by Edward Klein
*1 More than ten years later, on March 12, 1980, the New York Times ran a frontpage article headlined GAPS FOUND IN CHAPPAQUIDDICK PHONE DATA. The Times reported: “Records of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s telephone calls in the hours after the accident at Chappaquiddick were withheld by the telephone company from an inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne without the knowledge of the Assistant District Attorney who asked for them.”
*2 Joe Kopechne died in 2003 at the age of ninety. Gwen died four years later at age eighty-four in the Valley Nursing Home in Plains Township, Pennsylvania. They were buried next to Mary Jo in St. Vincent’s Cemetery in Larksville, Pennsylvania.
PART THREE
“A Second
Chappaquiddick”
12
ON TED KENNEDY’S first day back in the United States Senate following Chappaquiddick, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield made a public display of greeting him warmly and escorting him to his desk. But Mansfield’s gesture did little to sweeten the reception Ted received from his colleagues.
Among the one hundred senators in the 91st Congress, fifty-seven were Democrats and forty-three were Republicans. There was only one woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, and one African American, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Many senators, both Democrats and Republicans, had once flocked to Ted Kennedy’s committee hearings and press conferences to bask in his celebrity and get their faces on TV. Now, after Chappaquiddick, a number of them went out of their way to avoid being seen in his presence.
Few senators were in a position to cast the first stone, and in time, a number of them would achieve their own public infamy. Herman Talmadge of Georgia would be “denounced” by the Senate for his unethical conduct; John Tower of Texas would fail to be confirmed as secretary of defense because of his extramarital affairs and heavy drinking. Harrison A. Williams of New Jersey would be convicted of taking bribes in the Abscam sting operation. And Ted Stevens of Alaska would be convicted of seven felony counts for failing to report illegal gifts (though the decision would eventually be reversed following revelations that the prosecution had withheld evidence).
It was an open secret that many senators sexually harassed their female staffers, that others tried to seduce young female interns, and that still others sold their votes in return for campaign donations. The most powerful senator in the 91st Congress—Richard Brevard Russell Jr. of Georgia—was a white supremacist and unapologetic segregationist, which didn’t stop his colleagues from naming a Senate office building after him.
Without doubt, many senators derived pleasure in flaunting their righteous indignation over Ted Kennedy’s behavior on Chappaquiddick Island. But there was also a tinge of envy in their sanctimony. It’s about time, these senators seemed to be saying, that the Kennedys got their comeuppance.
WITH HIS COLLEAGUES’ disrespect came diminished influence. Many bills that Ted Kennedy supported—on health care, tax reform, gun control, and a lowered voting age—went down to defeat. His vulnerability invited petty personal attacks by his political opponents. They held hearings to consider a bill that would have changed the name Cape Kennedy back to Cape Canaveral. The proposal did not pass, but the fact that such an affront to the assassinated president could even come up for consideration in the United States Senate indicated just how far Ted’s star had fallen. Dejected, depressed, and stressed out, Ted fell ill with pneumonia.
Much of Ted’s power had derived from his position as heir presumptive to the presidency. But now, even his political allies questioned his right to succeed his brother Jack. Ted Sorensen said that Senator Kennedy “recognizes that his prospects were damaged [by Chappaquiddick] if not destroyed.” And Arthur Schlesinger Jr. added: “I think that with Chappaquiddick the iron went out of Edward Kennedy’s soul.”
There was talk that Ted would resign from the Senate. And in his darkest hours, he mulled over that possibility with family and friends. But as long as he remained a senator, he was determined not to hang his head in shame. In his role as the Senate majority whip, he ranked second only to Majority Leader Mansfield, and it was his duty to appear on the Senate floor and round up the necessary votes.
“Teddy wanted to be seen,” said Wayne Owens, an aide on his whip staff. “In two weeks, he had turned a little bit from the ultimate celebrity to the ultimate curiosity. So, process-wise, at twenty to twelve, I would come to the Senate office and brief him on what was happening that day … because we had a press conference … every day with Mike Mansfield. And Teddy was at those press conferences….
“And then we would just kind of hang around, slipping off into the cloakroom or into the lobby or something….” Owens continued. “But he made the decision to get right back on the bucking horse, right back out in public. He was never any shrinking violet. And those times were really tough because one of my tasks frankly was watching the wire stories to see whether [Dukes County district attorney] Edmund Dinis … had indicted him or something, had figured out a way to get the grand jury to indict him.
“And then since his [driver’s] license had been suspended, I would drive him home at night. I mean these were really tough, mean times for him. And yet, his old Irish dark sense of humor was wonderful, and he loved stories on Chappaquiddick. You know, if I would hear a good Chappaquiddick joke, he would always want to hear it. He would say, ‘What, get any new jokes or any new lines?’”1
I RARELY TAKE the Capitol subway—only when it’s raining terrifically hard,” Ted Kennedy said several months after Chappaquiddick. “I like to walk whenever I can and go by both where Jack’s office was and where Bobby’s office was. I can remember different things Bobby said as I pass by the places where we stood and talked. When I go by the north entrance hall, I think of President Kennedy delivering his inaugural address there and I remember that was where the country honored him in the end.”2
The New York Times reporter who recorded Ted’s words was sufficiently moved to reflect upon their meaning. “What was evident from such talk,” the reporter wrote, “was that beaten and humiliated as Kennedy then was, forced as he was to contemplate the possibility of dropping out of public life altogether, he still loved the Senate—loved it as a young priest loves his church.”3
The decision whether to remain in the Senate was not his alone to make; he had to consider its impact on his family. Since Chappaquiddick, there had been a noticeable increase in threats against his life and the lives of his wife and children. Police cruisers were now stationed twenty-four hours a day outside his home on Chain Bridge Road on the Virginia side of the Potomac. The Secret Service escorted his children to school and brought them home at the end of the day. The pressure on Joan proved to be too much; she suffered a miscarriage—the second in their ten-year marriage.
“What if I didn’t run again?” Ted asked Fred Dutton, a Democratic strategist. “What if I retire?”
“Well, do you have anything in mind?” Dutton asked.
“Maybe return to law practice in Boston,” Ted said. “Maybe see if I can buy the Boston Herald. Maybe sit in the south of France.”
But in the end, Ted couldn’t bear to lose his identity. He was a man of the Senate. And so, as the election season of 1970 approached, he dusted himself off and announced that he was indeed running for reelection. He was determined to run as hard as or harder than he had the first time around.
“The voters need reassurance,” he told R. W. Apple of the New York Times. “They need to see me, to be convinced that I’m reliable and mature. You can’t counter the Chappaquiddick thing directly. The answer has to be implicit in what you are, what you stand for, and how they see you.”
The voters also needed to see Joan Kennedy campaigning by his side. It would be a signal that his wife had forgiven him for Chappaquiddick, and that it was all right for the voters to forgive him, too. Joan agreed to campaign, but her heart wasn’t in it. Ted didn’t really need her; he needed a symbol.
“I felt used rather than needed,” Joan told one interviewer. And
to another, she admitted: “That’s when I truly became an alcoholic.”4
Ted raised $1.2 million—a considerable sum for a senatorial race in those days. A good deal of that money was spent on registering young voters. The effort paid off in the fall, when he won the election to a third term with a comfortable 62 percent of the vote.
He had weathered the Chappaquiddick storm in his home state. But on January 21, 1971, he was handed a humiliating defeat in the Senate. Several Democratic senators who had privately promised to vote for him in his reelection bid as majority whip failed to make good on their pledges. He lost the secret ballot to Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was, said historian James MacGregor Burns, “a second Chappaquiddick.”5
· · ·
FRIENDS WORRIED THAT Ted’s defeat as Senate whip, coming as it did so soon after Chappaquiddick, would be the final crushing blow. But that was not how Ted saw it.
“There’s something about me I had hoped you would understand,” he told a journalist. “I can’t be bruised. I can’t be hurt anymore. After what’s happened to me, things like that just don’t touch me, they don’t get to me.”6
In fact, losing the post as Senate whip turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It freed him from the tedious business of having to round up votes and allowed him to concentrate on the real work of the Senate, which was conducted in committees. It also allowed him to travel. He gathered his wife and three staff assistants and made a five-state swing around the country. He gave anti-Vietnam War speeches that attracted large and enthusiastic crowds. Reporters noted that he wore a pair of cuff links engraved with the initials “JFK.” He was acting like a presidential candidate. Newspapers began to ask: Was Ted Kennedy preparing to run for the White House in 1972?
Rose Kennedy had something to say about that. “He promised me … he promised me faithfully that he would not run,” she said. “I told him I did not want to see him die too, that I could not stand another tragedy like the deaths of his brothers John and Bobby.”
That was Rose’s official position, and she stuck to it in public. But in private, Rose told Ted, “There never has been a mother of two presidents…. So get busy!”
13
FOR AS LONG as anyone in Washington could remember, Richard Nixon had been obsessed with the Kennedys. First, there was Jack, who “stole” the White House from Nixon in 1960. Then came Bobby, who might have defeated Nixon in 1968 if it hadn’t been for an assassin’s bullet. Now there was Ted Kennedy. There was talk that Ted was all washed up because of Chappaquiddick, but Nixon didn’t buy that line. Nixon felt certain that Ted was going to run against him. The Kennedys were like vampires: Nixon would never be rid of them until he drove a stake through Ted’s heart in the 1972 presidential election.
Nothing that Ted Kennedy did or said escaped Nixon’s attention. The president had followed Chappaquiddick from day one. Along with millions of other television viewers, he’d been watching Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacecraft circle the Moon on July 20, 1969, when the broadcast was interrupted with the news of Ted Kennedy’s accident on Chappaquiddick.
Presidential speechwriter William Safire, who’d once worked as a publicist and was sometimes called to the Oval Office for his public-relations advice, offered the opinion that the Chappaquiddick incident would be forgotten in the excitement of Neil Armstrong’s Moonwalk.
“No,” said Nixon, disagreeing with Safire. “It’ll be hard to hush this one up; too many reporters want to win a Pulitzer Prize…. He [Ted Kennedy] was obviously drunk and let her drown. He ran. There’s a fatal flaw in his character.”
Later that same day, in a meeting with Nixon, his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, scribbled notes on a legal pad as the president spoke about his nemesis, Ted Kennedy. Haldeman’s notes caught the flavor of Nixon’s morbid obsession:
obviously was drunk—escaped—let her drown
said nothing till police got to him
can’t have dived & been in shock
ran out & slept it off—then reported
really get dope on that girl [Mary Jo Kopechne] parents
etc.
what they [Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo] doing
together etc.
flaw in character
cheated at school
ran from accident—girl drowned,
chance for a press guy to get a prize
check out police chief—Mafia
get full check.1
With the president’s consent, John Erlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs, called in Jack Caulfield, a former New York City detective who was on the White House payroll. He ordered Caulfield to send a private eye by the name of Tony Ulasewicz, one of Caulfield’s former police colleagues, to Martha’s Vineyard to see what he could dig up on Kennedy. (For his dirty work, Ulasewicz was secretly put on the payroll of the Committee to Reelect the President [CREEP]; he received $22,000 a year plus $1,000 a month in expenses.)
“We want to be sure Kennedy doesn’t get away with this,” Erlichman instructed Caulfield.
The very next day, July 21, 1969, Caulfield sent a confidential memo to Erlichman:
The best thinking now as to the reason for the lapse in time between the incident and the [police] report is that Kennedy was very drunk and his friends were making attempts to sober him up prior to making the official report.2
That same day, Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman took notes on his ever-present legal pad during another White House discussion about Chappaquiddick:
man up there [Martha’s Vineyard]—tips
Sen[ator] has been playing w/ this gal couple of yrs.
The road was no mistake
It has been used reg. by this guy for
assignation purposes
earlier in eve neighbors had complained
ordered man & girl in car out of the area
pressure is on up there very heavy
but some [thing] is bound to break in spite of this3
Over the following days, Jack Caulfield sent regular reports to the White House:
It seems to me a thrust from here should center about an exposure of the party details, for example: The names of those attending? How many were married men? Why was the cottage cleaned bare? Where were all of the people attending the party during the early morning hours?4
On July 26, 1969, the day after Ted Kennedy delivered his television address on Chappaquiddick, Haldeman noted the following conversation with Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen:
Dirksen agree [s] [Kennedy’s] influence badly impaired
D. says now on whenever anyone sees him [Kennedy]
there will be constant conscious [ness] of girl drowning….
K misfortune takes off some pressure
in Sen [ate]—no one on either side believes him
when put to test—failed to stand up like
a man & no one will ever forget it5
Even while Nixon & Co. were plotting Ted Kennedy’s political destruction, the president was feigning friendship with Ted. On August 4, 1969, after a breakfast briefing of the legislative leaders of both parties, Nixon invited Ted into his office for a private chat. Bob Haldeman was present to take notes of the conversation.
[The president] told [Kennedy] he understood how rough it was, etc. Said he was surprised to see how hard the press had been on him, especially because they like him, but you have to realize they are your enemy at heart, even if they do like you, because their prime motivation is the story.6
· · ·
IN THE SPRING of 1970, shortly after publication of the official inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, detective Jack Caulfield composed a memo suggesting a plan of action to undermine Ted Kennedy if he chose to run against Nixon in 1972.
On April 30, 1970, Caulfield wrote:
[Murray] Chotiner [a political dirty trickster who had been involved in all of Richard Nixon’s campaigns] and I have di
scussed this matter and we both agree that the media will do an initial effective exposure of the distortions. For the long haul, either this November or [the presidential election year of] ’72, we can program, if need be, a very damaging document for public consumption…. When and if it becomes necessary, we can take the step recommended above. In the meantime, I will keep the document in my possession. It is ready for your perusal any time.7
Former detective Tony Ulasewicz explained the mysterious reference to a “document” in his 1990 memoir, The President’s Private Eye. “Staff members of the Republican National Committee were kept busy clipping and pasting together every newspaper article and editorial [about Chappaquiddick] that broke into print,” Ulasewicz wrote. “The White House wanted a record of the attack on Kennedy’s credibility to use if Kennedy ever sought the Presidency. A scrap-book of the articles and editorials was put together and given the title ‘At an Appropriate Time.’”8
Nixon probably never saw the scrapbook. But he liked Caulfield’s idea, and during a presidential flight to Rome in September 1970, he ordered Haldeman to create a “campaign attack group.” The president wanted the members of this group—Murray Chotiner, speechwriter Pat Buchanan, and political operative Lyn Nofziger, among others—to obtain the income tax returns of Nixon’s potential Democratic opponents in 1972, including Ted Kennedy’s.
The illegal White House campaign against Ted didn’t stop there.
