The film “Chappaquiddick,” which premiered last Friday, concerns the efforts of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., to save his career and reputation after the accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne, a young, pretty aide to his dead brother Bobby.
Kennedy intended to preserve his chances of running for president, like his two older brothers before him. But what if he wanted not to be president, and it was this desire that ruled from then on?
Kennedy wished to remain in the Senate, which was the love of his life and for which he was suited. But the presidency at age 36 was a whole other story. After the deaths of two brothers in less than five years made him head of a huge extended family of children and women, the public’s insistence that he replace his dead brothers— and the Democrats’ demand that he save them from Nixon—added a level of strain that he might not have been able to bear.
Almost immediately after Bobby’s last breath, the pressure had started: “Now that Bobby’s gone, you’re all we’ve got,” Allard Lowenstein told him. Richard Daley called from the convention in August, asking permission to draft him for president. After Humphrey and Muskie had lost in November, it was considered a given he would head the ticket in 1972.
The result of all this was to strike him with terror: as Dun Gifford put it, “He realized that he had always been pushed forward too soon.” In April, 1969, he got drunk on a flight from Alaska, throwing pillows and shouting “Eskimo power,” saying he feared he’d be shot like his brothers. Newsweek’s John Lindsay wrote a memo calling him “under terrible stress, an accident waiting to happen.”
That accident did indeed happen on June 19. Days later, Jacqueline Kennedy called Roswell Gilpatrick from her home on Cape Cod, where the family gathered. “He has an unconscious drive to self-destruct,” she said of her brother-in-law. “[I]t comes from the fact that he knows he’ll never live up to what people expect of him…He’s not Jack…He’s not Bobby…He believes deep down that what he is is just not enough.”
This was still true ten years later, when he ran against Jimmy Carter, who seemed doomed when Ted entered, but saw his fortunes revive within weeks.
“All summer Kennedy had been wooed by Democratic candidates terrified of the bloodbath to come if Carter headed the ticket,” Peter Collier and David Horowitz wrote in their history. But that was before Kennedy entered the race. Before he announced, he had stumbled badly in an interview that verged on incoherence, and on the trail it would be even worse: “The guy doesn’t want it,” wrote Ellen Goodman. “I wondered,” Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote in his journal, “whether Ted really wanted to be President, whether he may not be going though the motions in order to get the problem out of the way while unconsciously not wanting to succeed.”
He didn’t believe his own excuses, as Michael Knox Beran wrote many years later: “His campaign, lackluster and uninspired, dissolved in an agony of self-doubt.”
Ted couldn’t say he didn’t feel he was strong enough; he couldn’t say he feared he’d be shot like his brothers; all he could do was to stumble so badly, carouse in public so often and openly, and embarrass himself in every way possible so that people would draw their conclusions themselves.
In 1980, he regained his footing only when so far behind he could never recover. In 1969, if Chappaquiddick hadn’t occurred, it would hardly have mattered to him. Something else would have happened instead.
