New light on an old political scandal? The People reports that interviews recorded by the journalist Leo Damore as part of his investigation of Edward Kennedy's car crash at Chappaquiddick have been found:
Leo was the author of 1988 blockbuster book Senatorial Privilege, an exhaustive investigation into the events of July 18, 1969, when Ted Kennedy's car plunged into the waters off of Martha's Vineyard and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was left to die. The senator waited 10 hours to alert the authorities, a delay that – even 56 years later – remains at the centre of the Chappaquiddick mystery.
Among the tapes that have been found, says the People, are interviews with Joe Gargan, Kennedy's cousin, who was at a reunion party with the senator on the night Kopechne died:
Gargan, along with Ted Kennedy and attorney Paul Markham, claimed they’d gone to the Dyke bridge after the senator’s car crashed that night into the water below, to try and save Mary Jo Kopechne, who was 28. But years later, Gargan told Leo that Ted had asked him to lie about what happened and say that Mary Jo was driving the car the night it went over the bridge. He refused.
In one exchange about Ted and the events of that evening, Gargan tells Leo: “They were interested in protecting the senator, there's no question about that. And they let us fend for ourselves. As well as everybody else.”
A younger brother of President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, both assassination victims, Edward Kennedy represented Massachusetts in the Senate from 1962 to 2009. In 1980 he made a serious attempt to gain the Democratic Presidential nomination, but eventually withdrew from the contest with the incumbent President Jimmy Carter.
I was going to write something to the effect that the Chappaquiddick incident blighted his career but, in reality, it’s remarkable how little effect it had.
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