'The senator said he took a wrong turning on a dark night': How a fatal accident ended Ted Kennedy's presidential hopes

BBC News

a day ago

On 25 July 1969, 56 years ago, Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident where a young aide died. But as a BBC reporter learnt, Kennedy left many questions unanswered.
"There are people here who plainly feel that ugly and dishonourable things have happened here this summer," said BBC reporter Brian Saxton in August 1969. He was standing outside the courthouse in Edgartown, Massachusetts that would hold the inquest into what was already becoming known as the "Chappaquiddick incident". A month earlier, US Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy had appeared in the same courthouse to plead guilty to fleeing the scene of a car accident. His young female passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, had been killed.
The two had been at a party in a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, a popular holiday destination for the US's rich and famous that was only accessible by ferry from Martha's Vineyard. "That last fatal ride on 18 July has already produced a good deal of conflicting stories," reported Saxton. "Stories that have been used by many American journalists to Senator Kennedy's political disadvantage."
At the time, Teddy was the sole surviving son of the influential Kennedy political dynasty. The family had suffered a succession of tragedies in the preceding years. Teddy's older brother, US President John F Kennedy, had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963. The eldest of the four Kennedy boys, Joe Jr, had been killed undertaking a covert wartime mission in 1944, and his sister Kathleen had died in a plane crash over France in 1948. Another sister, Rosemary, was lobotomised at the age of 23 when their father Joseph became concerned about her behaviour. She would end up spending most of her life in an institution. A little over a year before the Chappaquiddick incident, Teddy's remaining brother, Senator Robert F Kennedy, had been shot dead while campaigning in Los Angeles for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In fact, the get-together on 18 July was a reunion for people who had worked on his late brother's ill-fated political campaign. Among the guests present were a group of six female political strategists known as "Boiler Room Girls" because of the hot, windowless office where they worked in Washington, DC. One of these women was the 28-year-old Kopechne, who had worked on the wording of Bobby's speech announcing his presidential candidacy. There was a growing belief that Ted would take up his brother's political mantle. The January before the RFK campaign reunion, he had been chosen by the Democratic party as its youngest ever senate majority whip. He was now widely tipped to be the party's candidate to challenge US President Richard Nixon. There were promising signs that, once again, a Kennedy would sit in the White House.
The Chappaquiddick party was still in full swing when, sometime after 11pm, Senator Kennedy and Kopechne decided to leave. According to the statement he later gave to the police, Kennedy offered to drive Kopechne to the ferry landing, so that she could catch the last ferry back to Edgartown, where her hotel was. However, she did not tell her friends that she was leaving, and she left her handbag and room key behind at the party. It was on the drive to the ferry that the accident occurred.
"The senator said he took a wrong turning on a dark night and was lost, although it's known he was familiar with the island," said Saxton. As Kennedy drove down the unlit Dyke Road, his car veered off a narrow, wooden bridge which had no railings, and plunged into a cold tidal pond. The car landed upside down, and immediately began filling up with water.
"I remember thinking as the cold water rushed in around my head that I was for certain drowning," Kennedy would later say in a television address on 25 July 1969. "Then water entered my lungs, and I actually felt the sensation of drowning."
Fleeing the scene
Kennedy managed to get himself free from the vehicle and swim to the surface. He told police that he called Kopechne's name and, despite repeatedly diving into water, he was unable to rescue her from the submerged car.
It was then that the senator decided to walk back to the party, passing by several houses on route where he could have sought help. When he reached the cottage, the get-together was still in progress, but Kennedy did not alert the authorities or the other guests about what had happened. Instead, he only confided in his friend Paul Markham – a former US attorney for Massachusetts – and his cousin Joseph Gargan about the accident. The two men returned by car with Kennedy to Dyke Bridge and took turns diving into the water to try to reach Kopechne, but were thwarted by the strong tidal currents.
Gargan and Markham drove with Kennedy to the ferry landing. They both urged him to report the accident to the police and then they returned to the party, but they too didn't tell anyone about what had happened. Since there were no longer any ferries to take him off Chappaquiddick Island, Kennedy decided to swim 500ft (150m) across the channel to Edgartown. Sopping wet and exhausted, he stumbled back to his hotel, the Shiretown Inn, but instead of calling the police, he went up to his room, removed his clothes and collapsed on his bed. At around 2:30am he left his room to ask hotel staff what the time was, and then he returned to bed.
The following morning, Edgartown's police chief, Jim Arena, responded to a call reporting a car in the water off the Dyke Bridge. When Arena reached the sunken car, he tried to swim out and look inside it, but found the tide was too strong.
"John Farrar arrived and he was a scuba diver and went a little under the car and came up and told me there is a body in there," Arena told the BBC's Witness History in 2014. "He had a rope, so we pulled this young lady's body up, and despite any rumours to the contrary, she was completely dressed, and it's a terrible thing to say but it looked like if we could prop her up she'd be ready to go out for the evening." Farrar also managed to recover a pocketbook from the car belonging to another one of the "Boiler Room Girls", Rosemary Keough, leading Arena to believe that he had identified the victim.
The police chief called his station to see if they could locate Kennedy, only to be told that the senator was already waiting in his office for him. "I drove back to the station," said Arena, "walked into the office and there was Senator Kennedy, and I said I'm sorry about Miss Keough, because that's who I thought the young lady might be, and he said it wasn't Rosemary Keough, it was Miss Kopechne.
"[Kennedy] didn't appear like he was injured or anything, he appeared clear-eyed, normal, actually. He didn't appear to be disturbed or he certainly didn't appear to be under the influence of anything. Needless to say, I hadn't had any idea about the time lapse and all that before I got the statement."
Speculation and allegations
Nearly 10 hours had elapsed between the accident and Kennedy reporting it. Arena told BBC Witness History that while there were clearly questions as to what happened that night, "to charge someone with that, you'd have to be able to establish that there was an illegal act done. In other words, he had been driving over the speed limit or something had contributed to him going off the road and going off the bridge, and we had no way of proving that." Given the amount of time that had now passed, "it wouldn't be much of a proof if I had an alcohol test done, so basically we were left with leaving the scene after causing personal injury, but that was about it."
In the immediate aftermath, the news of the Chappaquiddick incident was largely eclipsed by the widespread press coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landings and Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to walk on the Moon on 20 July 1969. But interest in the story rose when Kennedy, wearing a neck brace, attended Kopechne's funeral two days later with his wife Joan. Kopechne's body had been flown to Pennsylvania to be buried without an autopsy, and the strange circumstances and unanswered questions surrounding the accident began to make headlines.
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By the time Kennedy pleaded guilty on 25 July, the press had descended on Edgartown to cover the story. The senator received a two-month suspended jail sentence and the loss of his driving licence for a year. The same evening, he took to national television to express his remorse over Kopechne's death, and to try to explain his version of events and behaviour that night. "There is no truth, no truth whatever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been levelled at my behaviour and hers regarding that evening," he said.
Kennedy denied he was "driving under the influence of liquor", and said that although he was in a state of shock, it was indefensible that he "did not report the accident to the police immediately". He said: "I was overcome, I'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions: grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock."
But several suspicious details served to fuel speculation. "There are so many things," Arena told the BBC. "For instance, even the morning we were called about the accident, he was seen at the Shiretown Inn, where he was staying, sitting having breakfast in somewhat of a casual manner." A newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, claimed that multiple long-distance telephone calls were made and charged to Kennedy's credit card before he informed the police. There were allegations that he had asked "his cousin to say he had driven the car, but he had changed his mind", said Saxon. "And that he didn't make that impulsive swim back to the mainland, but friends instead provided a boat."
As more people came forward with statements, the impression grew that the public was not being told the full story. Deputy Sheriff Christopher "Huck" Look testified that he saw the Kennedy car, with Kopechne and Kennedy in it, around 12:40am on 19 July – more than an hour after Kennedy said it had driven off the bridge. And John Farrar, the diver who retrieved Kopechne's body, testified that he believed she survived in an air pocket in the submerged vehicle for up to half an hour before she had suffocated – contrary to the official ruling that she had drowned.
Ultimately, the formal inquest returned no indictment and the case was closed, but the incident cast a long shadow. The Kopechnes were devastated by the death of their only child. Kennedy's wife Joan would suffer a miscarriage shortly after attending Kopechne's funeral. Kennedy would be defeated as senate majority whip in 1971. And in the years since, various theories have developed concerning the accident, its aftermath and why Kennedy took so long to report it. Those lingering doubts would mean that he would never secure his party's nomination for president. He would, however, continue to serve as a US senator until his death in 2009. Known as the "the lion of the Senate", he was one of the Democratic Party's most effective lawmakers, famed for his ability to forge alliances across party lines to push forward education, immigration and health-care legislation.
But the mysteries around the tragic death of the young woman at the centre of the Chappaquiddick incident would remain unresolved. "Nobody will ever know because there were only two witnesses to the whole thing," said Arena. "One was dead, and the other one is deceased now."
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