“This one’s for you, Mary Jo.” So read signs in the Bay State in 2010, when Republican Scott Brown won the Senate seat opened up by the passing of Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Even before the film “Chappaquiddick,” the stain scrubbed at so hard by some of those featured in the movie had never been wholly erased.
The senator, weak as he was, was hardly the worst of the people depicted. That honor goes to the fixers, who showed up to “help” him escape the consequences of his actions. They saved his career, but not his reputation. And they gave to themselves the stigma they merit, and to his dead brothers a guilt-by-relation they did not deserve.
By 1969, when the accident happened, the Kennedys had been through a series of tortured transitions, when one of its sons met a violent ending, and the expectations around him passed on to the next: Joseph “Joe” P. Kennedy Jr. was killed in the war, and the torch passed to John F. Kennedy; JFK was killed, and the torch passed to Robert “Bobby” F. Kennedy; Bobby was murdered, and the torch passed to Ted, by whom it was dropped.
He had not gone to war, like JFK and Joe Jr. He had not won tough elections, like JFK and Bobby. His doors always were held open for him by others, and he did no more than walk through.
He was expected now to walk into the White House and bring their followers with him, which was why those who thought themselves “on the right side of history” found themselves struggling to keep him out of prison. Men who had worked on the missile crisis and the civil rights struggle convened at the Cape to thwart prosecution of their dead friends’ kid brother, who had caused a fatality.
“They were there,” Lawrence Leamer has written, “to protect the Kennedy legacy … they were there to salvage their own hopes of returning to the White House as well.”
They did this largely without the assistance of Ted, who spent his time on the beach, telling friends how much he hated the pressures put on him by politicians and family.
“As Ted wandered the grounds, they debated his future almost as if he were not there,” Leamer tells us. “Ted left it to others to decide what he should say, how he should say it, and when he should speak.”
When he did speak, it was an unnerving experience, as the soaring tone the speechwriters had used for his brothers worked for them only because they had always taken responsibility for mistakes when they made them. They had never walked away from the scene of an accident, leaving a woman to die in a car.
The speech worked for Ted in that it saved his seat in the Senate (while removing the prospect of the presidency in perpetuity), but outside Massachusetts it was a whole other story, which would only come to light later when he did run for president.
“The heroic tone of the speech,” wrote David Halberstam, “was even more dissonant than the interpretation of the facts, serving only to emphasize how different Teddy was from his brothers, and what a dramatic break with the past this had been.”
With the pressure removed, Ted would over time build up his career in the Senate. It was no use at all to his brothers’ advisers, who had surrendered their good names and reputations to take part in a sordid cover-up, and got nothing for their efforts.
