Chappaquiddick
By July 18, 1969—the day that Ted was flown to Martha’s Vineyard to sail in the Edgartown Regatta—speculation was intense that he was destined for the White House. Even the year before, in the wake of Bobby’s slaying, party heads had hounded Ted to join the race and fill his brother’s shoes; after serious contemplation, Ted decided he was in no condition emotionally, nor was he prepared mentally, for such an enormous challenge. He certainly didn’t have Joan’s support. To one interviewer after another, she said that she didn’t want him to run. Ascension to the country’s highest office had ended the lives of her two beloved brothers-in-law and left their wives widows and their thirteen children without fathers. It was a real and ever-present threat and Joan felt it.
Soon after Bobby’s death, Ted received one of many ominous letters and notes. It read, “Don’t run for President or Vice President or you will be shot dead, too.” Another was sent to Ethel, recently widowed, at Hickory Hill: “If Ted runs for Pres. Or VP he will be killed. We hate Kennedys. Stop him.” Still, Ted couldn’t dodge the wishes of his party—or of voters, almost 80 percent of whom believed he would one day be the Democratic nominee for president. President Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, had almost immediately started tracking Ted’s TV airtime, assuming a new Kennedy could be a threat in 1972. A writer observed: “The feeling of momentum was almost palpable; it was as though he were wearing the clothes of Jack and Bobby, fulfilling their destiny, which was now his own.”
But on the hot and humid Friday in Martha’s Vineyard, Ted could step away from those pressures and enjoy some time on the water. Afterward, he visited a gathering of Bobby’s former “boiler room” staffers, who gathered on nearby Chappaquiddick Island to reminisce about their days working in the windowless nerve center of the short-lived campaign. They were six young women, all single, meeting up at a small house rented by Kennedy cousin Joey Gargan, a regular of the family campaigns. One of the staffers, Mary Jo Kopechne, was a twenty-eight-year-old who had worked for Bobby in his Senate office since 1965; before that, she’d volunteered for Jack’s campaign as a college student. She was a loyal worker and serious minded, known for her “convent school” demeanor and her love for the Boston Red Sox. “Politics was her life,” said her father, Joseph Kopechne.
Ted wasn’t close with the so-called Boiler Room Girls, but he stopped by the gathering to show his continued appreciation for the work they’d done for his brother. At about 11:15 p.m., Ted asked his chauffeur for the car keys, saying he was tired and wanted to go back to his hotel, and drove off with Mary Jo. Later, he said he’d offered her a ride back to Edgartown. He took a wrong turn and plunged into Poucha Pond, his Oldsmobile coming to a rest wheels-up. “The next thing I recall is the movement of Mary Jo next to me,” Ted later said in an inquest,
the struggling, perhaps hitting or kicking me, and I, at this time, opened my eyes and realized I was upside down, that water was crashing in on me, that it was pitch black. I knew that and I was able to get a half a gulp, I would say, of air before I became completely immersed in the water. I realized that Mary Jo and I had to get out of the car.
Ted managed to free himself and swim to the surface. He said he dove repeatedly back to the car, calling Mary Jo’s name, but he couldn’t free her. She died, entombed in the car. The incident was tragic, clearly an accident, but it was Ted’s next steps that would forever cast a shadow on his political career. He stumbled back to the rented cottage, passing houses along the way. He didn’t stop for help. Once he reached the cottage, he climbed in the back seat of a rental car there and sent for his cousin and a friend, both lawyers. The three said they returned to the pond to try to save Mary Jo but failed. They never stopped for help, and once it was clear that Mary Jo was gone, Ted dove back into the water and swam all the way to Edgartown. He didn’t report the accident until the next morning, after the car had already been discovered by two boys fishing on the bridge.
While the Kennedy machine went to work—family members flew in from all over the country to be by Ted’s side and attempt to reinforce his quickly crumbling reputation—Joan was left in the dark. “No one told me anything,” she later said,
Probably because I was pregnant, I was told to stay upstairs in my bedroom. Downstairs the house was full of people, aides, friends, lawyers. Ted called his girlfriend Helga before he or anyone even told me what was going on. It was the worst experience of my life. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. No one told me anything. I had to stay upstairs, and when I picked up the phone I could hear Ted talking to Helga. Nothing ever seemed the same after that.
Joan wasn’t included in the plan making, but she certainly was included in the plans—as Ted’s steadfast, dutiful wife. She would be by Ted’s side at Mary Jo’s funeral, which meant forgoing the recommended bed rest. A few weeks after the incident, as public opinion about Ted began to dip and an inquest into the wreck neared, Joan had a miscarriage, losing her third baby in six years. She was days shy of her thirty-third birthday. About this time, she also learned that her mother, Ginny, had left for Europe with a friend after her father asked for a divorce. And in November, just months after a tearful Ted broke the news to him about Chappaquiddick, Joseph P. Kennedy, the onetime indomitable patriarch, suffered yet another stroke. On November 18, 1969, he died in his Hyannis Port home with the core of his surviving family keeping watch at his bedside.
It was a period that would have left even the most stoic person in a traumatized daze. But Joan’s sensitivity left her especially vulnerable to grief’s disorientation, and instead of rallying around her during this period, most of the Kennedy family turned away—reacting with instinctive distaste to basic human frailty and occupied with being “strong” in the face of their own wounds. Years later, Joan would still have trouble talking about Chappaquiddick. “For a few months everyone had to put on this show and then I just didn’t care anymore. I just saw no future,” she said. “That’s when I truly became an alcoholic.”