Peter Canellos is editor-at-large of Politico and editor of the book Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy.

The new movie “Chappaquiddick” arrives in the midst of a mini-Kennedy revival, and threatens to skunk it up. Many CNN viewers who watched the promos for the new miniseries “The Kennedys,” featuring the beautiful family romping on the beach in rich mid-century home-movie stock, were instantly fed the counter-image of Ted’s car plummeting off a bridge in ads for “Chappaquiddick.” Liberals who dared to love Rep. Joe Kennedy III’s passionate rebuttal to Donald Trump’s State of the Union risk being dragged to the multiplex by smirking conservative friends when “Chappaquiddick” opens on April 6.

Older viewers will understand that it’s always been thus. The July 1969 car accident that killed a young woman on tiny Chappaquiddick Island, off Martha’s Vineyard, was the end of the Kennedy moment, when the dreams of Camelot and the deferred hopes of martyrdom went skidding off the road and disappeared into the abyss. The movie understands this, too, and rarely misses a chance to show how reports of Ted Kennedy’s accident shared front pages with the moon landing, a fulfillment of President John F. Kennedy’s promise.


It was an ending, all right, but also a beginning. The Ted Kennedy of 1969 was a haunted figure, the spectral image of his brothers—the accent, the teeth, the hair—but at the same time, most decidedly not his brothers. As the movie presents him, he was a childlike figure, alternately entitled and self-pitying. The car accident was the fulcrum of his political career, the moment he shifted from inheritor to tarnished survivor, when he earned his self-image as the undeserving heir. But it also marked the start of one of the most remarkable revivals in American politics, as Kennedy settled down to the hard work of legislating and, almost as penance, went on to amass the most impressive list of accomplishments in Senate history.

This later realization—that Ted Kennedy was, in fact, a political giant who stood on his own two feet—marked much of the attention that surrounded his death from cancer in August 2009. Now, the question is whether the introduction of the Chappaquiddick story to a new generation will jeopardize that legacy.

It might, though there’s a lot of Chappaquiddick damage already baked into Ted Kennedy’s reputation. More significantly, though, it will cast new light on the incident itself, a strange, sometimes ambiguous series of events that confronted an America already benumbed by the violence of the preceding year. To today’s audience, primed by the #metoo moment, saturated with political scandals and inured to seemingly endless investigations, it could be something of an eye-opener: An actual tragedy, in which someone died, that was notable for its lack of both official scrutiny and harsh legal consequences.

“Chappaquiddick” won’t be confused for a pro-Kennedy retelling of the story. The first words the movie’s Kennedy says to his friends after the accident, while young Mary Jo Kopechne is still submerged in his car, are “I’m not going to be president.” But neither will the film’s portrayal of the senator be villainous enough for the Kennedy-hating right, who proudly posted bumper stickers saying “More people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than in a nuclear power accident,” and who for decades afterward consumed volumes of Chappaquiddick conspiracies in dusty paperbacks.

Mary Jo Kopechne, who was killed in the car accident off the Dyke Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969. | AP Photo

Instead, the movie tries for something like a consensus view, making faint allusions to claims by local diver John Farrar that Kopechne might have been rescued had Kennedy reported the accident earlier, but also downplaying the role that Kennedy’s drinking may have played in the crash. Kennedy isn’t seen doing much carousing; and his interest in Kopechne, a Senate aide to Robert F. Kennedy, seems closer to what he always claimed it was—a casual friendship that turned meaningful only when commiserating about Bobby’s assassination a year earlier.

For this attempt at even-handedness, “Chappaquiddick” may turn out to be a box-office dud—too depressing for Kennedy admirers, and too credulous for detractors. But it’s revealing, nonetheless. And it engages in a kind of exploration that people who are serious about political history should appreciate. It raises the question whether, after almost half a century, something like the truth can be rendered from an event as explosive as this one.

Kennedy’s behavior is often described, even by some grudging supporters, as unforgivable. He himself called it indefensible. Now that five decades have expired, and most of the political heat has dissipated, can America come close to understanding what really happened on that humid night, on that ramshackle bridge, under that all-seeing moon?



***

“Chappaquiddick” presents itself as a political thriller, with a poster featuring head shots of all the main characters, including the New Frontiersmen left over from his older brother’s truncated administration who rallied to Ted’s support. Those factotums pulled strings and overwhelmed the overly deferential local officials assigned to investigate the accident. As a result, crucial tests weren’t administered, such as an autopsy of Kopechne’s body or an interrogation of Kennedy about his drinking at the party that preceded the crash. The movie tries to show how a rich and powerful family stage-managed an existential crisis.

There’s certainly truth in that, but very little surprise, at least by today’s standards of political manipulation. But sometimes, in setting out to tell one story, another, more powerful one emerges. And the takeaway from watching the Chappaquiddick incident restaged for the big screen is the almost supernatural shock of the accident itself. Director John Curran may have set out to make a political thriller, but he ended up with a horror movie.

Under a shroud of darkness, the car bearing Kennedy and Kopechne bounces its way down a dirt road as overhanging branches reach out like grabbing hands. The speeding vehicle emerges from that tunnel, at a bend to the road, to confront a bridge with no guardrails, spanning a channel of swirling, black water. As the car somersaults into the water, landing top-down in the current, its ghostly headlights illuminate seaweed and schools of fish. Kopechne is trapped inside, while Kennedy, a strong swimmer from a lifetime on the ocean, bubbles to the surface.

A night view of a car approaching Dyke Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. | Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images

The novelist Joyce Carol Oates was the first to see the neo-gothic overtones of this situation. Her 1992 novel, “Black Water,” is told in part from the perspective of the Kopechne character, a young woman desperately gulping air as water closes in, amid the slowly dawning realization that the senator isn’t going to come back to save her. Seeing it all recreated on film wipes away the subordinate questions of whether Kennedy’s operatives bullied local officials and reveals the moral core of the case. The horror in Chappaquiddick, the real indictment of Ted Kennedy, is this: Did he, at a crucial moment, think more of his political prospects than of saving the life of a young woman?

Annette Gordon-Reed, the lawyer-historian who brought fresh attention to Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, argues at the start of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello” that in the long light of history, facts can’t be ascertained to an absolute certainty. But a lawyer, piecing together a circumstantial case, can present what likelier than not occurred. This can be gleaned through a combination of documentary evidence and assumptions about the motives of those involved.

Assuming that a half-century is enough time to apply the same analysis to Chappaquiddick, how, then, does Kennedy stand on the most serious charge, that he put career ahead of his humanity?

Top: The Oldsmobile Delta 88 car owned and driven by Senator Ted Kennedy after it had been pulled out of the water following the accident. Bottom left: The house on Chappaquiddick Island Kennedy hosted a reunion for campaign workers from his brother Robert’s presidential campaign. Bottom right: Kennedy's friends, Raymond LaRosa and Chase Tretter, walk along a sidewalk during the investigation into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. | Getty Images/Time & Life Pictures

It’s still not an easy verdict, but much can be revealed by a Gordon-Reed-type analysis. On the side of the indictment are the many seemingly obvious lies that Kennedy told in the immediate aftermath of the incident and his hours-long delay in reporting the accident. He claimed that he and Kopechne, after several hours of partying with a group of former Bobby Kennedy staffers at a cottage rented by his cousin Joe Gargan, had grown weary and wistful, remembering the dead senator. It was about 11 p.m., and Kennedy, ready to hit the sack, offered to drive Kopechne back to the small barge-like ferry that would carry them on the brief trip to Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, where each had a hotel room.

To say there were holes in that story was an understatement. First, Kopechne left her purse and room keys back at Gargan’s cottage. Second, the car did not follow the paved road to the ferry; instead, it made a very sharp right turn onto the dark dirt road heading for the beach—a beach that Kennedy had visited that afternoon. Third, a Chappaquiddick resident named Huck Look, who was also a deputy sheriff, reported seeing a car that matched Kennedy’s, with a man and a woman inside, near the turn-off for the beach at 12:45 a.m.—an hour and a half after Kennedy said the accident had occurred.

The movie doesn’t even bother to credit Kennedy’s story. It portrays the events as though Kennedy had lied. That’s less of an editorial judgment than it might appear, however, since Kennedy’s story hasn’t held up under scrutiny. Plus, there’s an obvious motivation for his misstatements. The ferry to Edgartown stopped running at midnight, so if he wanted to claim that he was just offering Kopechne a lift—rather than making a middle-of-the-night trip to the beach—he would have had to back-date the accident. Likewise, his turn onto the dirt road, such a curious wrong turn if he were heading to the ferry, would have made sense if the beach were his destination all along. This would comport with the deputy sheriff’s observation, as well.

Based on the preponderance of the evidence, it’s logical to assume that Kennedy and Kopechne were headed to the beach. What they would do there will never be known—it’s possible that they didn’t even know. But the appearance of a 37-year-old married senator and a 28-year-old unmarried former Kennedy staff member heading together to the beach at 1 a.m. would have shocked many people in the days when the far greater indiscretions of many politicians, including John F. Kennedy, had been shielded by a quiescent press.

It’s significant that seven days later, when Ted Kennedy finally addressed the issues raised by the case, in a speech to the nation, he seemed most eager to refute the one charge that wasn’t part of the actual case—immoral behavior. “There is no truth, no truth whatever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening,” he said. “There has never been a private relationship between us of any kind.”

He also denied driving while drunk, a claim that may also seem suspicious to current sensibilities, when drunk driving is taken far more seriously than in 1969. At that time, the legal limit in Massachusetts was a blood-alcohol concentration of .15 percent, about twice the current level. To exceed that mark, over the three or four hours spent at Gargan’s cottage, a man Kennedy’s size would have had to guzzle eight mixed drinks, or even more beer and wine. It’s quite possible he did, but equally possible he didn’t—even if he had been drinking steadily that night. Kopechne’s blood-alcohol concentration was tested after her death (one of the few tests done before her body was embalmed and sent home to her parents) and it was .09 percent.

Kennedy’s level of inebriation is significant because it would provide a motive for his failure to report the accident until late that morning. Even if he was just straddling the legal limit, he might have been fearful enough that he delayed reporting the accident. Or he may not have known the legal limit, since he rarely drove himself anywhere. Thus, it’s reasonable to assume that he was afraid his drinking had played a role in the accident.

In later court testimony, Kennedy recalled the car rapidly filling with water, as both he and Kopechne were thrashing around. In a state of panic, he pulled the door handle and pushed outward but couldn’t free himself. There was so little oxygen that he was swallowing water. He doesn’t remember how he escaped, only that he propelled himself to the surface and made his way to shore, gasping. (Though the movie doesn’t address this, Kennedy presumably escaped through the driver’s side window, which was the only one rolled down in the car.) He said he made multiple attempts to dive down and free Kopechne, before finally realizing that he could not. He then walked and ran, stumbling, back to the cottage; during that time, he passed other houses and an emergency fire depot that had a security phone marked by a red light, but did not call for assistance.

After arriving at the cottage, he told Gargan and another friend, Paul Markham, a former U.S. attorney, about the accident. By their accounts, they raced to the scene, where the car was still visible underwater, its headlights burning. They stripped off their clothes and dove down repeatedly. They stopped only when they became too exhausted to continue. None of them called the police. Gargan and Markham said Kennedy told them he would take care of it, before swimming back to his Edgartown hotel room.

The failure to alert the authorities, Kennedy said later, was indefensible, though he suggested that his trauma and a concussion played a role. “I was overcome, I’m frank to say, by a jumble of emotions: grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock,” he said in his televised speech. He also confessed to wondering “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.”

Clockwise from top right: Sen. Edward Kennedy hurries toward Edgartown center after leaving the ferry from Chappaquiddick Island, Saturday, July 19, 1969; an illustration of Chappaquiddick Island with relevant locations marked; Kennedy is escorted by troopers as he leaves court in Edgartown, Mass., July 25, 1969, after pleading guilty to charge of leaving the scene of an accident; Kennedy and and his wife, Joan, pass tombstone after a memorial service for Mary Jo Kopechne. | AP Photos/Getty Images

It seems reasonable to assume that a childlike fear of the consequences—including drunk driving or just plain recklessness, not to mention the questionable appearance of having an attractive young woman in his car—led Kennedy to delay reporting the accident. If in doing so he put concerns about his own well-being ahead of the possibility of rescuing Kopechne, trading her life for his political future, then he’s guilty of the serious moral crime that Oates wrote about, the horror at the bottom of the Chappaquiddick story. But the preponderance of the evidence doesn’t lead to that conclusion.

To be truly guilty, Kennedy would have had to believe there was a chance to rescue Kopechne and knowingly refused to take it. Even assuming the basest of motives, Kennedy would have realized that saving Kopechne would help him far more than letting her die. If he or anyone else had been able to rescue her, the accident might have raised questions about his judgment or alcohol consumption, but they would have been more easily addressed with Kopechne to vouch for him. A drunk-driving case in an accident in which no one died would have been less harmful to him than the charge he ultimately faced, of leaving the scene of an accident, in which a person died. And in the best-case scenario, if he and she had both walked away, the accident would have been a fleeting blip, a near-miss in the long list of Kennedy tragedies.



***

Politics is a strange scrambler of motives, and a distorter of events. Even with all the questionable judgments in the case—the drinking at the party, the decision to head for the beach, the failure to report the accident—it’s likely that, had Mary Jo Kopechne been Kennedy’s wife, he would have emerged as a figure of sympathy. Poor Ted, he lost his brothers and his wife. Who could question his actions in the midst of such grief? The fact that Kopechne was not Joan Kennedy was the linchpin for the lies that followed. That makes Chappaquiddick the progenitor of a distinct genre of political scandal, in which politicians go so far as to break the law in order to cover up personal entanglements that, while not illegal, are politically harmful.

Politics may have been behind Kennedy’s lies and failings, but politics also spared him—albeit at a tremendous cost. As the movie presents it, his decision to continue in politics rather than resign his Senate seat was itself an ethical lapse, offending even his cousin Joe Gargan. His speech, recreated in the film with a crowd of handlers in the room, is a coming-of-age moment, in which he embraces politics in all its compromises.

In saving his career, he nakedly drew on the country’s grief for his brothers, spending down the family capital. He spoke about the odd mood of Gargan’s party, with everyone remembering the slain Bobby, and about the Kennedy curse. Massachusetts voters—the least skeptical when it came to his family—were only too willing to lend a hand, like helping a neighbor through a hard time.

Senator John F. Kennedy, center, and brothers Edward Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy attend the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., on March 15, 1958. | AP Photos

How must Kennedy have felt at that moment? He had always been the pudgy younger brother, the figure of fun, of whom less was expected. Certainly, Jack and Bobby didn’t want him crowding them in Washington; his father, who believed in him, insisted that the older boys back his race for Jack’s old Senate seat in 1962. It had pleased Ted that Jack lived just long enough in the White House to hear good things about him, when the affable youngest sibling made a positive first impression on his elders in the Senate. Like many kid brothers, he worshiped his older siblings and felt a solemn responsibility to carry on in their footsteps, to finish their lives for them. But they must have been frowning down at that moment, watching Ted call upon their ghosts to help him escape that of Mary Jo Kopechne.

In truth, many people felt that a sense of unworthiness had been dogging Kennedy even before the Chappaquiddick tragedy. And it crushed down on him after what was, in retrospect, one of his finest moments—his eulogy for Bobby at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York: “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, but be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

At that moment, at age 36, Ted Kennedy was about as close as any man could be to having the weight of the world on his shoulders. It was 1968, the year of war and assassinations. He was grieving for his second brother gunned down in less than five years; he was the father of three kids and a surrogate father to 13 others. He had elderly parents, including a stroke-victim father, Joe, who had only a little more than a year to live. (“Chappaquiddick,” however, chooses to revive Joe Kennedy as a stage villain, twisted with paralysis but able to croak “alibi” to Ted; it’s a stretch.) There were also the thousands of New Frontiersmen who had been waiting in tongue-hanging expectation to return to power. And there was, in his mind, the awareness that tens of millions of Americans believed that only a Kennedy could make the world right again, that the last good day they’d had was November 21, 1963, before the assassination in Dallas.

In that vice, Ted faced intense pressure to enter the 1968 presidential race in Bobby’s stead. His faltering denials were more reflective of shock than ambivalence. He didn’t want to do it. He was intensely aware, friends recalled, that the people wanted his brothers, not him. And when the calendar turned to 1969, the pressure was still there, only with a different date on the bumper sticker: 1972. He was considered such a sure thing for the Democratic nomination that President Richard M. Nixon already had his henchmen tracking him.

They couldn’t have dreamed up a plot as rich as Chappaquiddick. And, in retrospect, even some Kennedy admirers imagined that Ted had sensed his life spiraling out of control before that fateful night on the island—that he was awaiting tragedy, rather than preparing for victory.



***

The three deaths—Jack’s, Bobby’s and Mary Jo’s—shadowed Ted Kennedy for the rest of his career, 40 years as it turned out. He was able to turn Jack and Bobby’s legacies into a family brand of politics that outlived them all. But Mary Jo’s legacy was his alone, and it shaped his public image as much as the others. Every day that he lived was one that Kopechne—a talented woman with political interests of her own—would not. It seemed cosmically unfair that he should have a second act when she couldn’t even complete her first.

When he was between marriages and went out on the town, drinking and enjoying the company of attractive women, the news media and the public saw only sordidness, as if another crash were just around the corner. When, in 1991, his 30-year-old nephew William Kennedy Smith was charged with raping a woman along the Palm Beach waterfront during a family Easter retreat, the scandal became Ted’s to bear, even though he was asleep at home when the alleged attack occurred.

While much of the public saw only dissipation, many Senate colleagues and constituents saw an intense focus on the job at hand. A haunted man had become a driven man. By the time of Chappaquiddick, Kennedy had already played central roles in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965—two of the century’s most consequential pieces of legislation. After the accident, he made his Senate office the focal point for legislation not only in civil rights and immigration, but health care and education.

Even when other senators’ names were on the bills, his were the hands moving them to passage—from minimum-wage hikes to student loans, from National Institutes of Health grants to freedom for Soviet refuseniks. His fingerprints were all over the Americans with Disabilities Act and the CHIP program, which guaranteed health care for children. He was the Senate’s pioneer in gay rights. In the 1980s and ’90s, he faced down prejudice against AIDS—the “gay disease”—and obtained tens of billions of dollars to cover the latest medications for HIV-positive patients. The massive cash infusion hastened research and saved lives.

Clockwise, from top right: Sen. Kennedy confers with Sen. Orrin Hatch during a January 1987 meeting of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee; Kennedy speaks to members of the United Mine Workers during his run for president in 1980; Kennedy and other members of Congress at a 20th birthday party for Medicare and Medicaid, July 30, 1985; Rev. Vernon E. Carter leads civil rights demonstrators in prayer on steps of the Boston State House on March 9, 1965, the same day Kennedy addressed a joint session of the state legislature. | AP Photos

Many politicians believe his best work was largely unseen—enforcing boundaries on the conservative revolution of the 1980s. It came after his one failed attempt at the presidency, challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and Kennedy emerged as the de facto leader of the opposition. Throughout the Reagan era and beyond, he constructed a political bulwark around civil rights and voting rights, and Medicare and Medicaid, preserving the essential core of the liberal agenda of the ’60s. He sometimes cast these achievements as Jack’s and Bobby’s, even though his own role was greater. He could push causes further by tying them to the sainted reputations of his brothers than to his own, more human, one.

And even if he was partying at night, he was sharp in the morning, having absorbed every detail of the briefing books his staff delivered to his door. And yet, somehow, a sense of darkness remained. Chappaquiddick had proved, as if further evidence were necessary, that his would not be a fortunate life. He would survive but lose the auspiciousness that enveloped him in the scant months between Bobby’s death and Mary Jo’s.

In Boston and Washington, he was respected for his accomplishments and appreciated for his friendships. Almost everywhere else, his reputation was imprisoned in the ’60s. And for every Kennedy nostalgic, there were two hecklers waiting to inveigh about all he got away with on Chappaquiddick. In the last year of his life, 2009, it came as a surprise to most of America that he had not, in fact, been coasting on his brothers’ reputations all those years—that he was one of the hardest workers in the Senate. And they were taken aback that he was considered such an empathetic friend to colleagues, family members and people in need. Where Jack and Bobby had their eyes on the horizon, Ted focused on the person in front of him. Orrin Hatch and John McCain were among the hundreds of friends who got teary-eyed at his funeral.

Now comes “Chappaquiddick.” The hole at the center of the movie is the character of Ted, played by Jason Clarke. At times scheming to save himself, at other times determined to take responsibility, Clarke’s Kennedy is a man of such pitiful contradictions that he’s a blur. Over the years, the real Kennedy did his best to fill in that hole, but some of that emptiness, some of that blurriness, remains. A religious man, he accepted it as his fate and moved on.