an unconscious drive to self-destruct,” Jackie tells Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli. “I think it comes from the fact that he knows he’ll never live up to what people expect of him. He’s not Jack. He’s not Bobby. And he believes that what he is, is just not enough.”
Rita Dallas recalls Ted undergoing a medical examination by a doctor in Hyannis Port, who “recommended that Teddy’s spine be tapped. This was done at Teddy’s house on Squaw Island. The diagnosis was ‘wear your neck brace,’ but Teddy shook his head saying, ‘No, I can’t do it. I can’t let people think I’d be trying to get their sympathy. I can’t.’” The doctor also detects a mild concussion, similar to the one Ted sustained in the 1964 plane crash he also survived.
In the aftermath of Chappaquiddick, Joan (then thirty-two years old and four months pregnant) hears of the scandal directly from her husband’s mouth—though he’s not talking to her. According to Joan’s secretary, Marcia Chellis, Joan picks up a phone extension only to overhear a conversation between Ted and Helga Wagner.
“Ted called his girlfriend, Helga, before he or anyone else told me what was going on,” Joan tells Chellis. “I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, I had to stay upstairs.”
Three days after the incident, on July 22, Ted and Joan, along with Ethel, travel from Hyannis Port to attend Mary Jo’s funeral at St. Vincent’s Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The congregation of five hundred buzzes when the Kennedy party enters, observing, “The senator, wearing a heavy neck brace, seemed to have trouble kneeling after they entered the front pew.” The three highly visible mourners then travel to the cemetery in Larksville by chauffeured limousine.
That same day, the Boston Globe reports on the findings of Edgartown’s associate medical examiner, Dr. Mills. Mary Jo’s blood tests showed “a degree of alcohol, but it was very well down. She was not drunk at the time this happened. She was not drinking immoderately,” he said. (In 1969, the Massachusetts blood alcohol concentration [BAC] limit was .15 percent; in 2000, the national limit dropped to .08 percent; Mary Jo’s blood tested for .09.)
Chief Arena didn’t test Ted’s blood alcohol levels, explaining, “If a man comes into my station clear-eyed and walking steadily on his feet with no semblance of alcohol on his breath,” he explains, “I have no business in giving a Breathalyzer.”
On Friday, July 25, Ted, Joan, and Stephen Smith cross Nantucket Sound by Kennedy yacht for a hearing at the Edgartown courthouse presided over by Judge James Boyle. Ted pleads a barely audible “Guilty” to a misdemeanor charge (lacking evidence of criminal negligence, the most serious possible charge) of leaving the scene of an accident.
After handing down a suspended two-month sentence, Judge Boyle says, “It is my understanding that he [Ted] has already been and will continue to be punished far beyond anything this court can impose.”
The bewildered public has endured seven days of silence from the Kennedys, but on that same Friday night, Ted makes a thirteen-minute nationally televised speech from the library of the family’s Hyannis Port home. While Ted is the one to deliver the speech, however, the message is crafted by Jack and Bobby’s finest wordsmiths and political operatives.
According to Lester Hyman, however, key influencers—speechwriters Ted Sorensen and Richard Goodwin, aides Milton Gwirtzman and David Burke, lawyer Burke Marshall, and brother-in-law Stephen Smith—“were John Kennedy’s people. I believe that they were there to preserve John Kennedy’s reputation, not Teddy’s, and I think they disserved him [Ted].”
Viewers now know that Ted’s wife, Joan, was absent from the party at the cottage on the night of July 18 “for reasons of health” (a euphemism for her pregnancy with their expected fourth child), and that Ted feels grief and remorse over Mary Jo’s death. Part of this is a prelude to a political appeal, as Ted directly addresses the voters of Massachusetts, asking “whether my standing among the people of my state has been so impaired that I should resign my seat in the United States Senate.”
A quickly commissioned Gallup poll shows that “extremely favorable” ratings of the senator have dropped fifteen points (from 49 to 34 percent) following his televised speech, but Ted’s Boston office is besieged with favorable calls. The polished senatorial rhetoric has convinced one crucial person: Mary Jo’s grieving mother, Gwen Kopechne, who passes a handwritten note to the reporters surrounding her house during Ted’s broadcast. “I am satisfied with the senator’s statement, and do hope