On July 18, 1969, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy drove a car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island near Martha`s Vineyard, Mass. A passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.
Questions about that accident have plagued Kennedy for 22 years, blunting his political career and ending the Kennedy dynasty`s dream that the senator would follow John F. Kennedy`s path to the White House.
There always has been a sense that the whole story of Chappaquiddick has not been told, that Kennedy fortunes and political connections have been able to mask the truth, that delays in notifying the police gave Kennedy and his friends time to craft their account of Kopechne`s death.
Now Kennedy is facing scrutiny because of another incident, this one at the family vacation compound in Palm Beach, in which his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, 30, is accused of rape.
The woman who filed the charge said she was assaulted after an evening at a bar where the senator, his son Patrick and Smith had gone to drink.
Smith has not denied engaging in sex with the woman, but he has called the charge of rape ”a damnable lie” and says he will be vindicated at a trial set for Aug. 5.
While Smith is the defendant in the rape case, the incident has raised broader questions about the senator`s behavior during the investigation and about the family`s marshalling lawyers and investigators to prepare for the case.
Perhaps inevitably, it has also spawned comparisons with Chappaquiddick and raised, once again, discussion about the behavior of Kennedy men, from the patriarch of the family, Joseph P. Kennedy, down through President Kennedy, his brother Robert, the senator and, now, the younger Kennedys.
Portrayed in the 1960s as the first family of American Catholicism, complete with its own Cardinal Richard Cushing to provide an imprimatur, the Kennedy image has long since crumbled under waves of disclosures about extramarital affairs and problems with alcohol and drugs.
And while it is too early to measure what impact the Palm Beach incident will have on the family`s political fortunes, the 1,300 pages of public record on the case do not present a favorable picture of the senator, either in his behavior before the incident or in the damage-control operation after it.
It had seemed, until recently, that Ted Kennedy had found his place as leading liberal in the U.S. Senate in the wake of his failed campaign to take the nomination from President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Were it not for Chappaquiddick, certainly the nomination of the Democrats, if not the White House itself, would have been his for the asking in 1972.
His friends in the Senate view him as one of the most effective politicians in the chamber. But they also recognize that, away from Senate business, there was another Ted Kennedy, a man who, like his father and his brothers before him, pursues his pleasures with the legendary Kennedy passion. It is that side of Kennedy that is most apparent in the sworn statements released by the Palm Beach police.
The Kennedy family began gathering for the holiday a week before Easter. The senator and his son Patrick, 23, a Rhode Island state legislator, were there, along with Smith, a medical school student, and Smith`s mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, and his sister, Amanda. William Barry, the former FBI agent who was a bodyguard for Robert Kennedy came, too, along with his wife, two of his sons and a daughter-in-law.
The senator, his son and two male friends of the family went drinking on Wednesday at Au Bar, a fashionable Palm Beach nightclub. Patrick Kennedy told police that he and another member of the party invited two women back to the compound. One left later by taxi, and he was unsure what happened to the second.
The next night, Thursday, Smith arrived in Palm Beach and immediately went out for drinks with some of the younger houseguests. At this point, the police records present some conflicting accounts. Although the senator said he stayed home Thursday, Stuart Lichtenstein, manager at Au Bar, said Kennedy was there with a group of friends and used his credit card to buy $30 to $40 worth of drinks.
On the evening of Good Friday, there was a dinner party at the Kennedy compound. After that, Patrick Kennedy and Smith went with some of the dinner guests to a bar, then returned to the compound. ”We were sort of proud of ourselves about getting a decent night`s sleep,” Patrick Kennedy said.
The senator said he stayed at the compound for the first part of the evening, but about 11:30 p.m., he went up to the room where Smith and his son were staying, woke them and asked them if they wanted to go out for some beers.
So they went to Au Bar. There was some drinking and some dancing. The woman who later filed the rape charge against Smith danced with him, and he asked her to drive him back to the Kennedy estate. At about the same time, Patrick Kennedy invited Michelle Cassone to the estate for a drink. She followed the Kennedys in her own car.
By that time, it was after 3 a.m., Cassone said. She told the police that when she, Patrick Kennedy and the senator arrived at the estate, they sat on the veranda overlooking the ocean and sipping wine.
”The senator started asking me about being a giver or a receiver type of person,” she said. And then the conversation turned ”not so innocent anymore.” Sen. Kennedy recalled the conversation as ”just general bantering.”
After that, she and Patrick Kennedy went to his bedroom. Patrick Kennedy`s statement says they sat on separate beds and talked. Cassone`s version is that they were rolling around and kissing on one of the beds.
More Top Picks Buying Advice
Then, according to Cassone, the senator appeared ”very drunk and very weird . . . he was kind of wobbling.” She said he was wearing a long oxford shirt, but no pants. Kennedy said in his deposition he was wearing a nightshirt that went to his knees. He left.
At about the time this was happening in the bedroom, the other woman claims that Smith was assaulting her out on the lawn. She said he grabbed her ankle, tackled her near the swimming pool and raped her. Medical reports show signs of intercourse. She also had a bruise on her ankle, bruises on her arm and a possible fractured rib.
It is after this point that the developments at the Kennedy compound begin to echo some of the developments that followed Mary Jo Kopechne`s death in 1969, particularly in the sense that both cases carry at least the flavor of an attempt to avoid, for as long as possible, facing the police.
Kennedy waited a full 10 hours before reporting the Chappaquiddick incident to the police. Although no one has accused Kennedy of any violation of law in the Easter incident, the Palm Beach police have hinted, perhaps disingenuously, that they might consider an investigation of obstruction of justice.
And it took more than a week for Kennedy to talk to the police in the Easter incident.
The woman contacted Palm Beach police Saturday to allege the rape. The investigators made their first visit to the Kennedy house at 1:30 p.m. on Easter Sunday. The former FBI man, Barry, told the detectives that the senator was not at the estate at the time.
Then they asked to speak to Smith, and Barry told them he thought Smith had flown out of Palm Beach on Saturday, but it was possible he was still around. Taking Barry at his word, the detectives left and asked the former Kennedy bodyguard to have the senator call them in an hour.
Those comments present some important conflicts in the case.
Smith`s sister, Amanda, told police that Barry accompanied her mother and William Smith when she was driven to the airport on Sunday at 11:30 a.m., two hours before the police talked to Barry.
And later Sunday, still in Palm Beach, according to Patrick Kennedy, the senator told him about the police. Kennedy told his son he had no idea why they visited. Patrick Kennedy told his father he had a ”good guess” why they were there.
At 2:30 p.m., the police called the Kennedy estate. The housekeeper said Barry was taking Sen. Kennedy and Smith to the airport. In reality, only Smith was leaving town.
At 3:20 p.m., Barry called Palm Beach police, telling them they had just missed the senator. At that point, the police told Barry they were
investigating allegations that Smith had committed a sexual battery.
A few hours later, according to Patrick Kennedy`s deposition, he had a discussion with his father and Barry in which Barry told the two Kennedys that police were investigating ”a sexual assault or sexual battery.”
The senator`s memory of this conversation is different. In his deposition, he said Barry only told him the police were investigating a
”serious offense” against Smith. He said he told Barry to call a Miami attorney who was to call the police ”and find out if we could be useful in helping them.”
The call went out to Miami attorney Marvin Rosen, a longtime Kennedy supporter and a major fundraiser for Florida Democrats.
By Sunday night, Smith, now back in Washington, had telephoned the senator at the estate to say, ”You know there`s some allegations against me.”
Sen. Kennedy told the police he said, ”I have heard that.” Then, he said, Smith offered ”the whole story” and Kennedy said he replied, ”You better tell the whole story to someone, to Marvin Rosen.”
Without ever speaking to police, the senator left Palm Beach on Monday, April 1. At a news conference later, he said he was ”never, never told that weekend that there would be an alleged charge against Willy that he had raped a young woman,” but that he was aware of ”some kind of sexual harassment on Willy.”
The release of the Palm Beach statements showed that the senator knew otherwise because of the conversations with his son and Barry.
That conflict prompted the senator`s Washington office to release another statement: ”The police did not use the word `rape`. They apparently used the phrase `sexual battery`. None of us thought that the investigation was about rape.” Kennedy called this, ”an honest semantic misunderstanding.”
While the Kennedys were making their statements, their attorneys and investigators began searching for information about the woman who filed the rape charge against Smith. Private detectives aggressively have been pursuing any hint of trouble in the woman`s personal life.
In some rape cases, Florida allows defense attorneys to use the complainant`s personal history, a tactic often used in jury trials to cut away at the woman`s reputation as a way to weaken the case against the defendant.
The Kennedy detectives have looked into every aspect of the alleged victim`s life, from her early years in Akron to the men she went out with in Palm Beach.
Their approach has been so vigorous that lawyers charged there may have been witness tampering.
In one incident, for instance, a lawyer for one of the material witnesses in the case called police saying two Kennedy investigators had threatened his brother if he continued to cooperate with police.
”They were going to implicate my brother in some criminal activity,”
said the lawyer, Peiro Desiderio of Miami.
”It was just shocking conduct to approach a material witness in a case and treat him that way.”
More Top Picks Best Rebar Cutters
Kennedy lawyers have said they are using proper techniques.