What Happened at Chappaquiddick

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy explains himself—or doesn’t—at a press conference shortly after the accident.

Late on the night of July 18, 1969, a car went off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard. With a young senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, at the wheel, the Oldsmobile sank into the water beneath the Dike Bridge.

In a sequence of events that instantly became famous, Senator Kennedy escaped from the submerged vehicle and swam to shore. By 2:30 a.m. he had made his way back to his hotel in Edgartown, where he was sighted in the lobby. He made 17 phone calls to family members and associates. But not until 10 hours after the accident did he call the police to tell them about the car crash—and the other person in the car, who had died.

Senator Kennedy had not been alone. Riding alongside him had been a young woman, not his wife, named Mary Jo Kopechne. She had been sitting next to him as they drove away from a party, and as they crossed Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island the accident ended her life. It would haunt the rest of Kennedy’s career.

After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and then the killing of Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy was regarded as the next standard-bearer of America’s foremost political family. With the 1972 presidential election approaching, many, including some of President Richard M. Nixon’s advisers, expected the youngest Kennedy brother to make a bid for the White House. As the details of the events at Chappaquiddick slowly emerged, however, they significantly weakened his prospects.

The public learned that the senator had miraculously escaped from his sinking vehicle, failed in his efforts to rescue Kopechne, and neglected to call for emergency assistance until long after the young woman could have been saved. People read reports that there might have been enough air left in the car to keep Kopechne alive until a search and rescue team arrived—but Kennedy waited hours to notify the authorities of her plight. Though many of his constituents wrote letters urging him not to resign from the Senate, many more Americans were deeply unsettled by his conduct.

Looking back on the 1972 election cycle, George McGovern, the eventual Democratic nominee, explained: “Teddy had run into the Chappaquiddick thing and more or less disqualified himself. . . . I decided a week after Chappaquiddick that I had a . . . clear shot at the nomination.”

In this regard, the events of that summer night marked not only a personal tragedy but a turning point in American politics. For years the Kennedys had dominated the national stage. Even after Chappaquiddick, observers as prominent as President Nixon expected Ted Kennedy to attain the Presidency. But the senator could never escape the shadow of his questionable deeds. Though he decried his own actions, describing them as “irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable,” this reaction hardly satisfied most Americans.

As years passed, more information about Chappaquiddick came to light, with suggestions emerging that Kennedy had drunk far more that night than he had admitted. Even more disturbingly, one reporter alleged that the senator had considered trying to hide his involvement in the accident by having a relative claim responsibility for the crash. When Kennedy eventually did seek the Presidency, in 1980, challenging Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries, he could not reassure the American people that his previous errors were mere aberrations. With Chappaquiddick always in the air, many Americans concluded that he was not the kind of person that should be President.

In the following decades, people have offered a variety of explanations for the events of July 18, 1969. Some have suggested that Kennedy is simply a man without a moral compass, preoccupied, above all, with self-preservation. Others have offered other, more complex reasons for his poor behavior and apparent inability to come to terms with his actions. The late journalist Michael Kelly, among others, found fault in his upbringing, arguing that he was “born and bred to act like the last of the Regency rakes”—to live like an aristocrat to whom the usual rules governing behavior did not apply. Ted Kennedy, the argument goes, didn’t leave behind this devil-may-care attitude when he reached the Senate.

Indeed the culture of the Senate itself may have influenced his behavior. When he first joined that body, in 1962, when he was 30, reporters still protected the private lives of politicians. In the words of the journalist Lou Cannon, it was still “an era when White House photographers by common consent took no waist-down pictures of a crippled president and personal things were written about politicians only if they were in the penitentiary.” A politician like Strom Thurmond could conceal a child born out of wedlock; President Kennedy could cover up extensive marital indiscretions.

Entering the Senate so young, Edward Kennedy learned the trade of politics from an older generation of men accustomed to this earlier brand of politics. He is one of only five members of the 87th Senate still alive, and he’s 12 years younger than his next-youngest former colleague, James B. Pearson. But he reached his political prime amid new, stricter standards for behavior and decreasing tolerance for misconduct. By 1969 it was impossible for someone in his position to conceal events like those at Chappaquiddick, and by the time he ran for President, such a scandal was utterly crippling—and he was still unable to fully explain his actions. As the National Journal’s Michael Barone said: “Maybe Ted Kennedy didn’t realize times have changed.”

In spite of Chappaquiddick, Kennedy has gone on to an extremely successful career as a legislator. According to former Senator Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, he ultimately achieved his own kind of greatness when he “lifted the curse from himself that Kennedys had to be President.”

Richard Nixon, in the wake of Chappaquiddick, wrote a note to himself saying, “A man is not finished when he’s defeated, he’s finished when he quits.” Thirty-seven years after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy is still not finished. Neither, however, is the specter of his disastrous accident.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.