Alison Stewart: We had arrived at the summer of '69 and an infamous fatal car accident on Chappaquiddick, a part of Martha's Vineyard. After his brother's murders, friends noted that Ted Kennedy was out of control, working too much, driving too fast, drinking heavily. Local reporters notified their bosses that they could see trouble ahead for the Senator.

It came one night on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick when late one summer night Kennedy drove a car off a small bridge and into the water. He left the scene having survived the crash. His passenger a 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. As we'll hear from John Farrell, there's much more to what Kennedy did that night of the accident.

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John, when did Ted Kennedy first start to show signs of having a problem with alcohol?

John Farrell: I think that he was always a boisterous party boy. That was a background. He had a remarkable ability to drink a lot and bounce back the next morning, whether it's at a 7:00 AM tennis game or a nine o'clock legislative hearing, and not show the effects of the nights before his carousing. I think it really became an issue for him after Robert's assassination in 1968.

Again, he had never been prepared for this role. He was always supposed to be the sidekick, the happy-go-lucky younger brother who help the elder brothers do great things. Now all of a sudden, he had to hold this family together, he had to maintain the myth. He had to be as good as they were in everything and better because they were now mythic creatures, charismatic dream figures in American celebrity culture that he never could measure up with.

In that year before the events on Chappaquiddick, you see signs of him cracking up, he throws himself into his work, he drives fast cars. For the first time he begins to appear in public intoxicated in front of the press. Remarkably, in the spring of 1969 you get reporters from Life Magazine and Newsweek writing long memos to their editor saying, "Get ready. I don't know how it's going to happen or when it's going to happen, but he is heading for a crackup." Indeed, only two months later on the island of Chappaquiddick, it did happen.

Alison: Ted Kennedy attends an event on Chappaquiddick, this tiny companion island just across Edgartown Harbor on Martha's Vineyard. The young women who were there that night were part of a group of aides known as the "Boiler Room Girls" including Mary Jo Kopechne. What did the Boiler Room Girl do?

John: It was a diminutive term for somebody who had a lot more responsibility. They should have been known as the Boiler Room Women at the least. They were in a windowless locked room with telephones, and their job was to call around the country and keep track of what was state senator so and so in Wisconsin District 12 thinking about Robert Kennedy's campaign? How could they get to the UAW, United Auto Workers leader in Minnesota who was flirting with Eugene McCarthy's campaign? How could they defeat Hubert Humphrey in the Pennsylvania State Convention which was coming up? Their job was to be proficient.

Political professionals constantly on the phone, gathering information on their own and taking information in from all the Kennedy scouts and supporters around the country. Preparing analyses of where Robert needed to go, what phone calls he needed to make, and what he needed to say in a particular district. It was a very important job, and all those young women went on to have spectacular careers in spite of the fact that Chappaquiddick to them as well as to Ted Kennedy became something of a drag on their careers. Because they were unjustly seen as the Chappaquiddick party girls and it was not that kind of party.

Alison: What was the event that night, and why was Kennedy there?

John: It was a cookout. They wanted to keep the campaign crew together for a future presidential campaign if Ted decided to run in 1972. In 1968, they'd had a similar day of sailing on a rented sailboat. That had been successful, so they decided they do it again. The only reason that Joan Kennedy was not there was that she had a difficult pregnancy and had to stay home in bed or she lose the child.

Because some of the snickering the men were almost uniformly older drabber and most of them were married. It being the Woodstock summer and being a political party with lots of drinks you can't rule out completely that there could be some canoodling in the backyard bushes. It was definitely not-- these were not a bunch of stewardesses as they were known, or fashion models flown in for Ted Kennedy's amusement.

Alison: John, do you have a copy of your book there?

John: I can get one. Hold on.

Alison: I'd love for you to read the account directly from your book of what happened that evening.

John: Kennedy asked Crimmins for the car keys. The old grouch was staying in the cottage that night, and happy to comply he wanted to get to bed. By the reckoning of the witnesses, it was sometime between 11:30 PM and 12:30 AM when Kennedy and Kopechne slipped away. She left her room key and her purse behind. With Kennedy at the wheel weary, emotional after hours of intermittent drinking. The automobile came to a juncture and turned off the paved road away from Edgartown and the ferry.

Christopher Luke, a deputy sheriff on his way home from work, would recall that he saw and approached a dark sedan at that intersection, which sped off down the washboard dirt surface of Dike Road towards the beach. The moon had set the night was black, Kennedy passed a house where the inhabitants, Sylvia Malm and her daughter would recall a car moving fast towards the sea around midnight. Then Dike Bridge was in the headlights with its iniquitous angle to the left. Kennedy slammed the brake pedal, the car left the bridge, flipped and crashed roof first against the surface of the water.

The driver's side window was open, the passenger side windows were shattered on impact. Instantly, the Olds filled with water and sank to the bottom of Pocha Pond. Automobiles did not have seatbelts in 1969, much less airbags, Mary Jo would have been tossed by the crash forward and down which was now toward the roof. Kennedy felt her thrashing beside him. She ended with her head in the footwell of the backseat beside the shattered window through which she might have escaped.

Perhaps she found a pocket of air, perhaps she never realized the car was upside down. Deep in black water seeing nothing, Kennedy at least had the steering wheel to grasp and get oriented. He was terrified, felt himself drowning, dying. Experts later theorized that the crash sprung open a door or that the torrent sweeping through the car helped push him through a window. He called out, “Mary Jo,” and made futile dives to the submerged car. “I knew there was a girl in that car and I had to get her out. I knew that." He'd recall. The current pushed him away. Defeated he crawled onto the shore.

Alison: That was John Farrell reading from his book, Ted Kennedy: A Life. What happens next is Kennedy goes back to the party, gets help from two colleagues. When they get to the car they realize this is over, that Mary Jo Kopechne is not alive. Kennedy claims he swam across the channel to the vineyard, but then he doesn't summon help. He waits until the next morning to go to the police. He checks himself into a hotel. Once he goes to the police, what was truly unusual about the way the investigation was handled?

John: Let me talk first about this decision that he made. Because I think that one thing that's overlooked in the reviews of the book is that observers, reporters, investigators have always assumed that Kennedy's pattern of action that night was an attempt to crudely evade responsibility-- to cover up for the crime. In this book, for the first time we have it from his own mouth. We have Ted Kennedy telling his sister Jean Smith, who then tells the historian and family friend Arthur Schlesinger.

That Ted confessed to her that he had indeed behaved in this craven manner, had gone back to try to establish some sort of alibi in his hotel in Edgartown, and pin the blame on either Mary Jo or maybe somebody else from the party and get off scot-free. In the book I described this as a terribly craven behavior. When it finally is clear after 10 hours, 10 hours of leaving this poor girl in the car of which even Rose Kennedy criticized her son.

He finally goes to the police station-- the police department there it's a small town, summer vacation spot. They're in awe of the fact that this has happened. They're all good democrats. There was no need to orchestrate a clumsy legal cover-up. They just behaved as if they were so overcome in awe of what had been dropped in their laps. That they weren't thinking like real prosecutors or real police chiefs, and allowed things to proceed in a way that it looked like the right questions were not being asked.

That caused a reaction the other way so that you had three extraordinary legal proceedings that never would've happened in a regular manslaughter case and flipped it back the other way and kept the case alive for another nine months. If there was a cover-up it was the worst cover-up ever because it resulted in an inquest that had devastating results for Kennedy and kept the issue alive for an entire year.

Alison: I have to tell you, I have family that lives full-time in Martha's Vineyard, and have gone there since I was a child in my ‘50s. You see people go to the Edgartown Harbor and stand and look at the channel. Almost everybody including myself says, "He didn't swim that by himself, [laughs] with a concussion and alcohol in his system." The little ferry, the On Time can barely get across it without the current

John: With a broken back from an airplane crash in 1964.

Alison: There's always been all kinds of questions around Chappaquiddick about what the truth was. I'm curious if you think that's why it still gets written about. In doing research for this book somebody wrote an article about it last summer. On the date of the anniversary, people still are writing about Chappaquiddick.

John: We don't know what happened in the time that they left the party and the time the car goes off the bridge, and we never will know. You can make all the guesses you want. Mary Jo did not bring her room keys, she did not bring her purse with her. Ted in his own memoirs right before his death for the first time acknowledged that the two of them had been talking about Robert Kennedy and were overcome with emotion and felt they had to get away from that party.

It's very easy to see the two of them getting in the car and going down for a private walk on the beach or in one of the Oceanside parks, and maybe something happened romantically and maybe didn't. Again, this was the Woodstock Summer, it would not have been unheard of. We do know from the testimony from his own words and especially now from this excerpts from Arthur Schlesinger's diary that I found. That from the moment that he got out of the water he started thinking about covering up his shame, his political future.

Whether or not he was going to be charged with drunk driving, whether or not he would be sent to the Barnstable House of Correction for manslaughter. He tried to evade responsibility. He stayed out of the clutches of the police long enough to allow whatever alcohol was in his bloodstream to dissipate so that there could be no prosecution for drunk driving. He contrived a way to get back whether he swam or whether he and his aides swiped a rowboat and went across and he just didn't want to involve them and so made up the story about swimming.

Appears in the lobby of his hotel at 2:00 AM saying, "This party woke me up. What time is it now?" To establish this alibi that he wasn't there. The really craving thing about it, the really awful thing about it is that people sometimes do survive in submerged cars. It's very rare and the studies that I'm aware of that were done about this particular car in this particular tide tidal pond make it I think highly unlikely that Mary Jo did survive. He did try to swim down and save her, I believe.

He did go back to the party and at least bring help too and they dove down and tried to see if they could find her. By that time, of course, she probably had drowned. The political thoughts and the feeling that, "Oh my God. I'm the screw-up they always said I was going to be. I always have been and now it comes crashing down on me." He thought about quitting and maybe he should have quit. Maybe you look at what happened to him after that and say, “In seeking atonement maybe it's good that he did not quit.”

Alison: I wanted to play before we leave Chappaquiddick, an address that Kennedy gave to the nation a week after the accident. Let's listen.

Kennedy: My fellow citizens, I have requested this opportunity to talk to the people of Massachusetts about the tragedy which happened last Friday evening. This morning I entered a plea of guilty to the charge of leaving the scene of an accident. 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 people of this state are entitled to representation by men who inspire their utmost confidence. For this reason, I would understand full well why some might think it right for me to resign. For me, this will be a difficult decision to make. 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.

Alison: John, from your reporting, why didn't Chappaquiddick end his career?

John: If you go to the photo array in the book. There's a photograph of him campaigning for office in 1970, immediately after Chappaquiddick. There's a picture of four nuns, and they're holding a sign that says, “God, bless our Ted.” Standing next to Ted is Joan being the good wife smiling, and I think that picture says it all. The Massachusetts elected him and re-elected him, and re-elected him, and re-elected him, and re-elected him because I think that they had so much of an emotional investment in the Kennedy story, the Kennedy charisma. They just loved that family so much for so long that they could forgive so much.

He campaigned hard, of course. He was incredibly lucky in that his arch-enemy Richard Nixon on the day that the Chappaquiddick inquest report was released in the spring of 1970, Richard Nixon invades Cambodia. It would take something like that in the middle of the Vietnam War to drown out something like the Chappaquiddick inquest, but son of a gun it did it. A great irony of history that Richard Nixon may have helped Ted Kennedy survive that particular week and the damage of that inquest report, which said that basically he should have been charged with manslaughter.

Alison: We'll continue our conversation about Ted Kennedy: A Life with John A. Farrell. We'll hear how Ted's first wife Joan succumb to alcoholism, his own rock bottom, and the woman who helped sort himself out. That's next.

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This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our full bio conversation about Senator Ted Kennedy's dark years following Chappaquiddick. Though he threw himself into his job, his behavior had an impact on his work. His young son got bone cancer and had to have his leg amputated when he was 12. Kennedy's wife, Joan, succumb to alcoholism. Here's the rest of my full bio conversation with John A. Farrell. I wanted to ask about Joan Kennedy at this point. She developed a very serious drinking problem. Did anyone try to help her?

John: I'm sure that her family tried to help her. I'm sure that counselors tried to help her. Eventually, she began to go to rehabilitation centers to try to dry out and they were all unsuccessful, sadly. Alcoholism has been shown to have a genetic predisposition. She had alcoholism in the family as did Ted, and all three of their children would end up being treated at one point or another in their lives for drug dependency. It's both something I think that's in the makeup of a person.

It's also within that awful Irish Catholic silence that guided that family and said that you're not allowed to be human, you're not allowed to be weak, you're not allowed to talk about these things. Image is everything, embrace the bravado and project a strong image to the world. In Patrick Kennedy's, whose Ted Kennedy's son, in his memoir is a very wonderful discussion of what that imposed silence does to even the next generation when they run into their own problems.

Alison: Joan and Ted Kennedy remained married for a long time-- sort of a partnership even though Kennedy was not faithful. Why did they finally divorce?

John: He decided to run for president in 1980 and challenged Jimmy Carter, the Democratic President in the primaries. To do that he thought he needed the good wife by his side. He needed to have the image of a happy family projected across America. In a very calculated way there was a summit of doctors summoned and they discussed what her problem was and what the pressures of the campaign would be. She was asked and agreed to do it. In later years she said she did it for herself, not for him, to demonstrate her own strength.

It seems that during the campaign she was very disappointed at the fact that there was a coldness on his part, and as soon as the campaign was over they split apart on-- she put it on Ted's initiative, and then they ended up getting divorced, which may have been healthier for them four or five years earlier. For reasons of children in political image or whatever they tried to stick together and tried to make it work until it was obviously a lost cause.

Alison: Ted Kennedy's drinking put him again in the vicinity of an alleged crime. This time he was older, it was the early ‘90s. He went out carousing with his son and his nephew at a trendy Florida bar. A young woman said she drove home William Kennedy Smith, and then he chased her down and violently raped her. She went to a rape crisis center after. He was charged and tried-- we should say acquitted. The trial included Senator Ted Kennedy having to testify. What did people see when Senator Kennedy was on the stand?

John: Two things. One, a very rehearsed and effective testimony. To me, when I do biographies I try to do biographies about a person. In these cases, of course, they're famous persons. It's still a story of a man, of a human being, of the motivations of the psychological impact of what childhood does to a person. What was interesting to me about the testimony at that trial was that he said that the reason that he had awakened William Kennedy Smith and his son Patrick and said, “Let's go out to the pickup bar,” they had been going to that week.

Was that he had been sitting on the patio late after dinner talking with his sister and an old family friend about Bobby, about Robert. This was the same stimulus from the Chappaquiddick party he had been talking with Mary Jo Kopechne about Robert. I think this man carried demons that are unimaginable to the rest of us. When they're awakened by moments like this he would seek through sensation to submerge them. Whether it was reckless driving, or whether it was heavy drinking, or whether it was chasing women, or whether it was throwing himself into his work.

He said at the end of his life, "I guess I was always running to stay ahead of the dark.” I'm not making excuses for him here, but if you think about it this is a man who a brother killed in a war, a sister killed in a plane accident, another sister a victim of botched lobotomy. He's in a plane crash in 1964 that breaks his back and he can't walk for six months. He can't move out of a bed for six months, and he has to learn to walk all over again, and he's in pain for the rest of his days.

For anybody else that would be a defining moment of your life, and yet for Ted Kennedy, it's almost parenthetical because of what follows, which is John's assassination, and Bobby's assassination, and the death of three nephews. This incredible gothic Shakespearean tale as you said would be so overwhelming to a human being and yet he has to function like this, and function as the last Kennedy brother.

Function as the head of the family, function as the leader of liberal America in the United States Senate. It's just an astonishing series of tests. I don't believe in redemption, but I do believe in atonement. I really believe that there was a strong effort by Ted Kennedy to atone for those sins, even while at the same time he was trying to drown out the feelings that they entailed through constant rushes of sensation.

Alison: We also should mention that his youngest son lost his leg to cancer.

John: Yes, all three children had cancer. That would be the defining moment of my life if my two children both had cancer before the age of 40. Yet again like with the Kennedy's it's parenthetical.

Alison: A time though when this combination of drinking and sexual extracurriculars really impacted his ability to be an effective leader. I might argue changed our country, was he remained largely silent when Professor Anita Hill testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. He didn't have the position to say anything. What role should he have played versus the role he did play?

John: Oh, I think that Ted Kennedy had a very good 1980s. He was very good during the Reagan years. He was a American envoy for the Reagan administration with the USSR as the Cold War was coming to an end. Yet at the same time, he was doing his bipartisan shtick with Orrin Hatch and leading the Senate effort against the AIDS epidemic. As an opponent of the Reagan years, he had this great success in 1987 when Robert Bork was nominated to the United States Supreme Court.

Ted Kennedy led the opposition putting fellow democrats and liberals on notice that this was a really crucial moment and they had to get together. Leading the fight, organizing the fight, and defeating Bork by the largest margin by which any Supreme Court nominee had ever been defeated. Just a handful of years later Clarence Thomas is nominated by the first President Bush, and the Anita Hill allegations come out at the end of the summer, and because of what had happened in Palm Beach Ted Kennedy had no moral standing to lead that fight.

For all the good that he did in the hearings he might as well have had a brown paper bag over his head. He was ridiculed on the late-night television shows and on Saturday Night Live in the harshest terms. His Republican colleagues in the Senate were merciless saying things like, "If you believe what Senator Kennedy just said there, I've got a bridge up in Massachusetts I can sell you." They just taunted him because he was in such a weak position. He had a tough campaign coming up in 1994 with Mitt Romney was running against him. There was a very serious chance that because of his performance in the Thomas-Hill hearings that he could be defeated. Because even in Irish Catholic Massachusetts which loved the Kennedys so much, there had always been a feeling that the private sins had never affected the public performance. Yet here was a case where obviously he had been silenced by the private sins that affected his public performance, and many of his former supporters in Boston and in Massachusetts said, "That's it, that's enough. He can't function as US Senator anymore.” He had to win them back in 1994 when he ran for reelection against Romney.

Alison: John, you interviewed Ted Kennedy on several occasions, and you asked him directly about his drinking. Can you tell us about that experience and what he said?

John: Sure, sure. As it turns out, I was The Boston Globe reporter covering Congress at the time of the Palm Beach incident. I did not have a great impression of Senator Kennedy because I had seen him in the 1980 campaign at his worst towards the end. When we first met in the halls of Congress he had somewhat brusquely dismissed me as this young kid from The Globe. I thought I maybe should have been stroked a little bit more than he was willing to do.

We developed under fire this foxhole respect in regard for each other that summer which started out with Palm Beach, went to the Thomas-Hill hearings, went to the wooing of Victoria Reggie. Ended a year later with an amazing reelection campaign at a time when a very strong Republican year where Newt Gingrich was taking over the house representatives for the Republicans as speaker. I was with him on a lot of battlegrounds.

One of the battlefields that I had to trod was the editors at The Globe said, "This behavior is unacceptable. We've accepted it when it didn't splash over into the public. It's now splashing over into his public performance as we can see in the Thomas hearings.” That feeling was alive in Boston and in the Globe newsroom and I was sent to beard the lion and challenge him. It has been said that I was the first and only Globe reporter to ever directly confront him with that question.

Of course, he was a wise enough politician to know that he had a stock answer ready which was that he was going to be more attentive to his flaws, which was the line that had been written by somebody for him to say over and over again which he did very capably. At one point I wrote a piece for The Globe in which I suggested that he was a great white shark, which was sharks don't sleep. There are a few species I guess who do end up going down into the sand and sleeping overnight.

Both sharks are ceaselessly moving through the water, and if they stop moving then they die. I said, “He was a great white shark who had to keep moving constantly because otherwise he would be overcome by this flood of sensation and he would drown in sorrow.” He was famous for writing little notes and I got a little note from him and he had drawn a little white shark and signed it “Ted the shark.” We ended up having after a very rocky and stressful beginning a decent relationship and a respectful one.

I think it helped me a lot to have seen him both from my perspective as a severe critic alienated from him, and somebody who became grudgingly more appreciative of his gifts. From his aspect of being standoffish with this new arrogant little kid from The Globe, who seems now to have more of an understanding of some of the things that I'm actually feeling that I can't say we became friends but we became friendly adversaries within the politician press relationship. That really helped me write this book.

Alison: You describe in the book that Kennedy's second wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy as being a person who really truly changed the trajectory of the last quarter of his life. How did she help Ted Kennedy find his footing?

John: First of all, I think that they truly loved each other. It was something of a-- what do you call it, May-December romance because she was many years younger. She is one smart woman. She's now the United States ambassador to Austria. A successful corporate lawyer has raised two fine children from a previous marriage. She was not some dizzy person who was won over by the Kennedy glamor and was going to let Ted pull his old tricks on her when she had just come out of a marriage and had these two young children that she had to raise.

She was not about to let those kids be hurt by his antics. I think that he realized too with the coming of years and the natural effects of age that he could not keep burning the candle either physically or politically on both ends. Was happy to settle into something more stable with such a loving, funny terrific woman as Vicki. It was by all accounts a great marriage. They certainly were too strong-willed people who had their spats and fights together. She was from Louisiana, so they had a touch of the New Orleans in her, and both the special Catholicism that looks upon—

I always say that there's two kinds of Catholics. There's 10 Commandments Catholics, and there's Sermon on the Mount Catholics. The Sermon on the Mount Catholics are more forgiving and more fun to hang out with. I think she and Ted were both two Sermon on the Mount Catholics who got along very, very well. I think she did great things for him and especially in the last two years of his life when he was suffering. She was a great steady partner and helped guide him through that last crisis.

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