| CastleBravo |
08-27-09 10:48 AM |
Named after his father’s chauffer and, as one biographer uncharitably called him, “whoremaster,” Edward Moore Kennedy never had a chance to be anyone but Edward Moore Kennedy. Joe Kennedy’s ambition to be president, jeopardized by his burning affair with starlet Gloria Swanson, moved the family patriarch to offer more money, trips, and servants to his alienated wife in return for a ninth child that would keep the scandal sheets off his back. As biographer Joe McGinniss explained, Ted Kennedy’s “very existence was the result of an act of political calculation on his father’s part.”
“He was my baby,” mother Rose remembered, “and I tried to keep him my baby.” When he was a man, this showed. He cheated his way out of Harvard. He led police on drunken high-speed chases while at law school in Charlottesville, Va. He bedded the most available women. When he finally settled down with Joan Bennett, his virgin bride surmised that he did so mainly because she refused to give him what so many of his girlfriends had “The only reason he wanted to marry me,” Joan reflected, “was because he couldn’t get me any other way.”
Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory said the trick in discussing the neophyte’s senate run was “to keep an absolutely straight face.” Prof. Mark De Wolfe Howe of Harvard Law School, a sometime advisor to John F. Kennedy, found the youngest Kennedy’s candidacy “preposterous and insulting.” But the pedigree of the 30-year-old kid brother of the President bested that of Edward McCormack, the nephew of the Speaker of the House, in the Democratic primary.
Despite his intellectual and character deficiencies, Ted was the family’s natural politician. His glad-handing and gregarious nature showed him as a Fitzgerald and not a Kennedy.
In the wee hours of July 18, 1969, Ted Kennedy drove Mary Jo Kopechne to her death and, rather than report the accident to the police, spent the next ten hours or so sobering up, attempting to cajole his drinking buddies to vouch for his innocence in the matter, and calling his lawyer, a German girlfriend, and political cronies. The indifference was particularly galling to many involved in the case. “She didn’t drown,” the diver who retrieved Kophechne’s body from Kennedy’s Oldsmobile Delmont 88, steadfastly held. “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 in 25 minutes after I got the call. But he didn’t call.”
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