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TED AND THE GIRL HE LEFT FOR DEAD
A new film searches for the tr uth behind Ted Kennedy’s 1969 car crash in Chappaquiddick
Around midnight on 18 July 1969, a large Oldsmobile car drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, and plunged into the water, leaving the driver in shock and killing his passenger. The driver was Ted Kennedy, 37 – senator and younger brother of John and Robert Kennedy, who had both been assassinated, John in 1963 and Bobby in 1968. The passenger was a 28-yearold woman – a guest at a reunion being held at a cottage on the island for those who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign the previous year. As the story broke and people rushed to sympathise with the Kennedys, a family blighted by misfortune, one of the newspaper headlines read, ‘ Ted Safe, Blonde Dies’.
The headline typified much of the early coverage of the tragedy, focusing on Kennedy’s escape and consigning the death of the woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, to the footnotes. ‘This was the Sixties and they were brutal,’ says Georgetta Potoski, Mary Jo’s cousin. ‘And the Kennedys had the power.’
Just how much power they had is captured in The Senator, being shown now on Sky Cinema, which tries to piece together the events using findings from the 1970 inquest. The Kennedys aren’t pleased, saying the film ‘does a disservice both to the victim and the truth’, but critics have praised actor Jason Clarke for his nuanced portrayal of the senator.
More importantly, it’s the first time that Mary Jo Kopechne has been portrayed as a flesh-and-blood human rather than a mere addendum to the story. ‘The actress Kate Mara [reporter Zoe Barnes in Netflix’s House Of Cards] is stunning as Mary Jo,’ says Georgetta. ‘We’re pleased that in this film she’s finally been given a voice.’
Mary Jo and Georgetta, now 76, were very close. ‘She was a stellar person, straight as an arrow. What was really hurtful was the suggestion that she and Ted, who was married, were having an affair. We knew better. She didn’t really care much for him – her loyalty was to Bobby.’
Mary Jo was one of a group of women who had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. They had organised the reunion, near Martha’s Vineyard, with Ted and his group of mostly married male friends.
Kennedy claimed that after leaving the party, he gave Mary Jo a lift to the ferry back to Martha’s Vineyard and accidentally turned down a dirt road and drove off the unlit bridge. ‘Initially I thought, “That sounds like Mary Jo – she wouldn’t have stayed overnight,”’ says Georgetta. ‘Yet she had left her bag and hotel key behind, suggesting she intended to return.’ Another inconsistency was Ted’s claim that he didn’t go to nearby houses to raise the alarm because he thought nobody was in – although at least two of the houses had lights on.
Instead, Ted returned to the party and told two friends what had happened, and they all went to the site and unsuccessfully tried to free Mary Jo. Kennedy then swam across 500ft of water to Martha’s Vineyard, went to his hotel and said he didn’t alert police as he was in shock – but he was able to make 17 phone calls to family, friends and aides. It was only after the car was found the next day that he contacted police.
The film highlights how swiftly the Kennedy spin machine got to work. Gwen Kopechne, Mary Jo’s mother, told Georgetta that within hours of Senator Kennedy calling to tell them Mary Jo had died, there were Kennedy people at their house. ‘They were answering the door, the phone, and Gwen thought they were being helpful. It didn’t occur to her till later that they were screening everybody.’
A few years after the crash, Gwen and Joe gathered the courage to visit Chappaquiddick, where they met John Farrar, the diver who had recovered Mary Jo’s body. ‘They thought she’d died instantly,’ says Georgetta, ‘but he told them she could have lived for up to three hours, so they had to grieve for her all over again.’
There have been numerous conspiracy theories about the case, including that, having spotted a police car, Kennedy got out of the Oldsmobile to avoid being found with a young woman and that, drunk and unable to control the huge car, Mary Jo had driven it off the bridge.
‘There’s also the theory that she wasn’t feeling well and had gone to lie down in the back of the car, which Ted drove off in with someone else,’ says Georgetta. ‘They didn’t know Mary Jo was inside, so didn’t report the accident. But I think, if he didn’t know she was in the car, why did he swim back to Martha’s Vineyard and establish an alibi? I do think he was responsible in some way for her death, but I don’t know how.’
Whatever the truth was, Kennedy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009, was charged with leaving the scene of an accident and given a two-month suspended sentence – and Mary Jo’s family were left with
out answers.