PART THREE
Ken Regan/Camera 5
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1969
I returned to shore--to the Senate, to what was left of my world--consumed with the need to spur myself forward into activity. Devastation about Bobby's death--and with it, all my pent-up grief about Jack--threatened to overtake me. My only defense against giving in to it was to keep active, keep moving, keep churning forward. I feared that despair and darkness might overtake and smother me if I slackened my drive.
On New Year's Eve 1968, three weeks before the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the thirty-seventh president, I announced to Mike Mansfield that I would challenge Russell Long for his position as Senate assistant majority leader. It was a bold move, in terms of Senate tradition, and it surprised a lot of my fellow senators. Not many of them thought I had a chance to unseat the Louisiana icon, and some thought I had no right. I certainly could show no claim to seniority: I was just thirty-six and had been a senator only six years. I held no committee chairmanships.
The Louisiana incumbent whip cut a picturesque figure in the Senate, though hardly as picturesque as that of his towering father, Huey Long, back in the 1930s. As governor of Louisiana and later its junior senator, "the Kingfish" had blazed his way into folklore as a gifted rustic populist with oratorical tactics and presidential ambitions. I liked Russell: as a specialist in tax law with a conservative's antitax positions, he differed in his politics from me; but his racial views were far more moderate than those of his southern colleagues. More often than not, Russell and I would sit next to each other during Democratic Caucus meetings and he'd tell stories. He was witty, a great teller of jokes--one of the most entertaining senators I've known. There was never any hostility between us.
He also knew how to get things done. He had perfected a trick of persuasion that reminded me of Lyndon Johnson: he would lean into you during a discussion, bringing his face in close to yours and draping a heavy arm around your shoulders, pulling you to him against your will. He'd get inside your space, your comfort zone. Senators would find themselves agreeing to whatever he wanted, just to get away. And when he was at the top of his game, he was a master. He'd take four weeks to push one bill through, not letting it be finished until he was finished lining up his votes. He was unique in that way.
But Long, who'd first been elected to the Senate in 1948, was running out of gas. He was beginning to be more interested in pursuing his oil interests than in attending to the duties of the whip. I sensed that he was vulnerable. I made up my mind before Christmas that I would make the challenge, and on January 3, I ousted Long as whip by a vote of thirty-one to twenty-six.
I continued to drive myself as hard as I could. But sometimes things happened that made me realize that my deepest fears were closer to the surface than I wanted to believe.
As I walked in a St. Patrick's Day parade in Lawrence in March 1969, a burst of popping firecrackers caused me to freeze in my tracks and prepare to dive to the pavement. I stayed upright by an act of will. Years later, on another occasion, I was enjoying a walk in the sunshine near the Capitol with Tom Rollins--then my chief of staff--when a car backfired down the street. Tom recalls that I was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Turning around, he saw me flattened on the pavement. "You never know," Tom recalls me saying. His memory is probably true.
Even now, I'm startled by sudden noises. I flinch at twenty-one-gun salutes at Arlington to honor the fallen in Iraq. My reaction is subconscious--I know I'm not in danger--but it still cuts through me.
In the months and years after Bobby's death, I tried to stay ahead of the darkness. I drove my car at high speeds; I drove myself in the Senate; I drove my staff; I sometimes drove my capacity for liquor to the limit. I might well have driven Joan deeper into her anguish, but the sad truth is that she needed no help from me. Bobby's assassination had devastated her.
We suffered together. And we suffered apart.
I generally managed to keep my public duties and my private anguish separated. Whatever excesses I invented to anesthetize myself, I could almost always put them aside in my role as senator. Almost, but not always.
Among my subcommittee chairmanships was Indian Education. The previous chairman had been Bobby; I'd taken it over after his death. On April 8, 1969, I led a delegation to Anchorage for visits to schools in Eskimo and Indian villages. The other members included Senator Walter Mondale, four other Republican senators, and one GOP representative. The trip was marred at the outset by political tension: after a long day of touring remote villages with newsmen and photographers in tow, three of the Republicans decided that I was exploiting the event for publicity and with great fanfare pulled out of the visit and returned to Washington. Mondale, Senator Ted Stevens, and Congressman Howard Pollock--the latter two of Alaska--and I continued our investigation, and in fact we were later able to pass legislation that improved conditions for the schoolchildren.
The aurora borealis, the northern lights, burned brightly while we were in Alaska. The lights burned especially bright one night during a side visit by Ted Stevens and myself, via a small airplane, to a locale so ancient and so remote as to almost seem suspended in time: Arctic Village, a tribal settlement of fewer than two hundred people and more than forty-five hundred years old. It lay, and still lies, in the lonely far north tundra of the Yukon.
The only landing strip lay several hundred yards from the hamlet, and so Senator Stevens and I, accompanied by some reporters and guides, traveled to it by dogsleds from the plane. We inspected the pitiful facilities, talked to people, made notes on what had to be done, and began our trek back to the airplane. Not far outside the village, I spotted something illuminated dimly by those green and red flashes of light from the heavens. What I saw made me halt my dogsled, disembark, and walk down a path that cut through a nearby woods. I had spotted a child, shivering in the cold, with no shoes and no bottom to his clothing. I unzipped my parka, lifted this little fellow, and tucked him inside against my chest. I could feel his icy skin begin to grow warm as I set out, with Ted Stevens, in search of his mother. We found her, in an igloo in that hamlet. She hadn't realized that her toddler had wandered off.
On the homeward flight to Seattle, I drank too much in an effort to numb myself. The accounts that eventually surfaced, of my resulting rowdiness and leading everyone in childish chants of "Eskimo power!" were on target. Someone later quoted me as saying, in the course of one of those legs, that if I were to run for president, "They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot off Bobby's."
My family, especially my children, provided hope and balance in those hard months. I focused on the responsibility that now had fallen to me, at age thirty-seven. My father would remain our paterfamilias for as long as he drew breath, but the family now looked to me for guidance and leadership in a new way.
I accepted my new role, insisted on it, and discharged its duties as though Dad's blue eyes were still watching me from the window of the Cape house. I became closer to the children of my brothers and sisters: those of Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Peter and Pat Lawford, Sarge and Eunice Shriver, Steve and Jean Smith, Joan and myself; and, later, Caroline and Curran, Vicki's daughter and son. Thirty-two total, just from that group alone. I wanted to do for them what my family had done for me when I was young; what all the Kennedys always did for one another: cherish them, look out for them, show them hope and joy and the delights and miracles of this world.
Memories of how I'd received these gifts came flooding back to me. I recalled the way my parents made the household and the dinner table places of inclusion and learning; the dolls and soldiers that Dad brought home from his travels; the endless larking competitions on the lawn and by the shore and out in the open waters of Nantucket Sound; the way we'd joke as children that none of us would marry because we were having such a good time with one another. I recalled those walking tours with Mother around Boston to see Milk Street and the Common and Paul Revere's home, and the trips with her to Plymouth, to Walden Pond--excursions that Honey Fitz had led for his eldest daughter Rose at the twentieth century's turn; excursions he later led for me.
I recalled how Jack and Bobby, who were altar boys, trained me to be an altar boy--and how that training tightened the fraternal bonds among us.
I recalled watching Jack as he used to take the hand of his small son John and lead the boy to the shore in front of the Cape house; watching the two of them bend over an elegant miniature sailboat, a gift of the Italian government, I think. How Jack would actually trim the little boat's sails and rig its steering.
Then memories came rolling in: all of Bobby's children filling the sunlit waters offshore with swimming and sailing, their cries of excitement floating along in the wind, their father splashing among them.
And I knew that my role now was to ensure a continuum in this beautiful process, this precious tradition of the Kennedy family, regathering itself, replenishing its young with knowledge and love.
And so I became the family uncle. I was counselor, skipper, and mentor to the sailors among them. I organized an annual hiking and camping trip in western Massachusetts, and we kept it going, with a revolving cast, for probably fifteen years. I got a Winnebago and we toured the Massachusetts countryside, the Berkshires, always with a stop in Stockbridge, where we visited Norman Rockwell's studio and the summer studio of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of Lincoln's figure at the memorial in Washington. Then on to Pittsfield, where we visited Melville's Arrowhead house. Then on again to the Riverside amusement park and its spine-tingling Cyclone roller coaster. As the nephews and nieces grew older, I rented a bus and expanded my itinerary to include the great Civil War battlefields, the ones where Jack had taken me. Over the past fifteen years, the circuit has variously included Manassas, Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Richmond, and Harpers Ferry, among many others.
I traveled constantly, almost compulsively, in the early months of 1969. In mid-May I flew to Los Angeles for a ceremony honoring the great organizer of migrant farmworkers, Cesar Chavez. Cesar had formed a powerful friendship with Bobby. This was my first return to the city since June 1968, and every boulevard, every palm tree took me back to that awful night.
My first impulse had been to decline the invitation. Both Chavez and I would be out in the open, among large crowds, and would be easy targets. But at the last minute I decided the hell with it, boarded a flight, and went.
In my hotel room at Los Angeles, I wrote a letter in longhand to the Los Angeles district attorney, requesting that the life of Bobby's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, be spared. Sirhan was then awaiting sentencing for his act, and the gas chamber appeared to be his fate. I told the presiding judge that Bobby would not approve the taking of a life in retribution for the taking of his own. The sentence, I argued, should be decided with respect for compassion, mercy, and God's gift of life. The next day I had copies of the letter made and sent them to Ethel Kennedy, to our mother, and to Eunice, Pat, and Jean. All of them agreed with me. I mailed the original letter to the judge, Herbert V. Walker, a week or so after returning from Los Angeles.
Walker disregarded the letter and sentenced Sirhan to the chamber. His life was spared by the California Supreme Court. As he sat on death row in 1972, the court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan's sentence was changed to life in prison.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War had just reached its peak of escalation, with 543,400 troops in country at the end of April. The mad futility of that escalation was just then on display once again: a ten-day battle of breathtaking, needless carnage. I took the Senate floor on May 20, the concluding day of the slaughter that came to be known as Hamburger Hill, and gave my outrage full cry. It was "both senseless and irresponsible," I declared, that U.S. Army generals "continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to this conflict."
The day of my speech marked the twelfth and final infantry assault upon the lethally fortified Ap Bia Mountain in the jungles near Laos. Our troops inflicted and absorbed heavy casualties. After the American survivors had taken the hill, the generals--as I'd predicted; as they so often had--abandoned the mountain as being "of no strategic value."
In subsequent days, and folding the abandonment of Ap Bia into my argument, I repeated my denunciation of the battle to the New Democratic Coalition in New York and to other groups.
On June 2, Everett Dirksen unleashed a strong and lengthy rebuke to me in the Senate. I was absent from the chamber on that day, delivering a commencement speech in Arizona. Senate protocol requires that a senator notify a colleague if he intends to refer to that colleague by name on the floor, but Dirksen was clearly not in the mood for niceties. He declared that my criticism of the generals "jolted" his estimation of my wisdom and judgment and that I had no doubt undercut troop morale and discipline. Radio Hanoi was already broadcasting my dissent to the North Vietnamese populace. Moreover, battlefield tactical decisions are never the province of "homefront critics"--they must always be left to the generals.
Given that Dirksen spoke only after a well-publicized meeting with congressional Republicans attended by Nixon himself, it was hard not to conclude that this was part of a consensus strategy to avoid responding to war criticism on its own terms.
The strategy failed. The sacrifices of American boys on Hamburger Hill and in similar battles that week, condemned by me and many others, outraged many citizens. The public outcry led General Creighton Abrams to fundamentally revise the U.S. prosecution of the war from one of massive force against North Vietnamese troops to one of "protective reaction" against attacking troops. The policy of "Vietnamization" soon took hold--in public, at least.
There was an increasing perception in the country that Vietnam was no longer "Johnson's war," it was now "Nixon's war"--a scalding rebuke to a president who'd campaigned on the promise that he had "a secret plan" to end the war. I always doubted Nixon ever had such a plan. But as American casualties mounted in the spring of 1969, he began to improvise secret tactics. One of them was the bombing of presumed enemy supply lines in neighboring Cambodia. This operation did not remain "secret" for very long, as leaks to the press began around the same time as Hamburger Hill. Nixon's outrage over leaks and supposed leaks escalated his impulse toward surveillance: telephone taps, procurement of personal records, and, ultimately, the bugging of the Democratic offices at the new Watergate apartment and office complex in Washington.
Speaking of Watergate, not long after Nixon's inauguration in 1969, I took over the chairmanship of an obscure Senate subcommittee, Administrative Practices and Procedures. I could not have anticipated, at the time, how pivotal this subcommittee was destined to become.
On June 8, I gave a talk in Kentucky, and allowed the Associated Press reporter Joseph E. Mohbat, with whom I'd been friendly, to accompany me and some aides back to Hyannis in a small plane. June 8 fell two days after the first anniversary of Bobby's assassination, and the heaviness of it had caught up with me in spite of my constant attempts to stay busy. Mohbat sensed my reflective mood, and took the opportunity to draw me out on my thoughts regarding my political life and my future.
When asked about a possible presidential run in 1972, I shared my misgivings: "I mean, is the country going to be receptive? Will it be the time? And if it is, is it really the best thing for me to do? And what kind of contribution could I make, even if...?"
Mohbat noted in the piece that I spoke hesitantly, in half-sentences, and he offered some examples: "I'm really very unresolved right now... Maybe over the summer... some sailing... the family... I think perhaps by fall I'll be settled, have some idea..."
In response to my flying companion's pleasantry about a "good crowd tonight," I could summon little enthusiasm: "You know, these kinds of things kind of turn me off now. When I first came on into this in 1962, it was really good, easy. But the kicks aren't... I mean, meeting Molly Somebody and hearing all about her being Miss Something."
I added, coming close now to the heart of it, "What's it all for? I used to love it. But the fun began to go out of it after 1963, and then after the thing with Bobby, well..."
The reporter then ventured one of those formulaic questions that almost seem to invite an equally superficial reply: whether I thought the Kennedy name would still be "magic" in 1972 or 1976. My response was probably unreflective and offhand, yet it hinted at deeper feelings.
"I just don't know," was what I told him. "I really think all these things are predestined."
June gave way to July. My calendar remained cluttered with dates for speeches and appearances around the country, and I continued my frenzied travel pace to fulfill all of them. Toward the calendar's lower right corner, the square marking July 18 read, "Edgartown regatta."
The Kennedys had a long history in the regatta. Joe Jr. and Jack had raced in it before World War II. Joe Gargan and I had always competed as kids. This was the regatta where Jack had swooped in from the skies from Washington one year to skipper for Joe and me on Victura, then swooped up and away again.
This summer would mark my first return to the regatta since Bobby's death.
There was an event that would be held on the same day and in the vicinity--on Chappaquiddick Island, separated from Edgartown and the rest of Martha's Vineyard by a narrow split of the Sound--a reunion of the six young women who'd served on Bobby's campaign staff, doing the hard necessary work of answering phones, getting out press releases, overseeing schedules and accommodations, and dealing with the press.
Such gatherings, I knew from experience, tended only to increase my difficulties in dealing with the grief. But Nance Lyons, one of the six who was then on my staff, let me know that it would mean a lot to the others if I attended. And so I decided to stop by the gathering.
I flew from Washington to Boston that morning, then made a smallcraft connection from Logan airport to the Vineyard. Tip O'Neill was my seatmate out of Washington, and I recall telling him, "I've never been so tired in my life."
That night on Chappaquiddick Island ended in a horrible tragedy that haunts me every day of my life. I had suffered sudden and violent loss far too many times, but this night was different. This night I was responsible. It was an accident, but I was responsible. One week after the accident, I purchased airtime to discuss the details of that night as best I could recall them. I gave the best account of it in my power at the inquest at Edgartown in January 1970. I've touched on it in interviews. And that, aside from many apologies, to the Kopechne family, to my constituents, to my fellow citizens, and in prayers for forgiveness, has pretty much been the extent of my public comment.
I have been told that upwards of twenty books have been published that deal in whole or in part with what has been known for forty years as "Chappaquiddick." Newspaper and magazine articles on the subject over the years are probably uncountable. I am aware that there are many who are skeptical of my explanation. And I am aware that there are others who are contemptuous, with the unchecked chatter in the blogosphere even going so far as to spin totally false, bizarre, and evil theories that do not deserve to be repeated here.
People have asked why I have not attempted to knock down each of these theories, as though my silence somehow gives credibility to every horrible allegation that people choose to make. Throughout my life, not just with this accident, I have refused to respond to false gossip and innuendo. I have never, not once, responded to a story in the tabloids, even when the story got repeated in the mainstream press. I knew that once I started, I would be forced to engage in a back-and-forth on every allegation, no matter how ludicrous or impossible. And I knew that no matter what I said, it would not satisfy those who had already made up their minds.
But whatever attacks and misrepresentations I have suffered as a result of Chappaquiddick, I know that they have been nothing compared to the grief endured with dignity by Mary Jo's father, Joe, who died on Christmas Eve 2003, and her mother, Gwen, who died in 2007. I know that my public discussion of that terrible night would only have caused them more pain.
I also have a personal distaste for self-justification. I grew up in a family of people who didn't want to hear you complain, and, quite frankly, I don't have a lot of respect for people who whine or go around feeling sorry for themselves. I do not intend to re-create all the details of a night that happened forty years ago, as I write this book. I couldn't. From my fortyyear vantage point, what I am left with now are mostly memories of memories, and even those older memories lacked clarity, as records of the time show. My thoughts through the hours that followed the accident were disrupted by shock, terror, and the concussion that I received on impact. In any event, I gave testimony about those events at the time, and that testimony is the best evidence of the chronology of that evening. But I do want to share the general story and my more personal feelings.
I landed at Martha's Vineyard airport in the early afternoon that Friday and was met by my driver Jack Crimmins, who had previously brought my Oldsmobile sedan to the island. Jack drove me across the Vineyard to Chappaquiddick Island. We crossed the narrow spit by ferryboat and went on to the small cottage that Joe Gargan had rented for the weekend festivities. I took a swim and then went back to Edgartown. Joe had reserved rooms at an inn near Edgartown for the women and at another inn for the men, including me.
Besides Joe, Jack Crimmins, and myself, the men included my friends Paul Markham, the former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts; Ray LaRosa, a former fireman and stalwart campaign worker; and another campaign aide, Charles Tretter, a lawyer and head of the New England Regional Commission. The young women, besides Mary Jo and Nance Lyons, included Nance's sister Mary Ellen, Susan Tannenbaum, Rosemary Keough, and Esther Newberg.
Later that afternoon I skippered my Wianno Seniors sloop, Victura, in the regatta, with Joe Gargan as part of my crew as usual. My recollection is that we finished in the top half of the fleet. After celebrating a while with the crew of the boat that won the race, I returned to my hotel to freshen up for the evening. Crimmins drove me to the cottage for the cookout. The guests, transported from the ferry site by Joe, had all gathered by about 8:30. We all talked, told fond stories about Bobby, listened to music, danced a bit, and had cocktails until dinner was served a little before ten.
During the evening, I began speaking with Mary Jo Kopechne. I did not know her socially before that evening. Perhaps I had met her before, but I did not recall it. We reminisced about Bobby, and we both became emotional. I needed to get out of that party. I needed to get outside, to breathe some fresh air. When Mary Jo said that she wanted to go home, I was grateful for the excuse to leave. I asked Jack Crimmins for the car keys and left with Mary Jo. My intention was to take her to the ferry and back to Edgartown and to her hotel.
With Mary Jo in the car, I drove the short distance from the cottage to a T-intersection. It was very dark. I had not been to this part of the island before that day, when I had been a passenger in the car and not the driver. I turned onto what I now know was Dike Road. The road was unlit, and a narrow car bridge for crossing the pond came up suddenly and unexpectedly in my headlights. It had no guard rails and headed in a leftward angle from the road. My car slipped off the side of the narrow bridge and into the water and flipped upside down.
To this day, I cannot tell you how I escaped that car. Most probably, I squeezed through the window on the driver's side, a reprise of escaping through the window of the crashed airplane, with Birch Bayh's help, five years earlier.
I dived back into the water several times, trying to get to Mary Jo. I could not see her in the car. I hoped she'd been able to escape, too. That's what I wanted to believe, even though I knew it was unlikely. I ran back to the party to get help. I returned with friends who also dove, but could not see her.
What I said and did in the ensuing hours has been copiously recorded, examined, disputed, and debated for decades: my devising and rejecting scenarios with Joe and the others that flashed compulsively through my feverish thoughts; swimming across the channel to Edgartown; delaying in reporting the accident. I am not proud of these hours. My actions were inexcusable. Perhaps I have not made my acknowledgment of this clear enough over the years. And perhaps I have not fully acknowledged the following points as well:
I was afraid. I was overwhelmed. I made terrible decisions. Even though I was dazed from my concussion, exhaustion, shock, and panic, I was rational enough to understand that the accident would be devastating to my family. They had suffered so much, and now they would be forced to suffer again because of me. And I knew it would be damaging to my political career as well.
I also worried that people would leap to false assumptions about Mary Jo Kopechne and me. We had no romantic relationship whatsoever. Yet I understood that my reputation was such that many people would seize on the circumstances to attack Mary Jo's character. And mine. The sad fact is that my flawed and wrongheaded actions had the opposite effect of having people link Mary Jo to me in a romantic way. I am deeply sorry about that. Mary Jo Kopechne was an innocent young woman who had done nothing more than been loyal to my brother and his cause. And she lost her life in an accident when I was at the wheel. I've had to live with that guilt for forty years. But my burden is nothing compared to her loss and the suffering her family had to endure. She also didn't deserve to be falsely linked to me in a romantic way. She deserved better than that. And God knows her parents did.
When I finally did stumble off into the darkness after my futile efforts to rescue Mary Jo, my mind was a jumble of mutually conflicting thoughts. I believed that the young woman was dead, and the thought buckled me with grief and horror. At the same time, I'd managed to convince myself that she surely must have escaped, given that I had not seen her in the car. Perhaps I had misperceived while I was in the dark water. Perhaps I could wish it all away.
But I could not wish it all away. I had suffered many losses during my life. I had lost all of my brothers and my sister Kathleen. My father had been lost to me in many respects because of his debilitating stroke. And now this horrible accident. But again, the difference this time was that I myself was responsible. I was driving. Yes, it was an accident. But that doesn't erase the fact that I had caused an innocent woman's death.
Atonement is a process that never ends. I believe that. Maybe it's a New England thing, or an Irish thing, or a Catholic thing. Maybe all of those things. But it's as it should be.
On Saturday, November 15, my frail father suffered the latest in a series of strokes that had ravaged his eighty-one-year-old body and slipped into unconsciousness at the Cape house in Hyannis Port. He never awakened. Three days later Joseph P. Kennedy quietly passed from this world, lying in bed in the same second-story room, with its view of Nantucket Sound, from where his blue eyes had tracked us children as we'd scampered home at twilight so many summers, and lifetimes, ago. The core of his surviving extended family kept watch at his bedside in the final hours: my mother, Ann Gargan, Pat, Eunice and Sargent Shriver, Jean and Steve Smith, Jackie, Ethel, Joan, and myself.
Condolences came in from all over the world. President Nixon graciously noted Dad's passing and the role he played in shaping American history.
Dad's old friend Richard Cardinal Cushing presided over the simple services two days later at the small nearby church where Kennedys have worshipped over the decades, St. Francis Xavier on South Street. It was November 20, Bobby's forty-fourth birthday. My remarks at the service were brief. There was too much to say, and too many tears to hold back. I observed quietly that this was not so much a final prayer for Dad as a reminder to the rest of us of the deep love he held for us, and our obligation to lead the kind of lives he would want us to lead.
We walked on the beach, singly and in small groups, heads down, hands in our pockets, shoulders hunched against the November wind. Mother walked with Jean and Pat; I walked with Ann Gargan and my son Patrick, who was eight.
Later, I walked alone, letting the tears come, and struggling with thoughts more wrenching than those following any of my previous bereavements. I wondered whether I had shortened my father's life from the shock I had visited on him with my news of the tragic accident on Chappaquiddick Island. The pain of that burden was almost unbearable.