The Real Ted Kennedy

Heard any good Mary Jo Kopechne jokes lately? According to his good friend and former New York Times magazine editor Ed Klein, the late Ted Kennedy always enjoyed a good knee slapper on the topic of Chappaquiddick. And for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m not surprised. You probably don’t know about the “waitress sandwich” episode either. Nor do you recall when Ted Kennedy was raising money for terrorists. Or when he tried to strike a deal with the Soviet Union to undermine US foreign policy.

Since Kennedy gained his eligibility to vote in Chicago elections, our unbiased and ever vigilant mainstream news media has only told us what a great man he was, how he cared about the less fortunate. But while Ted Kennedy used his position in the Senate to tell us how we should live, he lived a life of dissolution and used his wealth, authority and surname to escape legal responsibility.

A young friend of mine had heard of Chappaquiddick but didn’t know what it meant. She had never heard of Mary Jo Kopechne. I enlightened her as I will enlighten you.

Mary Jo Kopechne was one of three young female volunteers for Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign who joined Ted Kennedy and two friends for a party at a cabin on Chappaquiddick Island. Later that night, Kennedy and Kopechne left the party for what was almost certainly a tryst. Kennedy, who had been drinking, missed a turn and drove off a bridge. Kennedy escaped the sinking car. Kopechne did not.

After abandoning Kopechne to her fate, Kennedy swam across a narrow channel and took a room at an Edgartown hotel. Later that night he complained to the desk clerk of noisy neighbors who were disrupting his sleep.

The next day he was confronted by one of his fellow partiers and forced to alert authorities. Kopechne was found later that day in a position indicating that she survived for some time until she exhausted the oxygen in her air pocket. Kennedy received a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident.

When the news media did mention Chappaquiddick, it was treated as though this was his only transgression in an otherwise exemplary life. Untrue.

Until the 1990’s, the Irish Republican Army was Europe’s most dangerous terrorist group, setting off bombs in public places and committing murders. Ted Kennedy was one of the IRA’s primary enablers in this country and even helped raise money through the fake charity Noraid. Kennedy eventually condemned Noraid and claimed that up until then he was ignorant of its terrorist ties, but if so, he was the last man to learn of it.

And Kennedy didn’t confine himself to subverting Great Britain. About 15 years ago, Russian president Boris Yeltsin opened the Soviet Union’s KGB files for public inspection. The news media discovered, and immediately forgot, that in 1983 Kennedy was attempting to undermine US foreign policy. He offered to sabotage Reagan’s missile defense plans in exchange for Soviet assistance to Democrats in the 1984 general elections. I don’t think that even Alger Hiss’s treachery approaches Ted Kennedy’s. But that Kennedy name and the news media’s affection shielded him once again.

In 1985, Ted Kennedy joined Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) in an assault on a cocktail waitress, which came to be known as the “waitress sandwich.” In an account verified for accuracy by the victim, Carla Gaviglio, that was published in Gentleman’s Quarterly in 1990: “As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair.”

This wretch served for decades as the conscience of the Democratic Party. The Chappaquiddick incident ended his presidential aspirations, but he never paid the slightest price for any of his other misbehaviors.

A wit once posited that, to hear people speak of the recently deceased, one might conclude that dying was a privilege reserved only for the most virtuous. Ted Kennedy’s eulogies verified that. But history should not be so kind.