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- Ferrymaster, Dick Hewitt |
Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?" - Senator Ted Kennedy, 1973 |
Excerpts from : Senatorial Privilege by Leo Damore & The Kennedy Men by Nellie Bly |
1) Leaving the Scene of an Accident |
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2) Senator Kennedy's Expired License is "Fixed" |
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3) The Failure to Perform an Autopsy on Mary Jo Kopechne |
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4) Senator Kennedy's Medical Prognosis |
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5) The "Best and the Brightest" Assemble at Hyannis Port |
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6) Ted Kennedy Pleads Guilty to Leaving the Scene of an Accident |
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7) Teddy Kennedy Faces the Nation ( but not the Facts ) |
- Shortly after Senator Ted Kennedy and Paul Markham had left the Edgartown police station, Chief Arena was joined by Walter Steele, the Special Prosecutor for Dukes County, Martha's Vinyard. - Arena's only source of information about the accident was Senator Kennedy's report, which in Steele's opinion "didn't add up at all." - Questionable too, was the "shock and exhaustion" Kennedy said he'd suffered after the accident. The Senator had not sought medical attention after the accident, nor did he appear to be injured at the police station - factors which combined to suggest that the Senator may have tried to avoid responsibility by delaying his report. As it was, Kennedy hadn't done so until after the accident was discovered and a body had been removed from his car. |
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- Steele asked Arena if he had notified the district attorney's office about the fatal accident, and Arena said that he hadn't. "The statute says that you have to notify the district attorney," Steele said. "Let's not take any chances." |
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- Because he had failed to interrogate Ted Kennedy, Arena was left with only a single piece of evidence: the Senator's own statement. |
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- Arena started drawing up a traffic violation complaint charging Edward M. Kennedy with a violation of Chapter 90, Section 24: "Any operator of a vehicle who, without stopping and making known his name, residence, and the registration number of his motor vehicle, goes away after knowingly colliding with, or otherwise causing injury to any person, shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than twenty days or more than two years." |
- To complete the citation, Arena needed to know Ted Kennedy's driver's license number and expiration date. Since the Senator had been unable to produce a license at the police station, Arena called the Registry office in Oak Bluffs, and was told, "we'll get back to you." - Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy's Administrative Assistant, David Burke, telephoned Registry Inspector George Kennedy to report that he couldn't find the Senator's license in his Washington car. - Inspector Kennedy was disturbed to learn that Ted Kennedy, in addition to leaving the scene of a fatal accident, had been driving on an expired license at the time. The Senator's growing list of motor vehicle violations were evidence of "some negligence" that supported a charge of manslaughter in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. - Greelish called Registrar McLaughlin to inform him that Senator Kennedy was driving on an expired license at the time of the fatal accident. Mclaughlin told Greelish he would take over the case personally, "So it doesn't get screwed up." - Joseph Mellino had been alone in the radio room when he'd checked on Kennedy's license. He hadn't seen anyone in the building, "but a while later, I heard talk going around that McLaughlin was there on Saturday night," he said. It wouldn't take much for someone to keypunch a new license, to spare the Senator the embarrassment of not having one, he said. - The fact that Kennedy's license had expired, and that it had been concealed by the Registry, was confirmed when Joe Greelish telephoned assistant district attorney Jimmy Smith. Greelish wanted Smith to know the "problem" with the Senator's license, "had been taken care of." |
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- On Sunday, July 20, Greelish delivered Senator Kennedy's driver's license information to Chief Arena. The records now showed that Kennedy's license was valid until February 22, 1971. - Massachusetts law required a minimum mandatory 20-day jail term in all cases of leaving the scene of an accident where personal injury had occurred. - Six days later, when Senator Ted Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, he was able to produce a valid driver's license, which he surrendered to the court. Tests later performed on the Senator's license showed absolutely no traces of salt water. |
- State Police Detective George Killen was the senior officer responsible for the investigation and prosecution of all criminal matters on Cape Cod and the islands. When Medical Examiner Donald Mills called to ask whether or not an autopsy should be performed on Mary Jo Kopechne, Killen told him that if he was satisfied with his diagnosis and there was no evidence of foul play, no autopsy was necessary. - Mills called undertaker Eugene Frieh and instructed him to go ahead with the embalming. Mills then put the accident at Chappaquiddick out of his mind. He had a baby to deliver at Oak Bluffs Hospital. - Frieh was surprised no autopsy had been ordered in the case. "I figured there should have been one for three reasons: the type of accident it was; the important people involved; and the fact that insurance companies would be hounding officials over double indemnity claims." |
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- Frieh was beginning to doubt the validity of the medical examiner's diagnosis. The lack of water evacuated from the body was "unusual" in a drowning case. Frieh suspected that instead, the accident victim may have suffocated to death. His observations strongly supported scuba diver John Farrar's theory that Mary Jo Kopechne had survived in the submerged automobile by breathing a pocket of trapped air, and had died by suffocation only after the oxygen had been depleted. |
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- When Frieh contacted Dr. Mills to suggest he change his finding, the medical examiner told him he "didn't want to cause any problem," and refused to make an independant decision about ordering an autopsy. |
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- Dun Gifford, an aid to Senator Kennedy, was sent to Edgartown with instructions to do whatever he could to expedite the paperwork required to get Mary Jo Kopechne's body off the island as quickly as possible. |
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- The failure to perform an autopsy on the body of Mary Jo Kopechne caused a "public clamor", and drew harsh criticism from both prosecutors and the press. Prior to the inquest, a motion to have the body exhumed in order to perform a belated autopsy was challanged by the Kopechne family. The request to exhume the body was successfully blocked by the Kopechne's lawyer Joseph Flanagan, who was hired and paid for by Ted Kennedy. |
- After leaving the Edgartown police station, Senator Kennedy was taken to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, where he was examined by the Kennedy family physician on Cape Cod, Dr. Robert Watt. |
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- Other medical authorities found Watt's concussion diagnosis far-fetched - "highly-unlikely," as one put it in a Boston Globe interview. In that same interview, Watt admitted that his diagnosis about Kennedy's post-accident memory loss had been based "simply on what Kennedy told him." |
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- On Monday afternoon, Senator Kennedy was taken to Cape Cod hospital to have x-rays taken of the first to seventh vertebrae of the cervical spine (neck). Radiologist W.E.Benjamine found no evidence of fracture or depression. |
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- The EEG results appeared to call into question the symptoms of memory loss, impairment of judgement and confused behavior which Dr. Watt had reported. "It is safe to be dubious about the contention that there was a protracted period when Kennedy was alternately lucid and then terribly confused, because this behavior would almost certainly show up if the EEG had been properly administered and interpreted." |
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- Edgartown Police Chief Dominick Arena had allowed Senator Kennedy to leave the station without answering any questions because, "I figured Kennedy would be eager to clear the matter up." - Instead, Arena would recieve many new details about the accident from stories in the press. For example, Arena first learned of the party at Chappaquiddick from a reporter who had spoken to the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne. |
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- Meanwhile, behind the locked gates of the Kennedy compound, the Kennedy machine went to work. By Sunday morning the old, all-white, all-male brain trust had gathered at Hyannis Port. Among those present were: Former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, Ted Sorensen, Burke Marshall, Steve Smith, Dave Burke, Paul Markham, Joe Gargan, Milton Gwirtzman, Richard Goodwin, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., while John Kenneth Galbraith (Jonh Kennedy's Ambassador to India) gave advice by phone. - The line-up of big names at the compound made it look like a gang-up of special privilege. "Inviting all those people to advise on a motor vehicle accident case made it look like Teddy Kennedy was in more serious trouble than he was," Steve Smith said later. - Together, Teddy and his advisors moved into damage control. Yes, a young woman was dead, but all those present agreed that the most important thing was to salvage Teddy's political career. |
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- Neither Joe Gargan nor Paul Markham were allowed to participate in the strategy sessions going on at the Kennedy compound. To the others present, Gargan and Markham were "pariahs," as responsible for the incident as Senator Kennedy himself. - Edward Hanify, one of the lawyers hired to represent Ted Kennedy, set Gargan straight on exactly what bearing he would have on the matter. Because he was representing the Senator, Hanify couldn't talk to him about the case, suggesting Gargan discuss the accident with his own lawyer. Hanify told Paul Markham the same thing. "You people are going to be highly criticized," he said. "I think you ought to protect yourselves." |
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- By failing to report the accident, the Senator had made Gargan and Markham unwitting accomplices in his effort to conceal it from police for more than nine hours, involving them in a net of intrigue so as to avoid his own responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Now he was invoking lawyer-client privilege to prevent them from telling anybody what they knew. |
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- Hanify's instructions to Gargan renewed the outrage he had felt at the Chappaquiddick landing when the Senator bolted from the car with a promise to report the accident. To Gargan, Teddy's attempt to conceal the accident, and his child-like dread of facing the consequences of Mary Jo Kopechne's death had betrayed an astonishing weakness of character. |
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- Senator Kennedy's actions revived in Gargan a sense of family pride. "Gargans don't shit in their own bed." he said. "And that guy drove a car off a bridge and put everybody in the soup." |
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- Confronted by reporters for the first time since the accident, Kennedy turned away, saying "This is the day of the funeral. I will make a full statement at the appropriate time." |
- The Kennedy brain trust agreed it would be beneficial to have a local lawyer defend the Senator against the charge of leaving the scene of the accident on Chappaquiddick. Attorney Richard McCarron, whose law offices were on Martha's Vinyard, was chosen represent him. - McCarron was concerned about the mandatory 20-day jail term in all cases of leaving the scene of an accident where personal injury had occurred. |
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- Senator Kennedy, who had left his cervical collar at home, was escorted to the Edgartown Courthouse by a detachment of state police officers. - At 9:00 AM, the court clerk called the first case on the docket: "This complaint charges that Edward M. Kennedy of Boston, Mass., on the 19th day of July, 1969, at Edgartown, did operate a certain motor vehicle upon a public way in said Edgartown and did go away after knowingly causing injury to Mary Jo Kopechne without stopping and making known his name, residence and the number of his motor vehicle." - The clerk addressed Kennedy directly, "How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?" - After Police Chief Arena was sworn in, he read a summary of the evidence from personal notes written on a single sheet of yellow paper. He made no mention of the party at Chappaquiddick, or the possibility that the Senator may have been intoxicated at the time of the accident. |
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- Incredibly, Judge Boyle did not question Kennedy about what he had done in the hours after the accident. He apparently was satisfied that the Senator's plea of 'guilty' was in effect a confession to the crime, and therefore no further questions were necessary. - The prosecutor, Walter Steele, proposed incarceration in the Barnstable House of Correction for a period of two months. - Because the defendant's prior driving history would directly influence the sentencing, Judge Boyle asked the chief probation officer, Helen Tyra, "There is no record of previous violations?" - The offenses in Virginia had occurred on Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts driver's license, but mysteriously neither the Registry of Motor Vehicles nor the office of probation in Cambridge had any record of the out-of-state convictions. [ View Ted Kennedy's Driving Record ] - "Considering the unblemished record of the defendant," Boyle said, "and insofar as the Commonwealth represents this is not a case where he was really trying to conceal his identity....." "No, sir!" Steele interjected firmly. - McCarron wasted no time in saying, "The defendant will accept the suspension, your Honor." - Boyle adjourned the court. The proceeding had taken seven minutes. |
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- The reporters who had been allowed inside the courthouse were highly critical of the court's decision. |
- During the week of councils at the Kennedy compound, Joe Gargan was pointedly excluded from the strategy sessions. The Senator did not feel like talking about the accident. Gargan was an ambarrassment and a potential threat. |
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- Ted Sorensen, one of the major speech writers for President John F. Kennedy, had composed the speech which the Senator was planning to read on national television that evening. - Because the speech referred to his client, Gargan's lawyer Joseph Donahue read over the draft. Donahue found it acceptable with regard to Gargan's legal position, but otherwise was appalled. He urged Gargan to go personally to Ted Kennedy to dissuade him from delivering the speech. - "We indicated our feelings, but others had theirs," Gargan said. "It seemed to me they'd already made up their minds to go ahead with the explanation." |
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- While the speech presented an accurate portrayal of the rescue effort Gargan and Markham made at Dike Bridge, the rest of it was a fake, Gargan said later. "It was made up, all of it, including thoughts and emotions." |
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- Because the Senator's address was regarded as a news story, all three television networks donated 15 minutes of prime time to the broadcast. Facilities for the broadcast were set up at the home of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, inside the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. |
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- Francis Broadhurst, a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler, was outraged by the conditions being imposed on the broadcast. "I was pretty disillusioned that the Kennedys could exercise so much control over the press," he said. |
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- A light layer of pancake makeup was applied to the Senator's face, and he took a seat behind a desk. The desk and chair had been built up, using books as support blocks, so that the cameras were at eye-level, to give a more natural angle when Ted Kennedy delivered his speech. |
- On cue at 7:30 PM, Senator Kennedy began reading from a manuscript gripped tightly in his hand:My fellow citizens: - Kennedy put aside the prepared text. He folded his hands, looked directly into the camera and appeared to continue the speech extemporaneously. However, large cue cards picking up the text of the speech were held up out of camera range. The Senator continued: These events and the publicity and inuendo and whispers which have surrounded them, and my admission of guilt this morning, raises raises the question in my mind of whether my standing among the people of my state has been so impaired that I should resign my seat in the United States Senate. If at any time the citizens of Massachusetts should lack confidence in their Senator's character or his ability, with or without justification, he could not, in my opinion, adequately perform his duties, and should not continue in office. |
- Kennedy's speech hit hard at the one thing his attorneys feared most - a charge of manslaughter. - Kennedy also denied any sexual misconduct, an issue that represented such a serious threat to his political career that it had preoccupied the counselors at Hyannis Port who were composing his speech. |
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- The rest of the speech was a painful, bedraggled account constructed around the pitfalls of his statement to Edgartown police. |
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- Kennedy's escape from Gargan's nagging at the landing had been transformed into an effort to swim to Edgartown so strenuous as to have incapacitated his ability to report the accident. |
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- In wondering "whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might in some way pass from my shoulders," Kennedy came close to admitting his desire that "somebody else" would take the blame for the accident. The aborted scenario he'd proposed at the landing had left a number of loose ends to account for, such as his alibi-seeking encounter with the room clerk, Russel Peachey, at the Shiretown Inn. |
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- Unable to explain Kennedy's failure to report the accident, his advisers had re-focused the incident as a political problem through the contrived and irrevelant issue of whether he should resign his Senate seat. |
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- The speech ended with a passage taken verbatim from his brother Jack's Profiles in Courage, an effort to elevate the episode into a heroic mold more suitable to the Kennedy image. - No organized poll had been established wherby Massachusetts voters could register their opinion. There was only one candidate in this election, and his staff was going to count the votes. |
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- The speech came as a shock to Detective George Killen. "It was just foolish political talk. You'd have thought he was running for re-election from the gist of it. He didn't explain a goddamned thing about the accident. If that's all he was going to say, he'd have been better off saying nothing at all." - Detective Bernie Flynn was already convinced that Senator Kennedy had lied in his police report. "Watching that speech, I'm saying to myself: 'Jesus, this goddamned guy is lying again!' He should never have gone on the air, he came off so badly. The speech was an insult to your intelligence. Whoever came up with that speech ought to be shot." - Police Chief Dominick Arena was astonished to learn about the rescue attempt made by Gargan and Markham which was revealed for the first time in the Senator's speech. Arena said, "This revelation stunned police who clearly feel that this information should have been given them at the outset and cannot see why it was not." - - Unable to reveal how they had urged Kennedy to immediately report the accident to police, Gargan and Markham were severely criticized by the press. - Time Magazine wrote: - Indeed, the role of Markham and Gargan touched off the strongest reaction to the speech, a wave of editorial revulsion and reproach. - Gargan would later say that "when the Senator jumped into the water, he told Paul and me that he was going to report the accident. He wasn't in shock at that point. What happened to him after that, I don't know. We had a guy right up to the moment he went into the water who was capable of reporting his own accident. But he did not live up to what he said he was going to do." - In fact, it would have been unethical for Gargan and Markham to do anything about notifying police about the accident. As lawyers to Senator Kennedy, they would have breached the canons of ethics had they reported the accident without his permission. |
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- Senator Kennedy's speech had a devastating effect on the district attorney's office. The reaction of the press and the public outcry following the speech would force District Attorney Edmund Dinis to take action. |
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Index
Home
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Epilogue
Exhibits
Ted - The Other Scandals
YTEDK Joe Kennedy Sr. page