1969
Ted Kennedy takes a dive
In the long and squalid annals of the Kennedy family, few incidents are more shameful than the behaviour of Senator Ted Kennedy in the Chappaquiddick incident.
Edward Moore Kennedy was the last remaining son of the famous clan. Though young and already tarnished by scandal (expelled from Harvard for cheating) he had been elected to the Senate for Massachusetts in 1962 and was the white hope of left-wing Democrats who expected he would use the memory of his assassinated brothers to ascend to the White House. That plan was dealt a fatal blow in the aftermath of a July 1969 party, held to celebrate the “Boiler Room Girls”, a group of six young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s campaign the previous year. All the women were single and in their twenties; all the men attending were married.
At about 11:15 p.m., Kennedy and one of the women, Mary Jo Kopechne, left the party and drove off in Kennedy’s Oldsmobile. Over an hour later the car, with two people in it, was spotted by a policeman parked on a rural road; when the man approached the car, it departed in a cloud of dust. Shortly thereafter, the car drove off a bridge into the water where it overturned and sank, ending up on its roof. Kennedy was able to escape and walked to the party where he alerted friends to the accident and the fact that Ms Kopechne was still under water. With two companions Kennedy returned to the car where they tried in vain to rescue the trapped woman. Though his friends insisted that he report the incident, Kennedy, instead, dove into the water to swim across the channel and go back to his hotel. There he complained about other noisy guests and went to sleep. In the morning the submerged car was noticed by fishermen and reported to the police; Kennedy and his friends had still not made any contact with the authorities until he heard on the radio that a body had been found in his car. He then attended the police station and dictated a short statement (at variance with the facts).
Despite the fact that the police diver who recovered the body said that Ms Kopechne had survived some hours in the car until the trapped air ran out and that she could have been rescued if Kennedy had called for help, the affair was soon dispensed with. No autopsy was held; Kennedy was convicted only of leaving the scene of a crash. His driver’s license was temporarily suspended. The incident, however, showed Kennedy in the worst possible light and the stink of it prevented Kennedy from daring to run for the presidency until an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Even then he was dogged by the memory of Chappaquiddick when his opponent Jimmy Carter injected it into the campaign. The good people of Massachusetts, however, kept returning Teddy to the Senate, until his death in 2009.