It could be argued Ted Kennedy’s most enduring legacy is his staff. More than 1,100 aides worked for him. And many of them are high-powered Democrats. Plenty are registered lobbyists. All owe their influence at least in part to time served on the Ted Kennedy team.
Called the “T-Birds,” the group includes super-lobbyist Tony Podesta and DNC Chairman Tom Perez, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, David Boies, and former White House counsel Greg Craig. Michelle Obama’s chief of staff Stephanie Cutter, Madeleine Albright’s chief of staff Elaine Shocas, and former Clinton adviser and current congressional candidate Nancy Soderberg wear the mantle as well.
While they’ve spoken reverently through the years about the loyalty their boss commanded and the campaigns he waged, the darker shades of Kennedy’s life and career—like the July 18, 1969 death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign aide for Robert Kennedy, on Chappaquiddick island—come up less often. The new film Chappaquiddick details how Ted Kennedy, then a second-term senator, drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge into a pond and left Kopechne to die, not going to the police until the next day. Suffice it to say, T-Birds aren’t lining up to buy tickets: Three of the four former staffers I talked to Friday afternoon said they wouldn’t watch.
“I’m not seeing it,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic campaign consultant known for going 0-for-8 in presidential campaigns. (But he was also the speechwriter who penned Kennedy’s most presidential speech.) Shrum read the screenplay with an editorial eye and claims it takes unjustified liberties—especially with Joseph P. Kennedy’s involvement in the cover-up, he said. People magazine has already published his disapproving comments, he said. “So you can easily find them.” He’s not concerned, he added, that the fact that Kennedy left Kopechne to die—in an indefensible act of negligence, here the film leaves no wiggle room—will damage the man’s public memory. “I don’t think it’ll overwrite his legacy,” he said
Neither does lawyer Greg Craig, who joined Kennedy’s staff in 1984 and later served as White House counsel to President Obama. “I don’t believe there is anything about this tragedy that is going to change Ted Kennedy’s legacy,” he said, adding he doesn’t feel the need to see the film. Craig recommended I read the review published in Boston Globe, a more nuanced and sensitive treatment than other publications’ in his view. “It happened. It’s sad that it happened,” said Craig. “But Ted Kennedy’s contribution to his country and to the American people since that happened will not be forgotten.”
Tony Podesta, who worked on Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign, agrees. He doesn’t plan to see the movie and hasn’t discussed Chappaquiddick with anyone, he adds—not Kennedy’s sons or his friends from the presidential campaign. “The accident was a tragedy,” he says, of Kopechne’s death, “but a footnote to history.” Whereas, “His legacy in the Senate will be a monument that will live on in time.”
When I asked whether what happened in Chappaquiddick might have derailed his career in an era nearer our own than the summer of 1969, he described the breadth of Kennedy’s subsequent impact instead, from the war on drugs to airline regulation, saying, “There is no one whose interests were as broad, whose impact was as large in the last 50 years.”
The only female Kennedy staffer I reached had the least decisive response when asked about the episode the film dredged up. But maybe that’s because she’s running for office: Nancy Soderberg, an alumna of Kennedy’s national security team and the Clinton White House, is a Democratic candidate for Congress in Florida. She was tied up, she said, when I reached her on her cell but seemed to want to give the matter some thought: “That’s a longer conversation,” Soderberg said, “I’ll have to call you back.” She never did, though. A couple hours later, an aide called to thank me for my inquiry. “At this time,” Soderberg’s staffer said, “she has no comment.”
While the credits rolled after a Friday night showing of Chappaquiddick, candid comment was easier to come by. I asked a well-dressed man next to my friend whether he’d vote for Kennedy: “No, I don’t think so,” he snorted. It’s hard to come away from the film—which powerful people attempted to block from release, according to its producer—with very much confidence in Kennedy’s moral compass. Of course this random guy could have been a Republican, although that’s statistically unlikely in D.C. where, no matter who’s technically in power, the T-Birds still reign.
Correction, April 9: The article originally described Ted Kennedy as a freshman senator at the time of Kopechne’s death. He was serving his second term.
