The House of Kennedy(59)

Ted is struggling with his own drinking. In April 1969, the senator embarks on a visit to Alaska and the native people of that state in his brother Bobby’s honor. But on the return flight to Washington, his travel companions catch a rough glimpse of the usually jovial senator. “Teddy used to be so much fun,” a close friend tells the Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne. “He kept the whole family laughing. After the deaths of Jack and Bobby, his dark side appeared, which can only be described as melancholy. That was when the indiscretions started.”

Aides and reporters watch in shock as a drunken Ted stalks the aisles of the commercial jet, pelting them with airline pillows and repeating “Es-ki-mo power” amid ramblings about his potentially enduring a fate similar to his brother’s: “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby…”

After witnessing the spectacle, at once poignant and alarming, John J. Lindsay of Newsweek attempts to sound the alarm about what he assesses as Ted’s deteriorating mental state.

Lester Hyman recalls receiving a call from Lindsay directly following the Alaska trip. “I want to tell you that your friend Ted Kennedy is in deep psychological trouble,” Lindsay tells Hyman. “Everybody else is just saying, ‘Ah, he just had a few drinks.’ This is a guy who is suffering, and if you guys don’t do something soon, something terrible will happen. And by God, it did.”





Chapter 40



Friday, July 18, 1969, marks a hard stop in Ted’s packed Washington calendar. He catches a flight north to Boston, telling his seatmate, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a fellow Massachusetts native, “I’ve never been so tired in my life.”

As Ted is sharing that confidence, Apollo 11 is orbiting the moon. NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are two days from realizing Jack’s space-race vision of Americans making the first lunar landing.

Thirty-seven-year-old Ted has a mission of his own—a return to the Edgartown Yacht Club regatta on the eastern shore of Martha’s Vineyard. He was too deep in grief for Bobby to attend in the summer of 1968, but this year Ted, along with cousin Joe Gargan and a crew, will race Victura, a twenty-five-foot wooden sailboat the Kennedys acquired in 1932, the year Ted was born. Their boat places ninth.

On the small island of Chappaquiddick, reachable from Edgartown only by car ferry across a narrow channel, Joe Gargan has rented a cottage. After the regatta, a party of twelve—six men Ted’s age or older, five of them married; six single women all under thirty—gathers to enjoy steaks and drinks, and to reminisce about the women’s days as “Boiler Room Girls,” who’d done tireless liaison work for Bobby’s presidential campaign from a top-secret central room in his headquarters in Washington. The women have asked Ted and Joe Gargan to “take us sailing again” as they did in Hyannis Port the previous summer.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne currently works in DC at the political consulting firm Matt Reese Associates. She holds a two-year business-secretarial degree from New Jersey’s Catholic Caldwell College for Women and had volunteered on JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. In March 1968 she distinguishes herself by assisting with Bobby’s presidential announcement.

Her Caldwell College classmate and Washington friend Elly Gardner calls Mary Jo the kind of party guest who’s “always the first to leave and never had more than one drink.” Owen Lopez, a lawyer who dated Mary Jo in Washington, agrees, noting that she “wasn’t the life of the party by any means. She tended to be subdued and measured in her speech. In fact, that’s why I think she was so trusted by the Kennedy staff. They looked for unconditional loyalty and discretion in the people they hired.”

Loyal and discreet would also describe Ted’s driver, sixty-three-year-old Jack Crimmins, a South Boston native who, according to Senate staffer Edward Martin, is not only “a real character” but “an invaluable asset to the senator, not only his driving but humor.” He’s been with the senator since Ted’s 1961 days as a Boston assistant district attorney and looks after the senator’s 1967 black four-door Oldsmobile Delmont 88 (“Don’t ride around in new cars,” Joe Sr. insists). Tonight, Crimmins is one of Ted’s five male guests, and brings to the party gallons of alcohol, including vodka, Scotch, and beer.

But Crimmins won’t be driving that evening.

Instead, the senator leaves with the keys—and Mary Jo Kopechne.

Testimony as to what happens next runs to 763 pages in the inquest document released nearly eighteen months later, on April 29, 1970.

In short: Ted was driving the Olds, with Mary Jo as his passenger, when they went off Dike Bridge into eight feet of water in Poucha Pond.

He lives. She drowns.

His next actions shadow him forever after. The consequences of the accident are compounded by questionable choices. When Ted gets out of the water, his first instinct is not to seek help from police, but to return on foot to his friends at the party, a little over a mile away. “So then he [Ted] went back up to the house and he was very badly advised by others who had probably had too many drinks as well,” Ted’s best friend John Tunney, who is not at the party, later relates. “So everything fell apart over the next several hours.”

“That was the tragedy of it. All of the people there [at the party] were dependent upon him in one form or another,” Tunney declares. “It’s so sad. It was so sad that he didn’t have somebody at that party to say we’ve got to get hold of the police immediately.”