Ted Kennedy, after consuming numerous alcoholic beverages, leaves a private party with a young lady not his wife. His wife, you see, is pregnant and is at home back in Massachussetts.
Sen. Kennedy is driving with a suspended license.
A local peace officer wonders if Kennedy's car is lost after seeing it first go one way and then back up and start going a different way. He approaches it on foot. The car then takes off at a high rate of speed.
Shortly after this, the car drives off of Chappaquiddick Bridge, flips over and lands upside down in 8 feet of water. Sen. Kennedy exits the vehicle. The young woman with him does not.
For the next 9 hours, instead of simply calling the police and rescue workers, Sen. Kennedy desperately goes to work on an alibi.
Kennedy confesses the accident to two people, one of whom is his cousin and lawyer, Joseph Gargan. They press him to report the accident, which he is understandably reluctant to do. The two men press Kennedy so much, he surprises them by shouting that he will report the accident and then dives into the lake and swims the harbor to the hotel where he was staying.
Taking Kennedy at his word, Gargan and the other man remain on the Island. In the morning, Gargan is stunned to find Kennedy chatting with friends and getting ready to head for breakfast.
Not only did Kennedy not report the accident, he also took pains to be seen by a hotel staff member late that night and madee a point of asking the man what time it was.
Two fishermen discovered the upside down car next to the bridge that morning, while Kennedy was still feverishly working on his alibi.
To drink and drive is a crime. To flee the scene of an accident is a crime. To fail to render aid to someone injured in an accident you caused is a crime. While sleeping around on your wife is not a crime, it does display poor judgement and a low moral character.
Senator Kennedy did all these things and because he is a Kennedy, he got away with it. Had you or I gotten drunk and driven off a bridge with someone in the car with us, and we left them to die while we chose not to report the accident and instead tried to invent an alibi, you or I would go to prison. We are not Kennedys.
The key merit of this book is that it demonstrates how in America today someone with power and influence can engage in criminal conduct and not only never be called to account for their crimes, but can even flourish and sit in position of moral authority over others.
Teddy Kennedy, who drove his car into the water off a Chappaquiddick, Mass. Bridge, drowning his pregnant girlfriend, while he swam back to his hotel, took a shower, and went to bed. Next morning, he mentioned the incident in an aside to one of his "fawning" hangers-on, who told the local cops. They went out and found the body and took Teddy's driver's license away for six months.Ray ThomasThis, for a man who usually rides around in a limousine with a paid driver! (I presume he was driving that night because he didn't want any witnesses) Then he paid off the girl's family and went on television TO "apologize" to the people of Massachusetts, who dutifully re-elected him Senator again and again, until he became one of the most powerful senators in Washington. Today, they don't even MENTION Chappaquiddick. Mentioning Chappaquiddick is "unseemly" and a "personal attack."
I remember a "dyed-in-the-wool Democrat" then telling me proudly that Chappaquiddick only cost Kennedy one percent in the polls. ONE PERCENT for killing his pregnant girlfriend! And people wonder why I have no time for this jerk. Nobody mentions it any more, yet they almost offhandedly throw in cracks about Rush Limbaugh's problems with prescription drugs whenever they can. And they laugh at Reagan's tendency to fall asleep while boring speakers droned on and on.
Nobody in Washington mentions Sen. Robert Byrd's history with the racist Ku Klux Klan. Again, mentioning such things concerning a Democrat is "unseemly." But it is not true about minor problems with Republicans (such as Tom DeLay hiring his family members to help in his election campaigns or accepting lobbyist money for trips, something ALL politicians do), things Democrats do regularly while no one mentions them.
It's not just the Swimmer. The whole family is rotten.
if he was not in the car at the time of the crash my first guess is that she told him she was pregnant? note there was no autopsy.
That is such a well-stated encapsulation of these events that I have saved it to a file.
What a staggering hypocrite this man is.
A few days ago, the Washington State Democratic Party chairman compared Cheney's behavior after the shooting with Kennedy's at Chappaquiddick, saying that both men behaved the same. What a lying SOB, and of course the Seattle P.I. let his comments go unchallenged.
So many people---especially journalists---keep telling us that Kennedy reported the accident eventually. He didn't. Someone else found the car and reported the accident.
As I remember, phone records indicated a large number of phone calls from the place where Kennedy was staying after he got back there that night after the accident.
If he could make those phone calls, why couldn't one of them been to the police about the accident?
BUMP