The House of Kennedy(62)
The bewildered public has endured seven days of silence from the Kennedys, but on that same Friday night, Ted makes a thirteen-minute nationally televised speech from the library of the family’s Hyannis Port home. While Ted is the one to deliver the speech, however, the message is crafted by Jack and Bobby’s finest wordsmiths and political operatives.
According to Lester Hyman, however, key influencers—speechwriters Ted Sorensen and Richard Goodwin, aides Milton Gwirtzman and David Burke, lawyer Burke Marshall, and brother-in-law Stephen Smith—“were John Kennedy’s people. I believe that they were there to preserve John Kennedy’s reputation, not Teddy’s, and I think they disserved him [Ted].”
Viewers now know that Ted’s wife, Joan, was absent from the party at the cottage on the night of July 18 “for reasons of health” (a euphemism for her pregnancy with their expected fourth child), and that Ted feels grief and remorse over Mary Jo’s death. Part of this is a prelude to a political appeal, as Ted directly addresses the voters of Massachusetts, asking “whether my standing among the people of my state has been so impaired that I should resign my seat in the United States Senate.”
A quickly commissioned Gallup poll shows that “extremely favorable” ratings of the senator have dropped fifteen points (from 49 to 34 percent) following his televised speech, but Ted’s Boston office is besieged with favorable calls. The polished senatorial rhetoric has convinced one crucial person: Mary Jo’s grieving mother, Gwen Kopechne, who passes a handwritten note to the reporters surrounding her house during Ted’s broadcast. “I am satisfied with the senator’s statement, and do hope he decides to stay in the Senate.”
The Kopechnes decide not to sue. “We figured that people would think we were looking for blood money,” Mary Jo’s father, Joseph Kopechne, explains, though the family does accept $90,904 from Ted, as well as $50,000 from his insurance company. The money “was damn little, considering,” Joseph Kopechne angrily tells Ladies Home Journal in 1989.
*
Ted and his family spend the August Senate recess at the family compound in Hyannis Port. On August 28, Ted goes on the annual Kennedy family camping trip, but Joan feels too ill to join him. That night, her sisters-in-law Jean and Ethel take her to Cape Cod Hospital, where she suffers a miscarriage, her third. “Asked by a newsman whether the miscarriage was the result of a fall or accident,” the Desert Sun reports, Ted, who visits Joan on August 29, says, “No, she just didn’t carry.”
The couple’s personal tragedy counts among yet another life lost—among the Kennedys, and those who dare to get close to them.
*
On Ted’s first day back in the Senate, he invites Lester Hyman to lunch at his desk. Hyman recalls Ted “raised his hand just like a little kid” in an oath as he begins to tell his story.
“Lester, I swear to God,” Ted says, “I had nothing to do with Mary Jo Kopechne, and I was not drunk,” Hyman relates. “I said, Ted, I believe you, I really do. But the problem is not so much that but your conduct afterwards. And he said, Well, let me explain that to you. I said, Good. At that point, the buzzers rang in the Senatorial office for a vote call and he had to leave. By the time he came back, he wasn’t ready to talk any more, and I always wondered what he would have said.”
Ever mindful of the looming 1972 campaign, President Nixon is already actively working every advantageous angle. In a 2010 interview with the New York Times, John W. Dean III, who rose from an assistant in the Justice Department to White House counsel, explains that if Nixon were to face the senator he wanted to make certain “that he could hang Chappaquiddick around Kennedy’s neck.” On October 17, 1969, Dean requests that the FBI research the activities of Mary Jo Kopechne, specifically stating in his memo, “both the deputy attorney general and the attorney general are anxious to discretely find out if Mary Jo Kopechne (deceased) had visited Greece in August, 1968,” when Ted is known to have traveled with Jackie on his way to meet with Aristotle Onassis.
At clubby Sans Souci Restaurant in Washington, Lester Hyman and Senator Eugene McCarthy are seated at separate tables, but McCarthy is “talking about Chappaquiddick, and dripping with sarcasm” at a volume loud enough for Hyman to overhear McCarthy say, “Isn’t it ironic that the entire Kennedy dynasty has been brought down by a mere Polish secretary?”
The judicial inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne is set to begin on January 5, 1970, six months after the fatal accident. In advance, Stephen Smith has secured witness testimony from an insider source, the Massachusetts state detective Bernard J. Flynn. At Boston’s Logan International Airport, Flynn advises Smith and a Kennedy attorney, “Have Ted Kennedy tell the truth. We don’t have any other witnesses. He has nothing to fear.”
More than twenty witnesses are called, including Senator Kennedy. He testifies for more than two hours, although, per standard inquest procedure, he is not cross-examined. Questioning closes January 8.
Just two weeks later, Ted Kennedy experiences another blow. On January 21, the New York Times front-page headline screams “KENNEDY OUSTED AS WHIP” in bold, capital letters. Ted loses to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia in what the press describes as a political coup capitalizing on Ted’s vulnerabilities in the wake of Chappaquiddick. Byrd takes a stance against the stiff-drink negotiations that Ted has favored both on and off the Hill. “I despise cocktail parties,” he says. “You just stand around and waste time.”