A hearty bonne anniversaire to former Governor General and Deputy Prime Minister of the Bahamas Sir Orville Turnquest (97), Average White Band co-founder, songwriter and painter Alan Gorrie (80), former world tennis number one, novelist, briefly member of the Senate of Romania and retired major-general of the Romanian Land Forces Ilie Năstase (80), Eagles co-founder, Dillard & Clark and Flying Burrito Brothers vocalist guitarist and banjo player and one-time Patti Davis (née Reagan) partner Bernie Leadon (79), luxuriant-of-barnet Queen co-founder, astrophysicist and badger enthusiast Sir Brian May (79), Starbucks Chairman and CEO, unapologetic perpetrator of disgusting heated coffee-themed beverages and Seattle SuperSonics owner Howard Schultz (73), actor, director and Top Gun and ER legend Anthony Edwards (64), profoundly deaf virtuoso percussionist and Chancellor of Robert Gordon University Dame Evelyn Glennie (61), Prime Minister of New Zealand Christopher Luxon (56), former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon (56), Mayor of Kyiv and former world heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko (55), actor and amateur otter impersonator Benedict Cumberbatch (50), presenter Helen Skelton (43) and pioneering/shameless YouTube celebrity Shane Dawson (38).
No longer celebrating are the first President of the State of Ecuador Juan José Flores (1800), gunsmith and businessman Samuel Colt (1814), Impressionist painter, sculptor and illustrator Edgar Degas (1834), Sunday school teacher, temperance activist and definitely-not-axe-wielding-father-and-stepmother-killer Lizzie Borden (1860), surgeon and eponymous clinic co-founder Charles Mayo (1865), socialite and legendarily poor singer Florence Foster Jenkins (1868), autodidact, physicist, engineer and microwave oven inventor Percy Spencer (1894), physician and novelist A.J. Cronin (1896), South Dakota senator and fantastically unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern (1922), gunsmith and businessman Gaston Glock (1929) and Grateful Dead keyboardist and songwriter Keith Godchaux (1948).
Water, water every where, nor any drop to drink
In 1969, Edward M. Kennedy was 37 years old but already in his seventh year in the United States Senate. He was the ninth and youngest child of former US Ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald, and had been born the youngest of four boys. By 1969, however, he was the only son left. Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy Jr had died in 1944 while serving in the United States Navy when his aircraft had exploded over East Suffolk; President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated on a visit to Dallas in November 1963; and Senator Robert F. Kennedy had been shot fatally in the head in Los Angeles in June 1968 while challenging for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for that year.
Teddy Kennedy was charming, outgoing, selfish and spoiled, but the last of those qualities came easily with the shadow of tragedy which hung over him. He had been presiding over the Senate, a dreary slog usually shared between junior senators in the absence of the Vice President who is formally the presiding officer, in 1963 when he was informed that his brother President Kennedy had been shot during his visit to Dallas. Months later, in June 1964, he had been badly injured when the private aircraft in which he was flying from Washington DC to Massachusetts had crashed into an apple orchard in Southampton, Massachusetts. One of his closest aides, Edward Moss, was killed along with the pilot, while Kennedy was pulled from the wreckage by fellow passenger Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. His back was badly injured, leaving him in chronic pain for the rest of his long life, he had a punctured lung, broken ribs and internal bleeding, and he spent months in hospital. He was due for re-election in November 1964, and his wife Joan campaigned on his behalf, but no-one called Kennedy could lose in 1964; he defeated his Republican opponent, Howard J. Whitmore Jr, by three-to-one.
Kennedy was charming, personable and from an extremely wealthy family, but in some ways he was unremarkable. He was a mediocre pupil at the Fessenden School and Cranwell Preparatory School, and when attended the élite Milton Academy, he loved and excelled at sports, especially football, but achieved only Bs and Cs, and graduated only 36th in class of 56. Progressing to Harvard like his father and brothers, he continued to be a first-rate athlete, but was involved in two episodes of cheating in his academic work in his freshman year and was expelled. He enlisted in the United States Army for a four-year tour, which was reduced to two after his father’s intervention, and was discharged as a private first class after 21 months. Having shown the required contrition and improved his study habits, he was able to return to Harvard in 1953 but he remained an indifferent student. He eventually graduated with an AB in history and government, but only scraped into the top half of his class.
He had not achieved the grades he needed for Harvard Law School, so instead, like his brother Robert, he applied the University of Virginia Law School. Even then, because of his expulsion from Harvard, he was only admitted to Virginia after a full faculty vote. During his time he achieved mainly C grades, but he did win the prestigious William Minor Lile Moot Court Competition. As he would prove again and again, he was a powerful and emotional speaker who could wring the best out of trite and banal scripts. Campaigning for brother Jack’s re-election to the Senate for Massachusetts in 1958, Kennedy proved to have a knack for connecting sympathetically with ordinary voters—the genuinely common touch.
Rating Kennedy against his brothers is difficult. Alive Roosevelt Longworth, the acid-tongued socialite and daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt said of the Kennedy brothers that Jack was a movie star, Bobby was an intense 18th century Jesuit priest, while Teddy was a gregarious Irish pol.
When Jack Kennedy was elected President in November 1960, vacated the Senate seat for Massachusetts he’d snatched from Republican brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge Jr in 1952. (A quatrain about Boston brahmins from the early 20th century ran “Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God”.) The Kennedys knew the value of political real estate, but Jack appointed Bobby to his Cabinet as the United States Attorney General, while Teddy was still only 28, 15 months short of the minimum age of 30 to be a Senator. Consequently, the new President persuaded scandal-plagued Governor Foster Furcolo of Massachusetts, who had failed in his bid for re-election, rapidly to appoint his former Harvard roommate, 43-year-old, Benjamin A. Smith Jr, to the vacancy. Smith was widely seen as a stopgap, given that Teddy would turn 30 in February 1962, and that November there was a special election for the seat.
Edward Kennedy, now 30, was an assistant district attorney for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in which partly nominal role he had travelled extensively and was a frequent columnist in The Boston Globe. That he was so obviously the beneficiary of inherited privilege was less potent a weapon against him because the Republican Party had chosen as its candidate George Cabot Lodge II, 35, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Affairs, a product of Groton and Harvard and elder son of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, whom Jack Kennedy had beaten for the same Senate seat 10 years before. (In 1916, incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, George’s great-grandfather, had fought off a challenge from former Mayor of Boston John F. Fitzgerald, Teddy Kennedy’s grandfather.)
Kennedy once again proved an effective campaigner on the ground and won the election with 55 per cent of the vote to Lodge’s 42 per cent. Nearly 2.5 per cent, some 50,013 votes, went to the independent H. Stuart Hughes, an historian whose grandfather, Charles Evans Hughes, had served as Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and had been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. Lodge had joined the faculty at Harvard Business School in 1961 and returned after the election, staying until he retired as a professor emeritus in 1997. Hughes returned to his won studies at Harvard, but, increasingly involved in feminist, anti-Vietnam War activism and as co-President of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, moved to the University of California at San Diego, retiring in 1987. Kennedy remained in the Senate until his death in 2009, and is the fifth-longest continuously serving Senator in US history.1
Let us return to 1969. It was the Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta, and Kennedy and his cousin Joseph Gargan had rented Lawrence Cottage on the tiny Chappaquiddick Island, just off the eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard. On Friday 18 July, the two men hosted a cookout for the “Boiler Room Girls”, young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s doomed presidential campaign the previous summer. Six of them attended the party that Friday: Rosemary Keough, Mary Jo Kopechne, sisters Nance and Mary Ellen Lyons, Esther Newberg and Susan Tannenbaum. All were single and in their 20s. Also present were Paul Markham, a schoolmate of Gargan’s who had just stepped down as United States Attorney for Massachusetts; Charles Tretter, an attorney and adviser to Kennedy; Raymond LaRosa, who had worked on Kennedy’s senatorial campaigns; and John B. Crimmins, a long-time Kennedy associate who was acting as the Senator’s chauffeur for the weekend. All of the men except Crimmins were married; wives had not been invited.
Markham and Crimmins planned to spend the night at Lawrence Cottage. The other guests were booked into hotels on Martha’s Vineyard, the men at the Shiretown Inn, a block from the Edgartown ferry slip, the women at the Katama Shores motor inn, two miles south of the ferry slip. At around 11.15 pm on Friday night, in Kennedy’s account of the weekend, Mary Jo Kopechne asked him if he could drive her back to the hotel in Edgartown. According to Crimmins, she was feeling unwell after spending the day on the beach in the sunshine.
Kopechne was a week short of her 29th birthday. She was born in Pennsylvania, where both her grandfathers had been coalminers, and her father, insurance salesman Joseph Kopechne, was part-Polish by ancestry. When she was still an infant, her parents had moved to New Jersey, and she had attended Our Lady of the Valley High School in Orange, New Jersey, before studying at Caldwell College for Women, a Roman Catholic institution, where she had graduated with a degree in business administration in 1962. She had then spent a year at the Mission of St Jude in Montgomery, Alabama, which was active in the civil rights movement, and she had taught typing and shorthand at Montgomery Catholic High School. A former student recalled her being “a petite strawberry blonde” who was “humble and kind, and stood firm in her beliefs… tough, but fun in the classroom”.
In 1963, she moved to Washington DC to work as a secretary for Senator George Smathers of Florida, a moderate Democrat but a staunch anti-Communist who had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Truman Doctrine and a close friend of Jack Kennedy. When Robert Kennedy, still hollowed out by his brother’s assassination, was elected to the Senate for New York on 1964, Kopechne moved to his office, acting as secretary to various speechwriters then as legal secretary to Joseph Dolan, Kennedy’s legal adviser who had served under him at the Department of Justice as Assistant Deputy Attorney General. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, she worked for Matt Reese Associates, a political consultancy, but maintained contact with the Kennedy family and some of those who had worked on Bobby’s last campaign; one of her roommates in Washington was Nance Lyons, who was also at Lawrence Cottage that weekend. Like the other Boiler Room Girls, Mary Jo Kopechne was sharp and politically well-informed and astute, and extremely hard-working. She had revered Bobby Kennedy and had joined Matt Reese Associates after his death because she could no longer bear to work on Capitol Hill. “I just feel Bobby’s presence everywhere,” she said. “I can’t go back because it will never be the same again.”
By 1969, Kopechne was developing a promising career as a political adviser. She had recruited staff for the unsuccessful senatorial campaigns of DemocratsJoseph S. Clark Jr in Pennsylvania and Stephen McNichols in Colorado in 1968, and had then worked on Thomas J. Whelan’s successful re-election campaign as Mayor of Jersey City. Colleagues on the Whelan campaign noted her immensely hard-working nature; she was serious and slightly demure, a devout Roman Catholic who rarely drank, a young woman for whom, as her father would remark, “politics was her life”.
If Kennedy was to take Kopechne back to her hotel, they would need to catch the last scheduled ferry from Chappaquiddick at midnight, or else try to arrange a later ferry crossing. She seems not to have told anyone else at the party that she was leaving—not even Esther Newberg, with whom she was sharing an hotel room—and left her handbag and hotel room key at the cottage. Kennedy obtained his car keys from Crimmins, as the Senator did not usually drive.
What happened next is difficult to disentangle. Kennedy claimed he drove half a mile north on Chappaquiddick Road, heading for the ferry landing, then, rather than bearing left to stay on Chappaquiddick Road, which was paved, for another two-and-a-half miles, he accidentally turned right on to the unpaved Dike Road. Shortly after 12.30 am, Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look was returning to his home on Chappaquiddick, having been working as security at the regatta party in Edgartown. By Look’s account, he was driving south on Chappaquiddick Road and at 12.40 am he went by the intersection where Dike Road diverges from the paved roadway. He was passed slowly by a dark saloon car driven by a man with a woman in the front passenger seat which turned on to another unpaved route, Cemetery Road, and then stopped. Look thought the driver might be lost, so he also stopped and went to see if the occupants needed any help. When he was 30 feet away, the car began reversing towards him, and while he called out to offer help, the car turned sharply on to Dike Road and sped away, leaving a cloud of dust.
Look recalled that the numberplate of the car began with an L and contained two 7s; the registration of Kennedy’s Oldsmobile Delmont 88 was L78–207. He returned to his car to continue his journey home, but after only a minute or so, he encountered Nance and Mary Ellen Lyons and Ray LaRosa in a conga line in the middle of Chappaquiddick Road. He asked them if they needed a lift anywhere but they declined. All three would later corroborate Look’s account of their meeting and conversation, though none could be certain of the time. If Look’s version of events is largely correct, there is a period of an hour or so between Kennedy and Kopechne leaving the party at Lawrence Cottage and encountering the Deputy Sheriff for which it is difficult to account.
At whatever time, Kennedy was driving down Dike Road after his mistaken turn. After seven-tenths of a mile, there was a crossing at Dike Bridge, a wooden structure without any guardrails, at an oblique angle to the road which spanned the channel connecting Cape Pogue Pond in the north and Poucha Pond in the south. The bridge led to a barrier beach, Tom’s Neck Point. Less than a second before the car reached the bridge, Kennedy applied the brakes but then lost control, the car lurching over edge of the bridge’s southern end and landing nose-first in the channel. It then tipped on to its roof and settled on six or eight feet of water.
Kennedy was able to get out of the capsized car and swim free. He claims to have called out to Kopechne from the shore several times and attempted to swim down to rescue her seven or eight times. Thereafter his conduct was unconscionable. He rested on the bank of the channel for 15 minutes, then walked back to Lawrence Cottage, which was a journey of another 15 minutes. The route took him past at least four houses, but he made no attempt to raise the alarm or send for help. When he returned to Lawrence Cottage, the party was still underway. Kennedy quietly took Gargan and Markham aside, after which Gargan drove the three of them to the crash site in a rented Plymouth Valiant, and Gargan and Markham jumped into the pond and made several attempts to rescue Kopechne. The currents were simply too strong (and Gargan and Markham too drunk?), so they drove to the ferry landing where, all of them attorneys, standing by a public phone booth, they debated what to do.
Gargan and Markham claimed to have been insistent that the authorities had to be informed. Senator Kennedy seems to have taken a different view: he jumped into the water at the ferry landing, swam the 500 feet across the channel to Edgartown and made his way to his hotel room, where he removed his wet clothes and lay on the bed. A short while later, he dressed in fresh dry clothes, left his room and asked someone what time it was; he remembered being told it was around 2.30 am. Gargan and Markham drove back to the cottage, arriving about 2.00 am, and told the other guests when asked that Kennedy had swum back to Edgartown while Kopechne was probably at her hotel. No-one seems to have pressed further and the party wound up soon afterwards.
By 7.30 am on Saturday 19 July, Kennedy had risen and was talking casually to the winner of the previous day’s sailing race. Gargan and Markham drove across to Edgartown and met the Senator around 8.00 am. A short while later, a man and a 15-year-old boy fishing at Tom’s Neck Point saw Kennedy’s car in the pond and alerted the residents of the nearest cottage; in turn they telephoned the police about 8.20 am. Edgartown Police Chief Dominick James Arena arrived shortly after 8.30 am; unable to see into the car, he sent for divers with scuba gear and equipment to winch or tow the car out of the pond. Captain John Farrar of the Edgartown Fire Rescue arrived with scuba gear at 8.45 am, Mary Jo Kopechne was in the back seat of the car, dead. Farrar had extracted her body by 9.00 am; she had been in the water for about eight hours, during which Kennedy had informed only Gargan and Markham of the accident. They had told no-one.
While the police and fire service were finally releasing Kopeche from the place where she had lost her life, Kennedy, Gargan and Markham had driven back to the ferry and returned to Chappaquidick. From the pay phone at the ferry landing, Senator Kennedy called various friends and lawyers to ask for advice, including his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, who managed the Kennedy family’s finances, and Rep John V. Tunney of California, his roommate from the University of Virginia Law School and son of world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney. Kennedy did not contact the authorities.
Kennedy was still making calls when he heard that his car and Kopechne’s body had been found. While Gargan went to the Katama Shores to inform the rest of the Boiler Room Girls, Kennedy and Markham returned to Edgartown and arrived at the police station at 9.50 am. Kennedy asked to use a telephone and was shown into the Police Chief’s office. When Police Chief Arena arrived back at the station at 10.00 am, he was astounded to discover that Kennedy knew of the crash and the identity of the victim, and then—only then, nine or ten hours after the accident—admitted being the driver. Kennedy and Markham were given an empty room where the Senator could dictate a statement to Markham, who transcribed it in longhand. Arena then produced a typed copy.
On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11:15 p.m. in Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown. I was unfamiliar with the road and turned right onto Dyke [sic] Road, instead of bearing hard left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately one-half mile on Dyke [sic] Road, I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge. There was one passenger with me, one Miss Mary ___, a former secretary of my brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water, and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and the window of the car, but have no re-collection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface, and then repeatedly dove down to the car, in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage, and I climbed into the backseat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.
There is something dreadfully sad in the fact that Kennedy omitted Kopechne’s surname from his statement because he was not sure how it was spelled.
Kennedy’s statement was a collection of disjointed facts but made little sense as a narrative of events. The last sentence in particular rings hollow, since he had the wherewithal to seek advice from trusted friends and allies before he “contacted the police”, but the whole document gives the impression of a hastily if carefully calculated exercise in damage limitation. Damage, that is, to Senator Kennedy; it was rather too late for Mary Jo Kopechne.
Associate Medical Examiner Donald Mills examined Kopechne’s body at the site of the crash, and was satisfied that the cause of death had been drowning. Having been advised by the District Attorney’s office that no autopsy would necessary if he saw no signs of foul play, Mills signed the death certificate, directed that a blood sample be collected to test for alcohol, then released Kopechne for embalming and burial. The Massachusetts State Police reported a result of 0.09 per cent, which Mills mistakenly recorded as moderate, but for someone of Kopechne’s size and build—she was only 5’2”—it indicated up to five alcoholic drinks in the hour preceding her death. The other partygoers at Lawrence Cottage claimed only to have consumed small or moderate amounts of alcohol, though that may seem dubious given the conga line Deputy Sheriff Look reported encountering; yet Kopechne habitually drank very little.
Not everyone agreed with the medical examiner’s attested cause of death. Captain Farrar, who had extracted Kopechne’s body from the car, concluded she had suffocated: her hands were clasping the back seat, her face was turned upwards and rigor mortis had set in, and Farrar believed an air pocket would have formed, allowing her to breathe for a while after the car went into the pond. An inspector from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, Bob Molla, reported that the boot of the car and parts of roof appeared to be dry, so it had never been fully submerged. Farrar stated publicly his belief that of a rescue had been attempted earlier, Mary Jo Kopechne would likely have survived.
Kennedy retreated to the family’s six-acre compound in Hyannis Port, where a galaxy of stars arrived to advise him: Stephen Smith, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s speechwriter and White House Counsel Ted Sorensen, Kennedy and Johnson speechwriter and one-time Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Richard Goodwin, businessman and JFK’s childhood friend Lem Billings, speechwriter and attorney Milton Gwirtzman, Senate administrative assistant David Burke and Teddy’s Harvard classmate and former legislative assistant Rep John Culver of Iowa joined Gargan and Markham.
Smith, taking the long view, quickly concluded that, even at that distance, the accident had ended any chance Kennedy had of running for President in 1972, and that they should focus on the short-term objective of avoiding manslaughter charges being brought against the Senator.
Mary Jo Kopechne was buried on Tuesday 22 July in Plymouth, Pennsylvania.
Appearing in front of Massachusetts District Court Judge James Boyle on 25 July, the day before what would have been Kopechne’s 29th birthday, Senator Kennedy pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident causing bodily injury. His legal representatives argued against a custodial sentence given his character and prior reputation (something of a hostage to fortune with any male Kennedy). Judge Boyle was wholly compliant, and sentenced Kennedy to the statutory minimum of two months in prison, which he also suspended.
Considering the unblemished record of the defendant, and insofar as the Commonwealth represents this is not a case where he was really trying to conceal his identity… [he] has already been, and will continue to be punished far beyond anything this court can impose.
In fact Kennedy’s record was far from unblemished, showing a succession of driving incidents going back more than 10 years to his time at the University of Virginia. But his surname still weighed more heavily than that.
At 7.30 pm that night, Kennedy delivered a lengthy public statement from the Kennedy compound which was broadcast live by three television networks. Drafted by Ted Sorensen, it was an intricate attempt to shoulder responsibility without accepting blame. He strenously denied the most obvious accusations.
There is no truth, no truth whatever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening. There has never been a private relationship between us of any kind. I know of nothing in Mary Jo’s conduct on that or any other occasion—and the same is true of the other girls at that party—that would lend any substance to such ugly speculation about their character. Nor was I driving under the influence of liquor.
He claimed to be simply unable to explain the events immediately after the crash, while appearing not to seek to evade responsibility.
My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all. Although my doctors informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion, as well as shock, I do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either on the physical and emotional trauma brought on by the accident, or on anyone else. I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately… All kinds of scrambled thoughts—all of them confused, some of them irrational, many of them which I cannot recall, and some of which I would not have seriously entertained under normal circumstances—went through my mind during this period. They were reflected in the various inexplicable, inconsistent, and inconclusive things I said and did, including such questions as whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area, whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what had happened and to delay my report, whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might in some way pass from my shoulders.
Invoking the murders of his two elder brothers—“some awful curse… over all the Kennedys”—to explain his failure to report an accident in which he was uninjured but a young woman died was a grim and solipsistic attempt to reframe the entire story. If he had asked himself “whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area”, there is no evidence he acted on it, and by referring to Mary Jo as “the girl” served to diminish her and make it a question of his virtue or vice.
Today, as I mentioned, I felt morally obligated to plead guilty to the charge of leaving the scene of an accident. No words on my part can possibly express the terrible pain and suffering I feel over this tragic incident. This last week has been an agonizing one for me and for the members of my family. And the grief we feel over the loss of a wonderful friend will remain with us the rest of our lives.
The moral obligation was perhaps secondary to the legal obligation to report the accident, an obligation he had avoided for nearly 10 hours after it happened, a period during which he had widely sought advice on how he should handle the whole matter, and during the early part of which, if John Farrar was correct, Kopechne could have been saved.
Kennedy concluded by confirming that he had considered whether he should resign from the Senate. He asked his electorate for advice while saying it would be a decision only he could make.
And so I ask you tonight, the people of Massachusetts, to think this through with me. In facing this decision, I seek your advice and opinion. In making it, I seek your prayers—for this is a decision that I will have finally to make on my own.
After a quotation from John F. Kennedy’s famous Profiles in Courage, he concluded with words which neatly completed the task of making Chappaquiddick all about his suffering rather than the death of a 28-year-old girl whom he had abandoned.
I pray that I can have the courage to make the right decision. Whatever is decided, whatever the future holds for me, I hope that I shall have—be able to put this most recent tragedy behind me and make some further contribution to our state and mankind—whether it be in public or private life.
The reaction to the speech was swift and negative. Perhaps the most damning verdict came from journalist and author David Halberstam, who had a complex relationship with the Kennedy family. Writing in Harper’s, he pulled no punches.
[It was] of such cheapness and bathos as to be a rejection of everything the Kennedys had stood for in candor and style. It was as if these men had forgotten everything which made the Kennedys distinctive in American politics, and simply told the youngest brother that he could get away with whatever he wanted because he was a Kennedy in Massachusetts.
What really had happened? It is still impossible to say for certain. New elements emerged from an inquest held in secret in January 1970, the 763-page transcript only being released publicly four months later.
Kennedy flatly denied the encounter with Deputy Sheriff Look: he had not driven on to Cemetery Road, he had neither stopped nor backed up, and he had seen no-one nor any other car after leaving Lawrence Cottage. The only possible conclusion from this statement was that either Kennedy or Look was not merely mistaken or confused but actively involved in perpetrating significant falsehood. It is easy to see why Kennedy would have preferred Look’s account to be untrue; what is less easy to understand is why Look would just have made it all up.
The most horrifying part of the testimony was that from Captain John Farrar of the Edgartown Fire Rescue. As mentioned above, he did not accept the medical examiner’s conclusion that Kopechne had died from drowning.
It looked as if she were holding herself up to get a last breath of air. It was a consciously assumed position… She didn’t drown. She died of suffocation in her own air void. It took her at least three or four hours to die. I could have had her out of that car twenty-five minutes after I got the call. But he didn’t call… Had I received a call within five to ten minutes of the accident occurring, and was able, as I was the following morning, to be at the victim’s side within twenty-five minutes of receiving the call, in such event there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.
His heartbreaking conclusion was that Kopechne “lived for at least two hours down there”. If Farrar was right, and the other timings are accurate, it is possible that Senator Kennedy had changed out of his wet clothes and was lying on his hotel bed in Edgartown when Mary Jo Kopechne had finally choked to death, the air pocket in the car finally exhausted of oxygen.
Judge Boyle’s report was potentially explosive. He concluded that Kennedy had turned down Dike Road deliberately, that driving along it at 20 miles per hour, as Kennedy had testified, was “negligent and, possibly, reckless”. He went on that Kennedy had “failed to exercise due care as he approached the bridge”, that “his operation of the vehicle constituted criminal conduct” and that “there is probable cause to believe that Edward M. Kennedy operated his motor vehicle negligently… and that such operation appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne”.
Given these findings, Boyle could have issued a warrant for Kennedy’s arrest on manslaughter charges, but did not do so. District Attorney Edmund Dinis similarly declined to press charges. Yet the public seemed more forgiving. Kennedy was re-elected to the Senate in 1970 with 62 per cent of the vote, lower than in 1964, but that contest had been in the immediate wake of his brother’s assassination. He would be re-elected again in 1976, 1982, 1988, 1994, 2000 and 2006. He publicly stated he would not seek the Democratic nomination for President in 1972, but that was a blessing, an election to skip: President Richard Nixon beat Senator George McGovern of South Dakota by carrying 49 of the 50 states and winning the Electoral College 520-17.
In September 1974, he ruled out a presidential bid in 1976. This was a different matter: President Gerald R. Ford had inherited the vice presidency in 1973 when Spiro T. Agnew had resigned, and then had acceded to the presidency on the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. Struggling with a lack of popular mandate, Ford faced an internal challenge from the conservative wing of the Publican Party from former Governor of California Ronald Reagan, who ran an incumbent more closely than should ever have been possible. Before Kennedy announced he would not participate, he was easily the favourite, but one by one, a slew of the Democrats’ biggest names turned their backs on the election: former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, Senator John Tunney of California, Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois. More heavyweights began campaigns but withdrew before the convention, including Senator Frank Church of Idaho, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana (who had pulled Kennedy from the crashed aircraft in 1964) and Kennedy’s brother-in-law and former Ambassador to France, R. Sargent Shriver.
In the end, the barely known Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, emerged as the party’s nominee, and beat even the troubled and vulnerable Gerald Ford by 50.1 per cent to 48 per cent. Ford actually won more states than Carter—27 to 23—and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Carter made heavy weather of the victory. Had it not been for Chappaquiddick, it is hard to imagine Teddy Kennedy, 44 years old but experienced and skilful, being denied. When he challenged Carter for the nomination in 1980, although the initial polling numbers were promising, there was something forced and empty about his performance and he struggled to convince reporters and voters that he really wanted to be President. Chappaquiddick become a more significant issue than his team had anticipated, and at a St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago, where Kennedy was advised for security reasons to wear a bulletproof vest, hecklers shouted “Where’s Mary Jo?” Sophisticated? No. Nuanced? No. Witty? No. But powerfully effective.
(Both Jack and Bobby Kennedy had been killed by headshots, of course.)
Next Sunday would have been Mary Jo Kopechne’s 86th birthday. There is no reason she shouldn’t have lived to see it. Only two people, Mary Jo and Edward Kennedy knew what happened that night on Chappaquiddick. We can be more or less certain of a few facts: that Kennedy was driving the car along Dike Road; that he had a long history of driving carelessly, too quickly, while drunk or a combination of those; that he probably lost control of the car because of one or more of those factors; that, however vigorous or otherwise might have been his attempts to extract Kopechne from the car, he did not persist for very long; that the focus of energy and attention quickly moved from Kopechne’s plight to the potential criminal and reputational dangers he now faced, that Kennedy, Gargan and Markham knew about the accident for many hours and never reported it to the police; that they all did have the wherewithal actively to seek legal and political advice and chose to prioritise that over any consideration of Kopechne, virtually turning the page on some time before 2.00 am.
Did the accident at Chappaquiddick prevent Senator Edward Moore Kennedy ever from seeking the office of President of the United States? It was certainly a factor. But it is at least arguable that Kennedy’s desire to protect himself and his political reputation made the difference between Kopechne living and dying. Given all the circumstances, it was a modest price for the Senator to pay.
Feast or famine
Today is the feast of SS Justa and Rufina (d AD 287), sisters from a poor but pious family in Seville who sold earthenware pottery but were seized when they refused to sell to worshippers at a pagan festival, tortured on the rack and with iron hooks and eventually staved id; of St Aurea of Córdoba (AD 810-56), born into a noble Muslim family from Seville, whose two brothers were executed for apostasy from Islam, whose mother Artemia was a nun at Cuteclara for 30 years and who converted to Christianity for which she was eventually either beheaded or killed with a sword and hung on a gibbet, after which her body was thrown into the River Guadalquivir and never recovered; and of St Bernold of Utrecht (d 1054), probably an official at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II before being appointed Bishop of Utrecht in 1027, after which he was active in church reform, reducing episcopal authority over monastic orders, promoting the Cluniac Order, strengthening ecclesiastical jurisdiction against lay encroachment and championing the interests of Conrad II and his son Henry III, as well as establishing the collegiate churches of St Pieterskerk, Janskerk and St Pauluskerk, forming three-quarters of the Kerkenkruis in Utrecht.
Factoids
The Battle of Halidon Hill, which was fought today in 1333 two miles west of Berwick-on-Tweed, was one of the most emphatic English victories and Scottish defeats in the long centuries of fighting over territory, authority and jurisdiction. In 1332, Edward de Balliol, a claimant of the Scottish throne who had the tacit support of the English king, Edward III, ousted the eight-year-old David II, and was crowned King of Scots in his place. The following year, Edward III openly declared his support for Balliol, and in March an English-led force invested Berwick. A large Scottish army moved to relieve the town, and on 19 July, knowing that Berwick would otherwise fall, Sir Archibald Douglas, the Scottish commander, decided he had to attack the English. Douglas had the larger force, at 15,000 or more, while his opponents, commanded by Edward III in person, numbered fewer than 10,000; the English had, however, occupied a position of tactical advantage along the crest of Halidon Hill, almost all dismounted and in three battles. The Scottish army had to descend from the top of the hill facing Halidon, cross “a gret syk”, a large depression of marshy ground, then climb Halidon Hill to engage the enemy. With substantial numbers of longbowmen in the English army, the Scots were marching into slaughter the moment they started their attack, and by the time the survivors struggled to the top of Halidon Hill to engage in combat, they were done. The fighting was soon over and the English put them to flight, their men-at-arms mounting and pursuing the remnants of the Scottish army for eight miles. At the end of the battle, Sir Archibald Douglas was dead, as were five earls—Hugh de Ross, 4th Earl of Ross; Malcolm of Lennox, 6th Earl of Lennox; John Campbell, 1st Earl of Atholl; Alexander Bruce, 4th Earl of Carrick; Alan, Earl of Menteith; and Kenneth de Moravia, 4th Earl of Sutherland—as well as 70 barons and 500 knights. Overall, the Scottish force lost several thousand men: even the Scottish chronicles report 10,000 dead, while English records suggest obviously inflated death tolls of anywhere from 35,000 to 60,000. English losses are estimated to have been somewhere between seven and 14.
The Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, born today in 1822, attended the coronations of three British monarchs, William IV (8 September 1831), Victoria (28 June 1838) and Edward VII (9 August 1902). She was unable to attend that of George V on 22 June 1911 due to age and ill health. Born at Schloss Monbrillant in Hanover, she was the second child and first daughter of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, tenth child and seventh son of George III, and Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel. As the male-line grandchild of the monarch, she was born Her Royal Highness Princess Augusta of Cambridge and spent most of her childhood in Hanover where her father was Governor General (1816-31) then Viceroy (1831-37), ruling on the whole competently on behalf of his father and his brothers George IV and William IV. In 1843, she married Friedrich Wilhelm, Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (the Hereditary Grand Duke was in fact the heir to the title), who was her first cousin on her mother’s side and her second cousin on her father’s. She received an annuity of £3,000, paid in quarterly installments to commence after her father’s death under the provisions of the Annuity, Duchess of Mecklenburgh Strelitz Act 1843. Her husband succeeded as Grand Duke in 1860 and lived until 1904; on Friedrich Wilhelm’s death, she became Dowager Grand Duchess for the last 12 years of her life. In 1902, she was consulted by the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, on matters of etiquette and attire during the planning of Edward VII’s coronation, since she was probably the only living person who had attended William IV’s ceremony, then the most recent coronation of both a King and Queen. Her annuity was suspended after July 1914, on the grounds that she lived in what was by then in a hostile country, Germany. Augusta died on 5 December 1916 in Neustrelitz at the age of 94, the last link to the British branch of the House of Hanover.
I can’t imagine he knew, much less planned, this, but, with his final departure from office scheduled for tomorrow, worth remembering he announced he was quitting all the way back on June 22: it is the feast day of St Thomas More, patron saint of politicians and lawyers. St John Paul II described More as “an imperishable example of moral integrity” and “highly esteemed by everyone for his unfailing moral integrity, sharpness of mind, his open and humorous character, and his extraordinary learning”, so one can perhaps push a comparison too far.
Sir Thomas More is sometimes cited as the only person ever to serve as Speaker of the House of Commons (1523) and Lord High Chancellor (and thereby speaker of the House of Lords (1529-32). Not quite: Sir Thomas Audley, later Lord Audley of Walden, succeeded More as Speaker of the House of Commons (1529-33) and Lord High Chancellor (1533-44), though he was only Lord Keeper of the Great Seal from 1532 to 1533; and Sir Richard Rich (later Lord Rich) was Speaker in 1536 then Lord Chancellor 1547-52.
Tekle Giyorgis I (c. 1751-1817) was Emperor of Ethiopia for six separate periods of time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The youngest son of Emperor Yohannes II, who ruled for a few months in 1769, and brother of Tekle Haymanot II (1769-70, 1770-77), Tekle Giyorgis was installed as Emperor in July 1779 by Azaj Salassie Barya, a leading nobleman and court official, after the deposition of Salomon II. He was then unseated in 1784 by court officials who supported Iyasu III, but restored in 1788; he lost throne again fifteen moths later in 1789 to Hezqeyas, son of Iyasu III. Tekle Giyorgis was restored in 1794 only briefly before he was replaced during 1795 by Baede Maryan II, possibly the son of Salomon II; but eight months later Tekle Giyorgis was back in charge. Six months later, his throne was seized by Salomon III (who may have even been the same person as Baede Maryam II), but after another 18 months, in January 1798, Tekle Giyorgis regained the throne for a fifth reign, but only for 16 months before Salomon III was reinstated. He was succeeded by Demetros, then in March 1800 Tekle Giyorgis became Emperor again for final time, ruling for three months before Demetros regained power. He spent the remaning 17 years of his life first in his birthplace of Tigray in northern Ethiopia then at Axum (where the Church of Our Lady, Mary of Zion, is said to house the Ark of the Covenant), dying on 12 December 1817, aged 65 or 66.
Readers may already have grasped and absorbed this fully and permanently, in which case congratulations, but I still find it jarring—and terrifying when set against my own chronological progression—that Mary, Queen of Scots, who inherited the crown of Scotland from her father James V when she was six days old, was betrothed to Edward, Prince of Wales, when she was six months old, although the marriage would not take place until she was 10; was crowned in Stirling Castle at nine months old; moved to France at five-and-a-half; married the Dauphin of France, later Francis II, at 15; became Queen of France at 16; was widowed three days before her 18th birthday; returned to Scotland to rule in person at 18; married her second husband, the appalling Henry, Lord Darnley, when she was 22; gave birth to her only child, James, later James VI of Scotland and James I of England, at the age of 23½; was widowed a second time at 24 when Darnley was killed (albeit probably with her connivance); saw her son for the last time two months later; married for the third time to the newly divorced Earl of Bothwell, who had probably raped her a few weeks before, at 24½; abdicated as Queen of Scots 10 weeks later, having just miscarried twins; was taken into protective custody in England when she was 25; was tried for treason and convicted at 43; and was executed two months after her 44th birthday, on 8 February 1587 at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire. She packed a lot in, yet still spent nearly half her life as a prisoner.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minster for 11½ years, from May 1979 to November 1990. In all that time, there was never another female head of government within the EEC, so she was always the only woman at European summits at head of government level. The next woman to hold such a position after Thatcher’s resignation was Édith Cresson, Prime Minister of the French Republic from May 1991 to April 1992. (Portugal briefly had a female prime minister, Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, in 1979-80, but did not join the EEC until 1986; Kazimira Prunskienė, Prime Minister of Lithuania 1990-91, just overlapped with Thatcher but Lithuania only joined the European Union in 2004.)
Draw your own conclusions, but New Zealand has had three female Prime Ministers, Dame Jenny Shipley (1997-99), Helen Clark (1999-2008) and Dame Jacinda Ardern (2017-23), while neighbouring Australia has had only one, Julia Gillard (2010-13), who was born in Barry in (old) South Wales.
Lithuania, which only reclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, has had a female President, Dalia Grybauskaitė (2009-19), and three women as Prime Minister, Kazimira Prunskienė (1990-91), Ingrida Šimonytė (2020-24) and Inga Ruginienė (2025-26), stepping down this week as the governing coalition was reshuffled; Irena Degutienė has twice been acting Prime Minister (May 1999, October-November 1999).
Thatcher was known for her lack of sympathy for feminism, seeing it as another kind of special treatment which talented women did not need and less talented women did not deserve (though she was perfectly aware of the additional and unfair expectations on women in the workplace and had faced many herself). Nonetheless, she made no concessions to gender in appointing her ministers, and, astonishingly by today’s standards, her last government which in office in November 1990 contained only seven female ministers apart from herself, and none in Cabinet: Lynda Chalker, Minister fof Overseas Development, Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Angela Rumbold, Minister of State for the Home Department; Baroness Trumpington, Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food; Virginia Bottomley, Minister of State for Health; Baroness Blatch, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment; Baroness Hooper, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health; and Gillian Shephard, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security. Bottomley and Shephard would go on to sit in John Major’s Cabinet; it is likely Chalker would have done so too, but she lost her seat in Wallasey in the 1992 general election and was given a life peerage to allow her to remain in office as Minister of Overseas Development.
“If you’re a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them for other people who want to live vicariously.” (Harry Reasoner)
.“Let London grow”: in CapX, Alys Denby, Opinion and Features Editor at City A.M. (which means she has to edit my copy every week) argues that greater prosperity in London requires more building: the City of London Corporation’s CityPlan 2040 could be at risk from stifling bureaucracy which is concerned by the construction of more tall buildings in the area around the Tower of London. But the plan is connected to 7,000 jobs, could generate around £1.2 billion in annual economic output and unlock approximately £1.7 billion of investment. Ministers proclaim how much they are “pro-growth” but often display great squeamishness about the sectors which are most likely to deliver that growth and fall prey to lobbying by other interests, and the City is a classic example: the Square Mile does not sit well with many Labour MPs and that may be even more true under “Manchesterism”. “The danger of Burnham’s programme of ‘good growth in every postcode’ is that it risks mistaking redistribution for wealth creation,” Alys suggests, and the underlying truth is this: “Britain’s challenge is not that London is too successful; it is that too few other places are.”
“Northern discomfort”: Patrick Maguire’s excellent eponymous Substack looks at the impending Andy Burnham premiership and its strong emphasis on place and Northern identity. The interests and instincts of London are seen as different from—and less authentic and democratic than—those of anywhere else in Britain, but particularly from the North of England. Maguire identifies two opposing schools of thought in the contemporary Labour Party: “Members of the embattled group the northern set call the London left argue—accurately, in a Marxist sense—that it’s all about economics and this culture stuff is the really corrosive identity politics. Then there are those who argue that the intersection of economics with identity and culture is what most people really understand by class these days. They now appear to be winning. The other side think the culture argument is disingenuous.” Fascinating prism on our new overlords.
“‘We were once the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world.’ Why regeneration doesn’t work”: Simon Cooke’s Substack, The View from Cullingworth, proposes that central government-led urban regeneration comes in three principal forms: Shiny Boosterism, Hugging Communities and The Big Party. And none of them works. Instead there has to be an honest and realistic examination of what makes places successful and how much of it can be changed. “If the North’s (or indeed anywhere else’s) cities want to grow they need control of more taxes, regulations and rules… so they can reduce the negatives that those taxes, rules and regulations impose on business, investors and trade.” It is in its way the most obvious form of devolution, beginning with devolution of thought. Places cannot be bent to human will beyond a certain point; Workington will never be the new Santa Monica. How do we identify what we can be best at and where we can extract the biggest advanatage, and then do that.
“The Long Trade”: on the Mad About Churchill Substack, financier Anthony Scaramucci presents a fascinating deconstruction of the US-UK “special relationship”. He points to the difference between a trade and an investment: “A trade is transactional. You’re in, you’re out, you count your money. An investment is a bet on character. You’re betting the thing is worth more tomorrow because of what it’s made of today.” On that basis, he argues, Winston Churchill’s cultivating of President Franklin Roosevelt and the evolution of the “special relationship” was based on precisely that understanding, the half-American Churchill grasping intuitively the long-term nature of the alliance and the time frame over which it could play its part. Lend-Lease, “the boldest structured deal of the twentieth century”, was agreed in 1940 and the UK finally paid off its debts in 2006. “Show me another sixty-year loan that performed and I’ll show you another alliance worth keeping.” It is an intriguing way to frame the relationship between Britain and America, particularly now when it is under such pressure.
“The case for physical media”: my friend and former parliamentary colleague Alex Horne, wading deeper into Substack at the moment, considers the enduring appeal of—and market for—physical media: CDs, records, films and books. A strictly rational approach would dictate that the virtual availability of almost every artefact you could wish for, often more cheaply, is an overwhelming case for decluttering. He is right to say, of course, that, certainly in terms of music, online availability can affect how we listen: a physical album imposes structure and order which are often part of the artist’s intent. I also agree that physical objects speak to an urge to collect. At the end of the day, virtual cultural artefacts may be the logical direction of travel, but art and culture are not wholly logical phenomena, so let a thousand flowers bloom—we have no need to justify our quirks and preferences.
I believe…
… said Adam Smith on his deathbed, we shall adjourn this meeting to another place.
Last words to warm a clerkly heart.
After Robert Byrd (D, West Virginia) 1959-2010, Daniel Inouye (D, Hawaii) 1963-2012, Patrick Leahy (D, Vermont) 1975-2023 and Strom Thurmond (D/R, South Carolina) 1956-2003 as well as 1954-56.