“Atonement is a process that never ends,” Ted Kennedy writes in his memoir, confronting the shame shadowing his life that was avoided in a weekend of tributes–the death of a young woman at Chappaquiddick.
In a preview of the 532-page volume to be published later this month, the New York Times discloses that Kennedy “called his behavior after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne ‘inexcusable’ and said the events might have shortened the life of his ailing father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
“In that book, ‘True Compass,’ Mr. Kennedy said he was dazed, afraid and panicked in the minutes and hours after he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Ms. Kopechne as his passenger.
“The senator, who left the scene and did not report the accident to the police until after her body was found the next day, admitted in the memoir that he had ‘made terrible decisions’ at Chappaquiddick.”
Such candor has not been typical of the Kennedys, who fought fiercely to protect their family myth over decades. That’s underscored in this month’s Vanity Fair story of how Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned William Manchester’s book about JFK’s assassination, “Death of a President,” and then went to court to force him to cut parts of it that family advisers (she herself couldn’t bear to read it) deemed personally or politically incorrect.
During that period, I published excerpts from a light-hearted book by Red Fay, a college friend of JFK’s who had been his Undersecretary of the Navy.