After the car accident that left a young woman dead, Ted Kennedy managed to escape with little to no punishment. 50 years later, the truth still feels just out of reach
Fifty years ago, as men prepared to land on the moon and millions of those stuck on earth followed each staticky dispatch from space, Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car into a pond. The weekend of the Apollo 11 moon landing should have cemented the Kennedy family’s legacy of public service. Seven years earlier, Teddy’s brother President John F. Kennedy proposed putting an American on the lunar surface before the decade was out.
“I had a shiver go up my spine like I’ll never forget,” Bruguiere says. “Jim said, ‘Oh shit. The world is going to descend,’” referring to Edgartown Police chief Jim Arena, who died in March. “It wasn’t like a normal person who had been in a fatal accident,” he says. “It was almost like he was an actor and he had a script to go by.”Molla says it was implied that he needed to “show him the courtesies of a senator” by not pushing for answers and not approaching the other women. Later, Molla says he drove Kennedy, Gargan, and Markham to the airport and again tried to get Kennedy to talk.
When the media finally descended, most of the stories focused on Kennedy’s political future and dismissed Kopechne. The most telling headline: “Teddy Escapes, Blonde Drowns.” Kluge says Kopechne attended the party because it was ultimately a thank-you for the women’s work on the Kennedy campaign a year earlier. “She didn’t go up there because of Teddy,” Kluge says. “She didn’t really know him.”
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