Ted Kennedy [with neck brace] leaving funeral of Mary Jp Kopechne.
Posted on 03/29/2018 7:42:17 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
Mary Jo Kopechne had been dead for several months when her parents began to have serious questions about what really happened the night of July 18, 1969.
At first, Gwen and Joe Kopechne had believed Senator Ted Kennedy’s account of that evening. “They trusted him,” says Mary Jo’s aunt, Georgetta Potoski, 75. “They loved the Kennedys. But later on, they started to question what happened.”
Ted Kennedy could never escape the unanswered questions about his 10-hour delay in reporting the accident to Edgartown police.
“The longer it went on, more and more inconsistencies were discovered and he wasn’t telling Gwen and Joe anything,” says Potoski ,the sister of Gwen Kopechne. “Gwen and Joe never had the last hours of their daughter’s life explained to them.”
Now, 49 years after Mary Jo’s death, a new movie Chappaquiddick explores what happened that night and in the week that followed, when Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.
Potoski and her son William Nelson, 46, hope the film may prompt someone to come forward with new information— and give them the answers they never got from Senator Kennedy. “The truth has never really come out,” says Nelson. “The story has never been put to rest.”
The film has not been well-received by the Kennedy camp.
Still, Potoski and her family hope that Mary Jo’s story being told on screen will result in more people learning that she was much more than just a “blonde secretary,” as she was often referred to at the time.
Potoski and Nelson have written a book, Our Mary Jo, about her life and have also launched a scholarship in her name at Potoski’s alma mater, Misericordia College (now Misericordia University), to be given out for the first time this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at people.com ...
So, why the sympathy neck brace, trying to tell the public that he was in the car?
Was he related to harcourt fenton?
Ted Kennedy was addressed by three separate liquor store owners as “the guy who paid for my houseboat.”
Ted Kennedy entered his liver in a Tough Man competition.
Ted Kennedy was shocked and confounded to discover they actually sell Coke without Jack Daniels.
Ted Kennedy didn’t sniff the cork, he chewed it.
Ted Kennedy like a splash of coffee in his morning whiskey.
Ted Kennedy was kept awake at night by the sound of his liver crying.
Ted Kennedy always drank Irish Coffee for breakfast because it contains all four adult food groups: fat, sugar, caffeine and alcohol.
Ted Kennedy never drank anything stronger than vodka before breakfast.
If it weren’t for the olives in his martinis, Ted Kennedy would have starved to death.
When Ted Kennedy spirits got low, he used a straw.
Ted Kennedy drank a bottle of wine every day. Unless he was sick. Then he drank two.
Ted Kennedy gave directions with liquor stores and bars as the major landmarks, i.e., “You’ll pass Argonaut’s Liquors on the left and Scooter’s on the right, then turn right on the street between the Satire Lounge and the Lion’s Lair, then continue until you see the tree that looks like a huge martini glass.”
Roger Mudd was blacklisted after that interview with Ted Kennedy.
I remember being furious that they let it go (for several years afterward), but I doubt that any resistance by the parents would ever have gained traction given that the country was still revering JFK and Bobby.
“I hear you need a house painted?”
The coroner said, “Ted Kennedy killed her as surely as if he had put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
She was found in rigor mortis position with her head and neck arched upward into an air pocket in the upside down car with her arms frozen in rigor mortis position against the seat.
She died of oxygen deprivation, NOT OF DROWNING. She had used up all the oxygen in the small air pocket she found.
The coroner estimated she lived a MINIMUM of TWO HOURS in that position.
Kennedy did not report the accident until the next morning.
If he had reported it immediately she could have been saved.
On this day – July 18, 1969 – After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.
Events at Chappaquiddick Island gained international attention on July 18, 1969, when the dead body of Mary Jo Kopechne was discovered inside an overturned car in a channel on the island. The car belonged to Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who did not report the midnight incident to police authorities until the following morning.
Kopechne’s body was recovered from the submerged car, and Kennedy entered a plea of guilty to a charge of “leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury”. He received a sentence of two months in jail, which was suspended. (AP)(Wikipedia)
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politicsdaily.com
Ted Kennedy’s actions that followed the accident – not summoning emergency personnel who might have saved her life, the cover-up of the facts, not even reporting the accident until the following morning – likely would have landed a man without political connections in prison. It was heartbreaking for her family and friends to experience the loss of a lovely, devout, and socially committed 28-year-old woman. For millions of Americans who never knew her, the tragic incident has fed a festering cultural grudge.
The idea that Edward M. Kennedy could be a viable national politician – let alone a much-admired and lionized political figure – has convinced millions of everyday citizens and succeeding generations of conservative activists that among the elites of academia, politics, and the media two standards of behavior exist: One for liberal Democrats and another for conservative Republicans.
Liberals in the media pretend not to see this. Or rather, they blame those who feel aggrieved. This very morning, my old friend James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly employed the usual euphemisms about Kennedy’s behavior in his post – and then launched a preemptive strike against anyone who might view Teddy’s life with gimlet eyes. “A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life — the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick — but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul,” Fallows wrote.
I like Jim Fallows, and stand in awe of Kennedy’s effectiveness as a politician myself. But hold on a minute: The “college problems” were serial cheating. The “silver-spoon” stuff, I suppose refers to, among other things, the speeding and reckless driving that ominously foreshadowed Chappaquiddick. And that phrase “redeeming himself in the eyes of all but the committed haters,” well, the problem with that is that to many people, redemption implies that a sinner has come clean.
Certain theological questions present themselves here. One of them is whether one can completely atone for a sin that is not truthfully confessed.
On July 18, 1969, Kennedy and five other men – all but one of whom was married – met six single young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The women were known as the “Boiler Room Girls” for their tireless work in a windowless office in that ill-fated campaign.
Sometime late at night after an evening of drinking, Kennedy and Kopechne went for a drive in his 1967 Oldsmobile. Kennedy placed the time he left at 11:15 p.m. A local cop who believed he saw the car put the time at 12:40 a.m. – significant at the time because Kennedy testified that he was taking Kopechne to a ferry that ran to Edgartown, a ferry that stopped running at midnight. In any event, Kennedy wasn’t headed toward the ferry landing when his car careened off Dike Bridge and into the inlet known as Poucha Pond; they were heading toward the beach.
Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone.When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity.
First of all, he and two of the men, a cousin named Joseph Gargan and a friend named Paul Markham say they returned to the bridge to try and rescue Mary Jo. (If the Edgartown constable who believes he saw Kennedy was accurate, this was impossible.) Next, the men claimed that they drove Kennedy to the Chappaquiddick ferry landing, where he told them not to tell the other women for fear that they would try to rescue Mary Jo – at great peril to themselves – and assured them that he would report the incident to authorities. Then, the men said, Kennedy dove into the water and swam across the sound to Edgartown himself.
Upon reaching Edgartown, Kennedy went to his room at a local inn – it was now 2:25 a.m., — where he spent the night, and the following morning engaged in small talk about sailing with a local yachter and agreed to have breakfast with the man when Gargan and Markham showed up about 7:30. They asked him who he’d called about the accident only to receive the astounding reply: no one. Kennedy explained it this way at the inquest: “I just couldn’t gain the strength within me, the moral strength, to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, either, and wouldn’t until 9 a.m.
Not reporting a fatal traffic accident is a felony in most places. On Martha’s Vineyard, if the driver is a Kennedy, it’s not even a matter of official curiosity: The local police chief never even asked Kennedy why he waited nine hours to report what had happened. The state of Massachusetts, citing Kennedy’s excessive speed on the bridge, suspended his license for six months. That was it.
In protesting Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy thundered, “Is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” These words, uttered five years after Chappaquiddick, are ubiquitous on conservative websites where they are offered up as evidence, not only of Kennedy’s hypocrisy, but the mainstream media’s as well.
Similarly, to movement conservatives, Kennedy’s attack on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is offered up as a case study in the press’s historic double standard. Immediately after Bork’s July 1, 1987, nomination, Kennedy took to the Senate floor.
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,”he said. “Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy....”
It is an article of faith among conservatives that if a Republican senator had launched an attack this personal and vitriolic – not to mention wildly exaggerated – against a nominee named by a Democratic president that liberals would have gone ape and that the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate would have made the intemperate conduct of the Republican senator the main issue.
Twenty-nine years ago, after the inquest cast doubt on his version of events at Chappaquiddick, Kennedy briefly took issue with the report, then went about his duties: In a speech to a Boston business group, he lambasted Nixon’s decision to extend the Vietnam War into Cambodia, he consented to his first broadcast interview since Bobby Kennedy’s death, and he kept an appointment to narrate Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. As Time magazine noted at the time, this engagement included a bit of irony: The opening lines of Lincoln read by Kennedy that night included this passage. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We ... will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
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For Democrats, the end always justifies the means, and rhetoric will always trump reason. Two orators of the Democratic party of the last 40 years, Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, were two of the most immoral men who ever graced public life. Clinton will speak tonight, and as always, his horrific history of rape and abuse of women will be ignored so he can pose as a person who really cares. Just ask Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willie, among others too numerous to name, how much he cares.
But the worst example of all is the Democrat’s lionizing of Ted Kennedy. In a seven minute video at the DNC, there were plenty of quotes from Kennedy and his admirers that should be seen through the agonized eyes of a young girl, slowly asphyxiating in a car submerged in water, a young woman vainly trying to open the door so she could breathe just one more time, a young woman betrayed by the scion of the country’s most powerful family who left her to die.
Mary Jo Kopechne.
Kennedy said:
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
Whose dream? Mary Jo’s?
I believe in the bright light of hope and possibility
I always have even in the darkest hours.
That bright light of hope was the pressure his family brought to bear so he wasn’t arrested for vehicular manslaughter.
Everything he did was about the future, it was about going forward.
You bet Kennedy never looked back.
Barack Obama: Those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here —
people of both parties knew that what drove him was something more.
Sure they knew what drove him. The accessory to rape with his nephew, the sex on tables; why do you think Clinton idolized the Kennedys?
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1. Ted Kennedy’s idea of funny was asking people to tell him the latest Chappaquiddick joke.
Here is what one of his biographers had to say after Kennedy’s death on Aug. 25:
I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?”
This isn’t just any bozo talking through his hat: It’s Ed Klein, who wrote four books on the Kennedy clan over the past two decades, including The Kennedy Curse.
Klein, by the way, is the former foreign editor of Newsweek magazine and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine.
(It does make one wonder about Newsweek and the New York Times, however, when one of their recent senior decision makers thinks he’s burnishing Teddy’s image by telling a story in which a killer — convicted, sentence suspended — seems to be dancing on his victim’s grave.
I know there are some people out there who doubt this story. Here is the link to the YouTube copy of the broadcast interview between Klein and guest host Katty Kay on National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm Show on Aug. 26.
2. Radio interview — again from YouTube — with John Farrar, the diver who got to the scene of the Chappaquiddick accident in 25 minutes — once fishermen found the car nine or 10 hours (depends on whether you believe Teddy’s timeline) after the car plunge. Farrar believes Mary Jo Kopechne found an air pocket in Teddy Kennedy’s submerged Oldsmobile and lived for an hour or more (he’s said up to four hours).
Here’s the link to the 1994 radio interview with Farrar.
3. And while we’re still at it, here’s a TV piece on Kennedy that includes an interview with Leslie Leland, the foreman of the grand jury that Farrar mentions in the previous clip.
By the way, Farrar’s a firefighter and Leland’s a pharmacist . I’ll tell you in a future post about the kind of pressure these guys were under from what was known then as “the Kennedy Mafia.”
Here’s the link to the news report with the 1989 Leland interview.
Wait, Saint Ted, let’s hear one more time how you liked a good joke about Mary Jo Kopechne’s death at Chappaquiddick. Here again is the link to what Ed Klein had to say about you. (Remember, this is a Kennedy sycophant telling the story.)
4. Ted Kennedy — nicknamed “Cadillac Eddie” in university — was kicked out of Harvard for paying another student to take a Spanish test for him in 1951. Teddy then joined the U.S. Army as a private but his father, Joseph — multi-millionaire, former ambassador, powerhouse of the Democratic Party — made sure Teddy got nowhere near the Korean War, which was going on at the time. Teddy spent that war as part of a U.S. Army honour guard in Paris. After the war, he was re-admitted to Harvard. Thanks, Dad.
Wealth and power do have their advantages.
blogs.canoe.ca
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Elizabeth Warren: “Ted Kennedy Changed My Life . . . I Think Of Him Every Single Day”…:
“Ted Kennedy changed my life,” Warren said. “He changed how I understood what it is that a public servant does. And I think of him in this race every single day. And I come to this convention and I think of him every single hour.”
SO DID MR. AND MRS. KOPECHNE:
I want Ted Kennedy removed from Arlington.
Is it time to do a movie about John F. Kennedy’s alleged mistresses while he was President?
...their dirt doesn't come out until...they're in the dirt.
I often wonder who the hell decided that the Kennedy family was somehow like an American royal family.
The press just ate it all up. Called it Camelot. (Remind you a bit of a more recent president?) And then he got assassinated. Three days of national mourning. Three days of nothing but Kennedy retrospectives on TV. Dumped Franklin on the half dollar and stuck his portrait on it—which caused half dollars to disappear from circulation since spending them almost seemed disrespectful. Schools, airports and space centers got his name.
People were a bit upset when his widow remarried. Then Robert was assassinated. Of course the last brother, the fat one, was politically bullet proof. How could someone vote against a Kennedy?
As JFK fades from living memory, he turns out to be nowhere near as big an historical figure as people who were alive at the time seemed to believe. The really historic thing he did, “we’ll put a man on the moon in this decade”, the nation has turned its back on.
Lifelong residents of the Vineyard tell a completely different story, that she was already dead, and the “drowning” was a cover story.
Ted Kennedy [with neck brace] leaving funeral of Mary Jp Kopechne.
Maybe they were too afraid to say anything anything that would make Ted and his rich and powerful family unhappy. The consequences might have been terrible. Still,if they knew something that needed telling they should have spoken out.
Ted "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy
Parents of Mary Jo Kopechne leaving her funera;.
Also, he was going to try to pretend he had never been in the car at all on that fatal drive. There were indications that he tried to establish a fake alibi at his hotel and then in the morning he asked his cousin to say he (the cousin) had been the driver, but the cousin refused.
Teddy would not have come clean even about driving the car had the other options been feasible.
Didn’t her parents refuse to allow an autopsy?
Haven't you heard? Pope Francis says there is no hell.
The two of them drove off. They passed Officer Look who was on his way home. They sped off. I contend that he got out of the car and he walked. She turned right instead of left and ended up in the water.
Maybe he did swim back to the motel.
The next morning, a guy and his son were fishing and they saw the car. They called the police and continued to fish.
The police arrived, called the scuba guy. He comes out and finds Mary Jo in the back of the car, her hands grabbing on to the back of the car as if trying to get her last breath.
No autopsy done, but the guy at the funeral home said there was no water in her lungs, nada.
She died of asphyxiation. She had been in the car probably several minutes if not hours.
Next morning, Kennedy comes out of his room dressed to go sailing. He carefree and jokes with another couple.
Then two of his staff/friends show up and talk to him on the side, and his demeanor changes.
He goes to the police and tells them that he was driving the car, but was in shock for ten hours, and that’s why he didn’t report the accident.
Then two weeks later, the whole story changes. He says he walked back to the part, got two friends and they tried repeatedly to save Mary Jo. The finally he quit and he swims back to the motel.
Still, no explanation why none of them reported the accident.
I’ve been involved in car accidents into water where the occupants have to get out. The car is upside down, it’s dark. Kennedy is 6’ 2”. He gets out, and she doesn’t?
BS. He wasn’t in the car.
If he was then why were there no marks on him. No scratches, and why didn’t he and his two friends report the accident.
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