Chappaquiddick Incident - Legacy

Legacy

The case resulted in much satire of Kennedy, including a mock advertisement in National Lampoon magazine showing a floating Volkswagen Beetle with the remark that Kennedy would have been elected president had he been driving a Beetle that night; this satire resulted in legal action by Volkswagen, claiming unauthorized use of its trademark. National Lampoon also printed a fake quote from Kennedy, as a "response" to a question on whether he planned to campaign for President in the next election: "I'll drive off that bridge when I come to it."

After Kennedy's televised speech on July 25, 1969, regarding the incident, telephone calls and telegrams to newspapers and to the Kennedy family were heavily in favor of his remaining in office, and he won reelection the next year with 62% of the vote. Nonetheless, the incident severely damaged his national reputation. Before Chappaquiddick, public polls showed that a large majority expected Kennedy to run for the presidency in 1972. After the incident, he pledged not to run in 1972 and declined to serve as George McGovern's running mate that year. In 1974, he pledged not to run in 1976, in part because of the renewed media interest in Chappaquiddick.

Kennedy finally announced his candidacy for the American presidency in late 1979, challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination for the 1980 election. On November 4, 1979, CBS broadcast a one-hour television special presented by Roger Mudd titled Teddy. The program consisted of an interview with Kennedy, interspersed with visual materials. Much of the show was devoted to the Chappaquiddick incident. During the interview, Mudd questioned Kennedy repeatedly about the incident and at one point accused him directly of lying. During the interview, Kennedy also gave what one author described as an "incoherent and repetitive" answer to the question, "Why do you want to be President?", and called the American-supported Shah of Iran "one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind". The program inflicted serious political damage on Kennedy. Carter alluded to the Chappaquiddick incident twice in five days, once declaring that he had not "panicked in the crisis." Kennedy lost the Democratic nomination to Carter, but remained a Senator until his death in 2009.

After Kennedy's death, Ed Klein, an editor for New York Times Magazine and an author of several books about the Kennedy family, stated that Kennedy asked people he met, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" Klein also said, "It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too."