Diary offers a new Chappaquiddick revelation
Speaks to actions immediately following crash
Ted Kennedy gave varying explanations for his behavior in the hours after his infamous car crash on Chappaquiddick Island. He said he’d been trying to get help as fast as he could. He said he was concussed and couldn’t think straight. He said he’d been unable to muster the “moral strength” to admit what had happened.
But more than five decades after the accident that claimed the life of 28year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a new biography of the political scion and longtime Massachusetts senator offers new evidence that Kennedy sought to cover up his actions that night.
In the new book, “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” which is being published Tuesday, author and historian John Farrell writes that days after the accident, Kennedy confided in his sister Jean and her husband, Stephen Smith, that in the panicked hours after the crash he had tried, futilely, to avoid responsibility as he entertained the delusion that Kopechne had somehow survived.
The conversations are based on the private diaries of Kennedy family confidant Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had visited Kennedy family members and Kennedy himself in New York and at the family compound in Hyannis Port in the weeks after the accident.
“Jean thinks that he panicked — that he hoped . . . he could find some way to cover it all up,” Schlesinger wrote. Kennedy “told the others to say nothing and do nothing until they heard from him,” Schlesinger recounted Jean Smith saying in the diary entry.
Farrell said that historians and journalists have long surmised that Kennedy’s furtive behavior in the hours after the crash were part of a cover-up.
“Now, you have it coming out of his own mouth,” he said in an interview Monday.
The crash on Chappaquiddick, a small island on the eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard, changed the course of Kennedy’s career. Political observers have speculated that if not for the crash he could have mounted competitive presidential campaigns in 1972 or 1976. (Instead, he ran and lost against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.)
It also haunted him. For a man plagued by scandals of his own making, nothing hung over him like Chappaquiddick, and the unanswered questions surrounding the tragedy.
Kennedy had gathered with friends
late on the night of July 18-19, 1969, at a Chappaquiddick cottage for a cookout and drinks. Around midnight, Kennedy left with Kopechne, who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Some time later, Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge. It flipped into Poucha Pond. Kennedy managed to escape. Kopechne did not.
Kennedy had had three drinks, Schlesinger wrote in his diary, according to Farrell’s book.
Kennedy would later say that he dove into the pond to rescue Kopechne, but could not reach her.
Then he walked back to the cottage, passing several houses along the way without stopping to ask for help. He returned to the scene of the crash with two friends and failed, once again, to extract Kopechne from the car.
Later, he swam to Edgartown and collapsed into bed at the Shiretown Inn. In the morning, he stopped at the inn’s front desk and made small talk as if nothing had happened.
“[I]n some confused way, he made his appearance before the hotel clerk, perhaps to establish an alibi,” Smith told Schlesinger, according to excerpts of the unpublished diary entries quoted in Farrell’s book.
All the while, he clung to the idea that what he knew to be true — that Kopechne had drowned in the overturned car — somehow wasn’t. “He had, Steve says, the wild hope that the girl might have had a . . . miraculous escape,” according to Schlesinger’s account of his conversation with Stephen Smith.
Kennedy told Stephen Smith: “At bottom I knew, I guess, that it wasn’t so. But I kept figuring out how it might be so.”
The new account of Kennedy’s motivations comes onethird of the way through Farrell’s nearly 600-page book about the “Lion of the Senate.”
Tom Whalen, a Boston University historian who has studied the Kennedys, said that Farrell’s work, as well as the second volume of another Ted Kennedy biography due out next month, “Against the Wind” by Neal Gabler, are welcome contributions.
“Up to now,” Whalen said, books on Kennedy “have been kind of a partisan look.” Farrell’s biography, Whalen said, promises to offer a “clear-eyed view of Ted Kennedy, warts and all.”
The Schlesinger diary entries are of particular interest, he added. Schlesinger, who wrote extensively about the Kennedys, was protective of the family’s reputation, he said.
Although Schlesinger’s family published hundreds of pages of his journals, the new details about Chappaquiddick were left out.
“This is stuff he didn’t have time to clean up and edit before publishing, or maybe he didn’t want to publish it,” Whalen said.
Farrell, a former reporter and editor for The Boston Globe, extracted new revelations from Kennedy’s own diaries, as well. In 2005, the senator wrote that during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Samuel A. Alito Jr., the future justice told him that he respected the precedent of Roe v. Wade and considered the matter “settled,” Farrell wrote in The New York Times on Monday. Despite that apparent assurance, Alito authored the opinion overturning Roe in June.
Apart from the Kennedy and Schlesinger diaries, Farrell drew on an extensive collection of oral histories, many from Kennedy family intimates, that became available at the University of Virginia after Kennedy’s death in 2009.
He also traveled across the country to reconstruct Kennedy’s legislative career from one degree of remove: in the archives of other politicians, including Bob Dole, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale. Piecing together events through others’ eyes enabled Farrell to “cross examine things [Kennedy] had written about himself,” he said.
Farrell is also the author of biographies of Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill and Richard Nixon. The Nixon book was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
A theme running through Farrell’s latest book is Kennedy’s insecurity, specifically with regard to his brothers, Joseph, John, and Robert, all martyred in war or politics. According to Schlesinger’s account of his meeting with Jean Smith, Kennedy’s sister downplayed the idea that her brother’s Chappaquiddick cover-up was about protecting his political career.
“It was not, she says, that he was worried about the presidency: ‘He didn’t want to be president. He was sure that he would be killed if he became president,’” Schlesinger wrote, quoting Smith.
“It was rather that he could not bear the thought of letting down the family, of destroying all that Jack and Bobby had done,” he wrote.