Kennedy, Kopechne and the Chappy cover-up
By Mark Alexander
web posted April 16, 2018
For the first time in five years (my wife claims 10), I attended
a general admission movie recently — "Chappaquiddick."
[Applause]
While I have attended opening
celebrations of good films, in my opinion there are few that merit the
commute and expense of theater viewing rather than streaming it a couple months
later in the comfort of our family room. Many other folks clearly agree, given
that theater attendance was at a 25-year
low in 2017, along with Academy
Award viewership.
However, I don't regret attending this movie, as I'm both
familiar with the Kennedy political dynasty and the Dike Bridge at
Chappaquiddick on Martha's Vineyard Island.
Not long after Ted Kennedy's Chappy cover-up, I worked the
summer before college at the exclusive Edgartown Yacht Club on the Vineyard.
One summer was more than enough on the playground with the wealthy leftist
glitterati — a place that has since become a favorite resort destination of Demo-party protagonists,
including the Obama
and Clinton
clans.
So here's a little teaser about an event that also shaped my
perspective on Chappaquiddick: Ted Kennedy buried a drunken manslaughter
conviction in Edgartown, but I was arrested and jailed for an open beer! (If
you're interested in the latter, see the addendum below.)
Allow me to offer some insights on how the film portrayed an
incident that should have ended the Kennedy political dynasty, but did not,
because of their Massachusetts Democrat
Party machine and the voters whose blind allegiance they commanded — and
still do.
Ted Kennedy was 30 years old when he first entered the Senate,
the minimum age prescribed by our Constitution for that once-august body. He inherited
the seat following the November 1962 "special election" to fill
the vacant seat held by his brother, John, whose presidential election had been
crafted by "Old Joe" Kennedy. Ted was elected to a full six-year term
in 1964 and re-elected in a 1970 landslide, just one year after the
Chappaquiddick whitewash. Massachusetts Democrats would repeat that offense six
more times, and the "Lion of the
Senate" remained in office for 47 years until his death in August 2009
— becoming the fourth-longest continuously serving senator in U.S. history.
That was 40 years after Mary Jo Kopechne was buried, along
with manslaughter charges against Kennedy for her death.
The movie "Chappaquiddick" accurately depicts the
record of that night and the conspiracy to conceal the facts in the ensuing
hours, days, weeks and years. It was a fair treatment of the conspiracies and
lies that were undertaken to protect Kennedy's political ambitions. It took
half a century to bring the Kennedy conspiracy to the big screen, but I'm
frankly surprised it would make it through the Hollywood PC censors even after
50 years.
Here are the details ... according to the record.
On Friday night, July 18, 1969, then-Senate Majority Whip Edward
"Teddy" Kennedy, the youngest senator to ever hold that position of
power, was at a party with Kennedy campaign "Boiler Room Girls" on
the small island of Chappaquiddick across from Edgartown harbor. The Kennedys
were notorious philanderers, and on this night Teddy's pregnant wife Joan was
home at their Kennedy Cape compound.
At 11:30, he left the party inebriated with a 28-year-old
campaign assistant, Mary Jo Kopechne. En route to a beach where he intended to
"party," he drove his car off the side of the small Dike Bridge that
crosses tide-swept Poucha Pond to a vacant beach. Kennedy's car overturned in a
few feet of water, trapping Kopechne, who died of asphyxiation hours later
after depleting the oxygen in the air pocket she occupied in the back of the
overturned car.
Kennedy claimed he made several attempts to rescue Kopechne
prior to walking back to their Chappaquiddick party house. He passed four
residences on the way, where he could have called for help, but didn't. Upon
arriving at the party house, he summoned his cousin Joseph Gargan and former
Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Paul Markham, and together they hatched the
cover-up.
Gargan and Markham escorted their friend Teddy to the
Chappaquiddick ferry landing, where he either swam or they boated him the few
hundred feet to the Edgartown harbor landing.
Once back at his small Edgartown hotel, Kennedy changed clothes
and sobered up. It was 10 hours before he reported the incident to police the
next day (by which time his car had already been discovered). He was able,
thus, to avoid manslaughter prosecution for driving while intoxicated — and the
end of his political career. He and his political handlers conjured up a claim
that he hadn't reported the incident right away due to a concussion — though he
was able to swim the harbor channel just fine. The next day, he strapped on a
neck brace, until they decided the public wouldn't buy it. Then they considered
claiming that Kopechne was driving. That option was rejected.
Mary Jo's body was quickly sent, without autopsy, back to her
parents' hometown, where she was buried.
During the "investigation" in the days that followed
her death, Kennedy testified that he left the party because Kopechne told him
"that she was desirous of leaving, if I would be kind enough to drop her
back at her hotel." But Kopechne didn't tell any of the other Boiler Room
Girls that she was leaving, and she left her purse and hotel key at the party
house.
As for the cause of death, experienced Edgartown Fire Rescue
diver John Farrar, who recovered Kopechne's body, testified, "She didn't
drown. She died of suffocation in her own air void. It took her at least three
or four hours to die. I could have had her out of that car 25 minutes after I
got the call. But [Kennedy] didn't call."
On July 25, Kennedy pleaded guilty to "leaving the scene of
an accident," and his family attorneys argued that any jail sentence
should be suspended. Nobody was shocked when the prosecutors and Judge James
Boyle agreed, and Kennedy's two-month incarceration sentence, the statutory
minimum, was suspended.
At 7:30 that evening, Kennedy delivered
a prepared speech to a televised audience. In his remarks, he claimed to
the nation that there was "no truth whatever to the widely circulated
suspicions of immoral conduct," that he "was not driving under the
influence of liquor," and that he had "all kinds of scrambled
thoughts" including "whether some awful curse actually did hang over
all the Kennedys."
But it wasn't the "Kennedy curse" in this case, it was
the curse Teddy Kennedy.
He then looked into the camera and said in third person, with
all the sincerity of a generationally seasoned method actor:
"If at any time the citizens of Massachusetts should lack
confidence in their senator's character or his ability, with or without
justification, he could not in my opinion adequately perform his duties and
should not continue in office."
He concluded, "The opportunity to work with you and serve
Massachusetts has made my life worthwhile. So I ask you tonight, the people of
Massachusetts, to think this through with me. In facing this decision, I seek
your advice and opinion. In making it I seek your prayers."
Apparently, a Kennedy life was more worthwhile than a Kopechne
life.
Following his remarks, his family's sycophantic supporters
showered them with support.
Notably, a week after the conclusion of the inquest and the
suspended sentence, the grand jury foreman told the local Vineyard Gazette,
"I think that we were manipulated and I think that we were blocked from
doing our job, and if you want to use the term cover-up, then okay, that's what
it was. ... There seem to be two sets of rules and justices that are doled out
— one for the rich and powerful, and one for the regular people, for you and
me."
As previously noted, Massachusetts Demos handed Kennedy a
landslide re-election in 1970, a year after Mary Jo's death.
In 1980, despite Kennedy's command over Massachusetts voters,
Democrats across the nation rejected his presidential challenge to
then-incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was then resoundingly defeated that November
by Ronald Reagan.
But Kennedy would have his revenge.
Between 2004 and 2008, Ted Kennedy and his Massachusetts leftist understudy, John Kerry,
were most directly responsible for elevating an unknown community organizer, Barack Obama,
to the presidency.
The systemic Teflon shield that Kennedy perfected has endured
well beyond his death, as is evident in the near-ascension to the presidency of
Hillary
Clinton, the party's profoundly
corrupt 2016 nominee.
Among the disgraceful Bay State memorials to Teddy is the $38
million taxpayer-funded
Kennedy Institute in Boston.
Astoundingly, the Democrat Party and its MSM propaganda machine are
now trying to revive the Kennedy dynasty by promoting
Rep. Joe Kennedy III, Ted Kennedy's great-nephew, to national status.
Recall that it was this latest iteration of the dullard Kennedy clan who droned
on through a dry response to Donald Trump's
2018 State
of the Union address. Trump's address that night was titled "Our New
American Moment," but there's nothing new about Joe Kennedy.
Oh, and about that open beer ... an addendum.
Unlike Ted Kennedy, on another Friday summer's eve a few years
after the Chappaquiddick subterfuge, when I was working on the island, I WAS
arrested and JAILED by the Edgartown police. That was in connection with
defending my sister's honor after some local jerk yelled at her as she was
crossing a street with her leashed lab puppy and very pregnant with her first
child.
Later that evening, the same jerk cruised slowly down the alley
by my sister's little rental house — and I spotted him from her side yard. Of
course, I yelled the same words at him he had yelled at her earlier that day.
That was followed by a chorus of the same words from the cottage windows of a
few of her husband's ice hockey teammates.
The offender slammed on his car brakes and backed up to the yard
gate where I was standing (with a Black Label beer in my hand — I was 18 and of
legal age then). He jumped from his vehicle and stormed by me into the house,
where there was a verbal confrontation. He then exited by me through the gate.
We had a few "words," at which time he grabbed my
right arm. I was 6'4" and weighed more than two bills, and in response, I
slung my arm around, connecting my elbow with his face, putting him on his, uh,
rear. It was only then, after getting up off the ground, that "the
jerk" pulled a badge from his back pocket, identified himself as an Edgartown
police officer, and arrested me for having an "open alcohol container in
public." (I should note here that he shoved me into "public" on
his exit from the yard.)
He put me in the back seat of his unmarked car and, much to the
distress of my sister, off I went to be booked and locked up in the old
Edgartown jail. Soon thereafter, the aforementioned hockey players showed up
under the open jail window in the cell I was occupying, and as they were full
of Black Label beer themselves, began serenading me with a spiritual —
"Swing Low Sweet Chariot."
Soon thereafter, I was released from jail with an order to
appear in the old courthouse the following week for sentencing — the same
courthouse where Kennedy's sentence had been suspended.
I arrived for that hearing with my key witness, my sweet
expecting sister, who, from the witness stand, tearfully delivered her
emotional account of being verbally assaulted by the arresting officer on the
day of my incarceration.
"Tearfully" is the key word here.
I knew the winds of justice were turning in my favor when the
judge turned to the police officer and scornfully asked, "Is this true?
Did you yell at this young woman and call her a 'dumb —k'?"
Case dismissed! Apparently in Edgartown, it all boils down to
how much justice one can afford, or how many tears a young expectant mother can
shed!
So Kennedy and his clan buried a drunken manslaughter
conviction, but I was jailed for an open beer.
For the record, later that week I put my Chevy truck on the
two-car barge for the one-minute ride over to Chappaquiddick. Late that night,
I drove out to Dike Bridge with friends and successfully crossed without
incident. That was before the guardrails had been installed and when there was
still clear evidence of the damage done to the bridge by the undercarriage of
Kennedy's car as it plunged over the side. 
Mark
Alexander is the executive editor of the Patriot Post.