Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up

...among the other handmaidens were Richard Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, Burke Marshall, and Robert McNamara...

...he chatted with some yachting friends on the motel's porch...

...Indeed, on the next morning, when Gargan and Markham came to see Kennedy at his motel, fully expecting him to have reported the accident, they found that Kennedy had continued to expect Gargan to make the report...

...The TV speech was the product of a conclave of Kennedy celebrities who were barricaded with their leader incommunicado inside the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port for a full week after the accident...

...Damore also sheds new light on the perversion of the investigation that shielded Kennedy...

...The judge also found "inconsistencies and contradictions" of testimony too numerous for him to list and "probable cause to believe that Edward M. Kennedy operated his motor vehicle negligently . . . and that such operation appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne...

...After a while he could leave...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 45...

...In short, by 1976 at the latest, anyone interested knew that Kennedy was a liar...

...We learn for the first time that, however belatedly, there was a supposedly secret police investigation of the accident before the inquest, and that, in violation of his official duty, State Police Detective Lieutenant Bernie Flynn volunteered to Kennedy's brother-in-law, Stephen Smith, to prepare Kennedy for interrogation at the inquest by briefing him on the results of that investigation...

...Kennedy suggested that when he was back at the Shiretown Inn, Gargan could "discover" the accident and report to police that Mary Jo had been alone in the car...

...The chief draftsman was Theodore Sorensen...

...This is why, in violation of his promise to Gargan, Kennedy did not report the accident after returning to his motel sometime before 2:25 a.m., why he sought to establish his presence at the motel by complaining about the noise from a party, and why he chatted so nonchalantly with his friends on the porch the next morning...

...Between 11:15 p.m., when he left the party, and 12:45 p.m., when he drove off the bridge, there was plenty of time for more drinking and carrying on...

...he left his car and went toward Kennedy's to see whether help was needed, only to see it speed away on the dirt road toward the fatal bridge...

...The answer is that we all ought to hear more about it...

...I was asked that question repeatedly when seen with this book, 40,000 copies of which were sold before publication...

...Senator Kennedy gave three different and inconsistent accounts of his role in the tragedy: a written account drafted with the help of his friend and lawyer Paul Markham at the police station after reporting the accident, an account that omitted, among many other facts, any mention of the party with Mary Jo Kopechne and five other former members of Robert Kennedy's staff...

...At the end of the second briefing a grateful Stephen Smith asked Flynn: "What can I do for you...

...and at about 7:30 a.m...

...that Kennedy did not intend to drive to the ferry slip and his turn onto Dyke Road was intentional...

...There are many other revelations in this book, for each of which the sources are given meticulously...

...The answer was finally given to Damore by Edward Kennedy's cousin, Joseph Gargan...

...But thanks to the luck and patient detecting of Leo Damore we now know more, and enough to remove the lingering mysteries of that sordid episode...

...Since Kennedy and all other Kennedy witnesses had testified at the inquest that Kennedy and Miss Kopechne had left the party together at about 11:15 p.m., and Kennedy maintained that he had done so in order to drive Miss Kopechne to the ferry, which was only two SENATORIAL PRIVILEGE: THE CHAPPAQUIDDICK COVER-UP Leo Damore/Regnery Gateway/$19.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 and a half miles away, the discrepancy of time alone knocked every one of Kennedy's inconsistent tales into a cocked hat...

...about noises from a neighboring party...

...the following morning by two fishermen, who reported their discovery by telephone to the police at 8:20 a.m...

...He was immaculately dressed in "yachting clothes," freshly shaven, nonchalant, and "normal in every way...

...Gargan, at long last, told Damore that Kennedy had urged Gargan to report the accident, in order not only to avoid that painful chore but to develop another option: Kennedy was having alternative ideas about the situation: Why couldn't Mary Jo have been driving the car...

...nor could his license, which had expired months earlier, be found...

...By contrast Damore reports that Kennedy, at a regatta victory party on a friend's boat before the Chappaquiddick party, had drunk "three rum and cokes in about twenty minutes...

...Kennedy said: "I'm going to say that Mary Jo was driving...

...Look had spotted Kennedy's car at 12:45 a.m...

...Still, if the book does no more than stir the conscience of Democrats and Republicans who by action and omission permit an emotional and moral imbecile to serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee (to say nothing of the Senate), it will have rendered a patriotic service...

...Thanks to the media and Robert Sherrill's book, anyone interested also knew that Kennedy's lies and conduct remained unpunished in the teeth of Massachusetts law, because of the diabolical efficiency with which the Kennedy apparatus thwarted any normal investigation and prosecution...

...Mary Jo Kopechne's blood analysis showed an alcohol content of .09 percent (about six drinks), and all witnesses described her as the most abstemious drinker of the group...

...Kennedy asked to be brought back to the cottage to establish the story...

...Yet for all its merit, Senatorial Privilege is difficult to read and understand...

...The New York Times commented: "Senator Kennedy was really asking for an outpouring of support on the basis of a partially irrelevant and totally unsatisfactory ex parte account...

...The public reaction to the evasions, irrelevancies, and probable falsehoods of the speech was, in Sher-rill's words, "a disaster...

...Senator Kennedy reported the accident to the police about two hours after the fishermen had reported it...

...and secret testimony at an inquest held the following January...

...In this light, the deputy sheriff's testimony that Kennedy sped away when he saw the sheriff approaching becomes quite plausible: Kennedy did not want to have his presidential aspirations blighted by yet another reckless driving charge...

...and 12:45 a.m...

...The evidence is virtually conclusive that he was drunk when he drove off the bridge, which under Massachusetts law made him guilty of manslaughter...

...No one has ever described Ted Kennedy as abstemious...

...True, what we-al-ready know should alone make that endorsement a scandal...

...There had been previous speculation that he had been drunk, but Kennedy testified at the inquest that after drinking "about a third of a beer" with friends before the party, and after a rum and coke at 8 p.m...

...Add those drinks to the later two and sobriety becomes questionable...

...He had complained to the night manager at his motel at 2:25 a.m...

...Senator Edward Kennedy remains a leading member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and on June 11 he was formally endorsed by the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention as the Democratic party's candidate for yet another term as senator...

...Why couldn't she have let him off, and driven to the ferry herself and made a wrong turn...

...T here remained, however, many 1 mysteries that have now been solved by Leo Damore...

...Apart from obvious internal contradictions, the untruths of Kennedy's accounts were most convincingly established by a man of unblemished reputation, Christopher Look, a deputy sheriff of Dukes County who testified at the inquest...

...How this was going to be worked out insofar as "details" were concerned, the Senator didn't say...

...It was to Gargan that Kennedy first reported the accident when he returned to the party to seek help, having escaped from the submerged car in Poncha Pond...

...As for Kennedy's third and last story, given at an inquest belatedly held on January 5-8, 1970, the judge found it "probable" that "Kennedy and Kopechne did not intend to return to Edgartown at that time...

...After attempting to rescue Mary Jo, Gargan finally drove Kennedy to the ferry landing, from which Kennedy swam the channel to return to his motel...

...It is now clear that although "Gargan rejected the idea out of hand," Kennedy did not...

...It is a splendid source book for students, but its presentation is likely to put a strainon the common reader...

...From Robert Sherrill's masterly The Last Kennedy, we knew by 1976 that sometime between 11:30 p.m...

...and one at 9 p.m., he drank nothing at all and drove off the bridge "absolutely sober...

...Another of Damore's major revelations explains how Kennedy could drive off a bridge he knew so well...

...during the night of Friday, July 18, 1969, Senator Kennedy drove his car off a narrow bridge in Chappaquiddick, and that his car, and in it Mary Jo Kopechne, were discovered submerged in Poncha Pond about 8 a.m...

...The first was why Kennedy waited ten hours before reporting the accident, a question on which until now we could only speculate...

...stopped on the road...

...a television address, given a week later on the same day he pleaded guilty (and thereFranz M Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer by avoided cross-examination) to the charge of leaving the scene of an accident without reporting it "after knowingly causing injury to Mary Jo Kopechne...

...Besides, Kennedy had no driver's license on him...

...The offer was accepted, and Flynn met secretly once with Kennedy's counsel Herbert J. Miller, formerly assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division of the Department of Justice in the Kennedy Administration, and another time with Miller and Stephen Smith...