because he’d lost the power of speech due to a stroke).
Bob Shrum, Ted’s former speechwriter, accused the filmmakers of ‘trafficking in conspiracy theories’ that did ‘a disservice both to the victim and the truth’. The ‘truth’ is that the film could have been much harder on Kennedy.
Although he was a heavy drinker and a notoriously wild driver, it doesn’t suggest he was drunk when he drove off the bridge (polls at the time showed most Americans suspected he was).
Nor does the film imply — as was rumoured at the time — that the aggressive womaniser was having an affair with Miss Kopechne. Many were suspicious about the odd mix of young secretaries — all in their 20s and single — and Ted’s thirtysomething friends, nearly all of them married, but solo that night, who attended the party on Chappaquiddick.
The filmmakers say they stuck as closely as possible to the nearly 1,000-page report of the inquest (conducted behind closed doors) released by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1970.
Kennedy is portrayed as shifty, self-pitying, entitled and weak. He changes his story repeatedly; first in a written statement, then in a televised address, and finally at the inquest — though none of the versions stood up to scrutiny.
He claimed he was giving Miss Kopechne a lift to the ferry back to Martha’s Vineyard and mistakenly turned on to the track that led to the bridge. However, Mary Jo had left behind her purse and hotel room key at the party — suggesting she was intending to return.
Further, Kennedy would have realised he’d left the paved road to the ferry and taken the unpaved track to the bridge, not least
because it was a route he had driven several times that day.
His wife Joan angrily rejected claims that the pair had been heading to the beach for a midnight swim, while he and his friends lied about the amount of alcohol consumed at the party.
Kennedy said he had been driving at 20mph when he plunged off the bridge, but experts estimated he must have been going at least twice that speed for the car to hurtle as far as it did.
There has always been scepticism over his claim that, after escaping the vehicle, he swam back down to try to free Miss Kopechne at least seven times. His insistence that he didn’t raise the alarm at nearby houses because he thought nobody was in was ridiculed when it became clear that at least two of them had lights on.
What we do know is that Ted Kennedy returned to the party and confided to two close friends, one of whom was his cousin Joseph Gargan. The film has his damning first words to them as: ‘I’m not going to be President.’.
The friends said they accompanied him to the car and entered the water to free Mary Jo — but failed. (Even this has been questioned because there was no sign of the injuries Ted’s friends said they sustained in their rescue attempts). They told the inquest that it was at this point they advised him to alert the authorities.
Kennedy would later claim that he didn’t immediately do so because he was concussed and
confused. (His doctor later diagnosed mild concussion.) That didn’t stop him from making 17 phone calls to family, friends, aides and even his father Joe when he got back to his hotel.
The next morning he joined sailing friends at brunch. The two men who’d gone to the crash scene with Kennedy, horrified to discover that he still hadn’t alerted the police, pulled him out of the meal.
It was only after hearing that police had found the car and the body that Kennedy went to the local police station, installed himself in the absent police chief’s office and imperiously summoned him back from the accident scene as he worked on a statement.
The film portrays the police chief and other officials as cowed by the Massachusetts senator.
The matter was taken out of the bumbling Ted’s hands as his father masterminded the gathering of a nine-strong team of advisers to spin the scandal and twist the arms of amenable officials.
Miss Kopechne’s body was removed from the island by plane before a post-mortem could be performed — one that could have confirmed the theory supported by the rescue diver and the undertaker that she suffocated rather than drowned. This would have made Kennedy’s long delay in raising the alarm even more indefensible by indicating that she might have been saved.
Helpfully for Team Kennedy, the tragedy occurred just two days before Neil Armstrong took man’s first steps on the moon, an event that blotted out all other news.
If this tawdry saga can be said to have a hero, it is Joseph Gargan, Kennedy’s cousin. The film shows him fruitlessly imploring Kennedy to tell the truth.
In one scene, furious at the deception Ted is perpetrating, he tears off Kennedy’s neck brace. (Ted is shown attending Kopechne’s funeral in the brace, but able to crane his head to see who is sitting behind him.)
In an interview in 1988, the late Mr Gargan — who became estranged from the Kennedys after Chappaquiddick — claimed Ted had tried to hatch a scenario in which Mr Gargan ‘discovered’ the accident, and informed the police that Miss Kopechne had left the party alone and driven off. Mr Gargan said he refused to cooperate.
In a televised speech a week after the accident — essentially a plea to Massachusetts voters to reelect him — Kennedy admitted his failure to report the accident was ‘indefensible’, but still dared to portray himself as the victim.
HE SHAMELESSLY played on Americans’ grief for his assassinated brothers John and Bobby, and wondered ‘whether some awful curse did hang over all the Kennedys’.
In the ensuing court case, Kennedy pleaded guilty to a minor charge of leaving the scene of an accident and received the minimum sentence of two months in prison — which the judge generously suspended.
In the years to come, he would weather other personal and public scandals, including once throwing a waitress over a table in the private room of a Washington restaurant and trying to have sex with her.
Depressingly, a conspiracy of silence continued to protect him over Chappaquiddick.
Even the five other ‘boiler room girls’ have never revealed what happened at the party. One of them asked to have her name removed from the film. Ted Kennedy’s repeated refusal over the decades to talk about it spawned myriad conspiracy theories.
The darkest of these was that Mary Jo Kopechne had been pregnant with his child and he had crashed intentionally to kill her and avoid a marital scandal.
A more credible alternative theory was that, after spotting a police patrol car, Kennedy had surreptitiously got out of his car to avoid being found alone with a young woman. Drunk and unaccustomed to driving the huge car, Miss Kopechne took a wrong turn and drove it off the bridge. Kennedy returned to the party and didn’t learn about the crash until the following morning.
A third theory claims that Kennedy drove off the bridge with Rosemary Keough, another of the women at the party, sitting next to him. She escaped with him, but neither of them knew that Miss Kopechne was lying passed out in the back seat.
At the time, some US media couldn’t even be bothered to spell Mary Jo’s name correctly. One news wire virtually ignored her, reporting: ‘TED SAFE; BLONDE DIES.’
Miss Kopechne’s relatives have welcomed the new film, saying it is made by ‘men of integrity’ and that it finally makes her more than ‘just a name’ in the Kennedy saga. They say it addresses the flaws and discrepancies in Kennedy’s account that haunted them.
‘Sometimes I’d like to scream a lot but I’m trying to hold it back,’ Gwen Kopechne, Mary Jo’s mother, told a newspaper in 2007. ‘It would be nice if somebody spoke up.’
Well, some of them have now, but those who should know better are still refusing to listen.