Chappaquiddick | The Weight of the Name | 5

0:06From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal.

0:30In July of 1969, a car drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. The passenger, Mary Jo Kopechny, would die that night. And the driver, Senator Ted Kennedy, would not report the accident for nearly 10 hours. He was never charged with a crime. He received a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene. And eight months later, he was re-elected to the Senate with 62 % of the vote. To many, it seemed the full weight of one of America's most powerful political families was deployed to ensure the senator's career survived. This scandal raised serious questions, not just about what really happened that night, but how it was handled, and whether the outcome would have been the same for someone without Kennedy's name and influence.

1:12More than 50 years later, those questions still resonate. My guest today is Peter Kanellis. He's a veteran political journalist, author, and editor of Last Lion, The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. Our conversation is next.

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2:30Peter Kanellis, welcome to American Scandal. Thank you. Many look at Chappaquiddick as a quintessential case of the wealthy and powerful avoiding accountability. Ted, though, said that it haunted him for the rest of his life. How do you assess what kind of accountability was involved, if any? I think that there was serious accountability for errors in judgment that were almost certainly motivated by concern for the image and politics and how is this all going to look. I think that it adds up to a pretty powerful indictment of Ted Kennedy's behavior. The line that might be drawn, though, is when people say, you know, did he intentionally sacrifice this woman or sacrifice her life?

3:16Did he, you know, he cared more for his own political well-being than he did for her life? I think that the evidence suggests that he believed that she was not savable at any of these later points. You know, he did dive in to try to save her and rescue her in the car. that is credible because he's such a good swimmer and he was somebody who spent his whole life on the ocean that it wouldn't have been some extraordinary effort of his to try to get down in the car and save her. And even if you're somebody who believes in the craven political motivation was always first and foremost in his mind, of course, his motivation would have been to do anything to save her because once she was saved, there would be no incident.

3:57It only became a scandal and a crisis because she died. So he had every incentive to try to save her. Then he ran back to the cottage, which was a pretty long track, to try to get Markham and Gargan to come back and help him to make a second run of attempts to save Mary Jo Kopechny. They did try. They didn't succeed. And it was then that the sort of political cover-up slash shenanigans slash manipulations, I think, started to occur. But when we look at how the Chappaquiddick incident played out, how much do you think was simply the system deferring to a powerful family? How does the local law enforcement apparatus go up against the Kennedys?

4:43Oh, I mean, I think that that is almost beyond dispute that the local officials in Edgartown deferred to the Kennedys. And, you know, a lot of their concerns were sort of how to please the Kennedys rather than how to properly investigate this death or concern for the Kopechny family. You know, at a certain point, various Kennedy aides and hangers-on and other figures, you know, started dictating terms to the local officials. Dominic Arena, who was the police chief, repeatedly deferred to the Kennedys. The question would be what might have been lost in that set of transactions, what evidence might have been lost.

5:18And, of course, we can't know. You know, we can't know what would have been obtainable if there had been a very high-powered sort of forensic investigation that took place at that time. So, you know, how much did the deference to the Kennedys matter? I would say it mattered much, much more in terms of public perception than it did in terms of actual forensic evidence that was lost. You bring up this entourage of operatives, advisors, and political allies that the Kennedys seem to have about them all the time. What does this machinery actually look like? In Ted's case, I guess, in particular. You know, I think it was actually much more of a loose combination of loyal hangers-on at many different rungs.

6:06So there were the Gargans and the Markhams. The Gargans were cousins, first cousins through Rose Kennedy, who had grown up as quasi-members of the Kennedy family, but in many people's estimation, sort of like second-tier members of the Kennedy family, and that they were there to be sort of friends and playmates and supporters of the Kennedy kids. So there are loyalists like that within the family. There also were the sort of practical aides that were part of Kennedy's Senate office and drivers and other figures like that that were quite loyal to him, sort of body men on the ground is the way some people would describe it.

6:45But then there were people like Burke Marshall who was involved. They were very high-powered academics and scholars and former Justice Department officials who were offering advice as kind of members of the larger Kennedy establishment. And I do not think that Ted Kennedy, especially traumatized after the election and everything, was able to plug in, take over, manage everything, get everything going. I think it happened sort of organically and perhaps even a little bit haphazardly. But there were a lot of people involved and there was a lot of intense thinking and strategizing that went on about how to preserve Kennedy's career and how to put Kennedy in the best light.

7:25I mean, among the strategic moves that I think stand out a little in the past is in Kennedy's speech, his sort of apology speech talking about this, he focuses very heavily on Mary Jo's honor. You know, he starts talking like there was nothing that happened that night that would cause any question to Mary Jo Kopechny's honor as though she were somehow the focus of attention in this. But it sends out sort of the subtle message that if you're looking at this as Ted Kennedy behaving in a in a louche way and cheating on his wife, that you're maligning the memory of Mary Jo Kopechny. They also staged the cervical collar that Kennedy was wearing and his whole appearance at the funeral designed to make it look like he was very seriously injured in this crash.

8:11I think it's easy to believe that he would have been shaken up, that he would have been sort of mentally traumatized and all of that. But I think they went out of their way to make it seem like he had, you know, suffered physically and that he was as much a victim as a perpetrator in this case. In the book that we did, Last Lion, The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, we revealed a very shocking kind of thing, which is that Joan Kennedy was in the early stages of pregnancy at that time and had had a series of miscarriages and was trying very hard to maintain bed rest and to preserve the pregnancy. But Ted prevailed on her to come with him to Mary Jo Kopechny's funeral in West Virginia up in the mountains and everything.

8:52And, you know, you can imagine Joan Kennedy's situation. You know, here's her husband's been in this perhaps career-ending accident, and it's with a young woman in his car and drinking and all this kind of stuff. And where was she and what was she doing and all that? So Ted clearly needed her at his side to show her loyal support to him that, you know, she backed him in every way. So he insisted that she go to the funeral and fly in this tiny plane to mountainous West Virginia for this funeral. And she suffered a miscarriage. And she's just recently passed away, but she had always thought that Ted was sort of putting his career over their family at that moment.

9:31So there was a lot to lay at Kennedy's doorstep from Chappaquiddick, a lot of questionable behavior. At the end of the day, was it brutal or murderous or, you know, casting this woman aside for his ambitions? It doesn't really add up that way, in my opinion. It adds up as a person showing poor judgment on a lot of different levels. Now, this incident happened at a time when there was perhaps an unspoken agreement between the press and politicians that politicians' personal life was perhaps off limits. That has obviously changed as we fast forward to today. What do you think the outcome would have been if this incident happened more recently?

10:14I think that it's quite possible to imagine that if it happened in a later era when there were more of these like tabloid type, you know, TV shows and things like that going on, that it would have ended Kennedy's career. Just the repetition and the mass scrutiny of his judgment and his errors and those kinds of things, I think, you know, it would not have withstood that kind of massive critical scrutiny. On the other hand, there were no shortage of people blaming Kennedy for this, and there was no shortage of effort on the part of the Nixon sort of central command to try to draw attention to Kennedy's lapses.

10:49They viewed Kennedy as a real threat to Nixon in the 1972 presidential election and were quite happy to see him sidelined and certainly wanted him to be sidelined. So it wasn't like this flew under the radar screen for anybody. I mean, I think the implications of this were quite visible to the American public. I think Ted himself also, you know, suffered in some ways in comparison to his dead brothers. You know, he was the one, the flawed human being sitting in the middle when they had become these sainted figures by then. But Massachusetts continued to love the Kennedys. And Massachusetts, I think, had felt that the Jack Kennedy presidency had brought, you know, tremendous new cachet and attention to Massachusetts.

11:30I think there was just a tremendous respect and regard. It was an era when Catholic families in Massachusetts would have a picture of Jack Kennedy on their dining room wall. I mean, they revered Kennedy. And he had been the first Catholic president, you know, all these things. So there was an underlying loyalty to the Kennedys that Ted could draw on in that situation. And by tailoring his appeals to his Massachusetts constituents, his hometown people, he established a very low bar for himself to survive. It was, you know, I will do what my constituents want, but he's asking the friendliest possible audience to judge his behavior rather than speak to the nation at large.

12:12And I think that helped him to survive. That helped him to get over the Chappaquiddick stain. But the Chappaquiddick stain, I think, effectively killed his national opportunities. Ultimately, Chappaquiddick is a tale of political survival, I guess, if we take Ted's point of view. But it's interesting that he brought up Mary Jo's honor as something that he really wanted to hit home in his speech. Because it does seem that a sexual scandal will often end a career faster than a financial scandal or an abuse of power. We have certain evidence of that, Gary Hart, Anthony Weiner, Bill Clinton. but politicians who are caught lying to Congress or obstructing justice often survive and sometimes even thrive.

12:54What is the difference in these improprieties? Well, I think a lot of it is changing times. You had referred a little bit before to the era when the media looked the other way, when politicians were often drinking and carousing and engaging in affairs. And that certainly was the case with Jack Kennedy. It was an era when all politicians tried to present themselves as role models for the average American family. So they're always standing there with their perfectly turned out wives and children. They were all men at that era, you know, almost all men and trying to sort of model a kind of 1950s ideal of the American family.

13:34And then we approached that earlier, talking about Gary Hart and the Bill Clinton era and things like that, when everything swung completely in the other direction and cynicism about politics took cold. And it was almost like presumed that these ideal images that they were sort of presenting were all fakes and that they were all having affairs and carousing behind the scenes and things like that. And in some ways, you were exposing sort of the hypocrisy of the whole system when people were writing and discussing politicians' extramarital dalliances. But there's no question that Kennedy would have feared the perception that he and Mary Joe were having a sexual relationship.

14:11It certainly violated people's sense of what a proper family man should be doing with his time on a July evening in 1969.

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16:22So let's go back a little bit to the beginning of the Kennedy dynasty. the Kennedy family, as we know it, began with Joe Sr. He was a financier, a dealmaker extraordinaire, and a man who understood power in a very transactional way. How much of what the Kennedy children eventually became was shaped by their father? Well, I have a view of their father that sort of runs a little bit counter to some of the depictions in these Kennedy movies and these Kennedy TV shows. You know, the common view of him is that he was ruthless. He was a man who made hundreds of millions of dollars in sometimes legally questionable activities, including liquor, bootlegging, areas like that.

17:05But then he went to Hollywood and financed movies, and there was always a hint of something slightly disreputable about the way that he was aggressively making money. However, I think he was an idealistic person, and he also was a sort of emotionally attuned person. And when you go back and read his letters, which have been collected in a book that one of his granddaughters pulled together, his letters to his children, it quickly becomes apparent that he was the nurturing parent of the two. It was Rose Kennedy that was sort of more austere and more of a threatening figure to the children. Joe Kennedy was loving and warm and, you know, always rushing home when one of his kids was sick.

17:46He especially took on the job of mentoring the sons, which was almost certainly a sexist double standard, but a little bit of an agreement between him and Rose that Rose could be the sort of dominant parent for the girls, but he was going to be the dominant parent for the boys. And the boys really looked up to him. There was no hint of any sort of rebellion or resentment. They trusted him. Now, in his own career, you know, he was a man of tremendous ambition. And, you know, wealth was just in his mind sort of a stepping stone to greater power. And he famously had his own career sort of truncated by expressing concerns about World War II and about whether the United States should really be involved before Pearl Harbor in the war in Europe and suggestions that he was sympathetic in some ways to the Germans or at least deferential to German power.

18:44And he then realized, being a very shrewd person, that after World War II and after everything, that that would be a fatal obstacle to his own career. So he set about making sure that his son Jack, the eldest son to survive the war, there had been an older brother, Joe Jr., who died during the war. But he set about making sure that Jack would be able to stand on his own two feet and not be too tainted by him. And the way he did it was encouraging Jack to make his academic thesis at Harvard about appeasement and the evils of appeasement. And, you know, he called it Why England Slept. It was about people who were doing what his own father was accused of doing.

19:24So I think that truly the Kennedys believed that that would be a way of sort of laundering the Kennedy name, showing that Jack was different from the old man. Hearing that JFK's senior thesis was pretty much dictated by his father leads me to wonder how much stage managing happened in the family. What was it like to grow up inside the Kennedy family? There was a tremendous amount of stage management, but there's no evidence that the sons resented it, as I had said before. It's like the father was sort of a master orchestrator. And there were a few like sarcastic quips that Jack Kennedy made when he was president that suggested he wanted his father to get off his back a little bit, but it was more made in humor and almost for political reasons to try to sort of establish himself as his own man.

20:09I think they very much revered their father and their father was very much pulling the strings. That goes double and triple with Ted because when you're the youngest child and you feel sort of overshadowed by your brothers, as he certainly did, you rely on your father's good opinion very heavily. And so in 1962, when Ted Kennedy wanted to run for the Senate from Massachusetts, Jack and Bobby Kennedy did not want him to run. They felt like it was too many Kennedys. It would look like a power grab. There was a vague suggestion that Ted really wasn't worthy. He really didn't deserve it. He hadn't earned it.

20:46He hadn't done a lot of things. And it was Joe Kennedy who stuck by Ted and insisted that Ted should run. I think if Joe were not still in the game during that period, which was just around the time that he had started having strokes, I think that Jack and Bobby would have absolutely forbidden Ted from running in 1962. But their father was adamant. Their father saw real potential in Ted. Their father believed in Ted. Their father wanted Ted to go into the Senate in 1962. I also think the father was probably wise enough to recognize that Ted Kennedy had some personality advantages over his brothers.

21:24Now, their personas have changed so much over time and in memory and because of the assassinations, and Ted himself has played a role in sort of molding the Kennedy myth and mystique. But Ted had much, much more of a common touch than Jack or Bobby Kennedy had. Jack Kennedy was very much a sort of look-but-don't-touch kind of politician, an intellectual, a performer, but not somebody who was a glad hander, not somebody who had, you know, close, intimate friends, not somebody who was able to make a connection to people in all walks of life. Ted Kennedy could, and he attributed it to some of his time in the Army where he was kind of a grunt in the Army.

22:04He had to, you know, bunk with guys who had no money and who had no prominent name to support them. And I think you can see throughout Ted's career that he genuinely did have a clear sense of what other people in the country were going through and what people of lower means and no means had. And Jack and Bobby did not have that same sort of instinctive feel for people. As you reminded us, Ted was the youngest of nine, and by most accounts, no one had especially high hopes for him. But one by one, the men ahead of him in prominence and age, Joe Jr., Jack, Bobby, they each died in tragic fashion.

22:48And every time the next Kennedy stepped up, what was it like for Ted to finally inherit the entirety of the mantle? I think it's unimaginable pressure is what it adds up to. You know, not only if you think about that period just before the Chappaquiddick incident after his brother Robert was assassinated, he realizes that he suddenly is the head of the family. Old Joe is still alive but is greatly disabled by a stroke. And what has been bequeathed to him is, first of all, the sense of grief from all of these losses. And it wasn't just Jack and Bobby. It was their sister Kathleen, who was like sort of a second mother to Ted.

23:28She died in a plane crash. There was a sister, Rosemary, who had a sort of botched lobotomy procedure and ended up severely impaired. I think that, you know, as the youngest child, you have this heightened sense of all of your older siblings. And, you know, one by one, they were sidelined or killed. And I think he felt this tremendous burden to sort of live the life that they were denied and to try to, you know, achieve some of the things that they had wanted to achieve, almost doing it sort of in their name and in their memory. If you combine that, though, with the tremendous expectations that went along with a Kennedy name after Jack Kennedy's assassination, it's almost kind of intolerable to think about it because it wasn't just grieving for the brothers and worrying about the brothers and wanting to follow in the brothers' footsteps.

24:19It was essentially inheriting this giant infrastructure of thousands of people around the country that identified with the Kennedy political establishment or the Kennedy political message because many of them were academics and intellectuals and not actual sort of footworkers in politics. And, you know, they had believed after Jack Kennedy had died that Bobby Kennedy was next in line, that Bobby would become president, that all of them would then return to their roles, sort of reconstituting the new frontier in a Robert Kennedy presidency, probably beginning in 1969. And after Robert was assassinated, those expectations of all these high-powered people centered on Ted.

25:00Now, Ted was not a great intellect. Ted was not somebody who enjoyed talking to, you know, poets and artists and tenured professors in the way that Jack Kennedy did. But, you know, here's this awesome responsibility, this tremendous sense of grief, this tremendous sense of legacy, and this tremendous sense of responsibility to thousands of people who he probably couldn't even relate to. and this expectation that it was the presidency or nothing. You know, they all were expecting to go right back into the White House and Ted was going to be their vehicle. So your book on Ted Kennedy says that he might have been the most legislatively consequential senator of the 20th century.

25:42I wonder if you could make that case. What did he achieve? Senator Kennedy was at the center of four of the most consequential legislative initiatives really of the second half of the 20th century. He was a co-sponsor and a key sponsor of the Immigration Act that has dramatically changed the racial and religious texture of America. He was the Democratic point man for years on the Senate Judiciary Committee and memorably led the charge against Robert Bork and was really the Democratic point man on justice issues. We all know that he was also the leading senator on health care and that he referred to universal health care coverage as being the cause of his life.