Yet another Kennedy cover-up revealed

By Thomas Lifson

How evil was Ted Kennedy? Shocking new details have emerged, now that the man himself is dead.

While many conservatives realized that Ted Kennedy was a morally compromised man (his record of walking away from Mary Jo Kopechne as she suffocated in an air bubble inside his Oldsmobile clinched the case), America's major media studiously ignored the incident, and many others, in order to preserve the luster of the Kennedy name, and to aid him in his role as the liberal "lion of the Senate."

Now, the son of the then-owner of the National Enquirer has provided information which, if true, adds a new dimension to understanding of Kennedy and the media which abetted him. The New York Post writes:

Teddy Kennedy quashed a National Enquirer story alleging Mary Jo Kopechne was pregnant with his child when she died by giving the weekly a fawning article about Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her kids, a new book claims.

In Paul Pope's "The Deeds of My Fathers," he claims his father, Generoso (Gene) Pope, who turned the Enquirer into the best-selling tabloid in America, spiked a story that reported Kopechne, the pretty young campaign worker, was pregnant in 1969 when she drowned in the Chappaquiddick River in Kennedy's car.

Pope writes that his father sent a reporter to DC in 1980 to buy the story from Washington Post gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire and a Women's Wear Daily reporter. The story detailing the alleged coverup included on-the-record sources, with every quote attributed.

So Kennedy not only let his young mistress die when he walked away and spent a night prior to notifying authorities, he also got rid of a child who could have become a serious embarrassment, as well as a financial burden. The mechanics of paying for an illegitimate child snagged even a superlawyer like John Edwards. Perhaps Kennedy family fixers could have handled a Kopechne child with greater finesses, had Catholic Mary Jo decided to keep her baby, rather than kill it via abortion. But it still could have spelled trouble ahead, especially if Mary Jo became demanding of his time and attention, as mistresses have been known to do.

How very conventient that mother and child both were removed from the ranks of the living.

The incident also illustrates the way the Kennedy family traded on its glamour to shape news coverage favorably. In this, they no doubt learned a lot from the Hollywood studios, which routinely covered up embarrassing stories about stars by trading access to sources. Teddy's father Joe Kennedy was very active in the movie business, as well as with female stars.

Now that the mood of the American people is shifting to cynicism and anger toward those who have been pulling off a giant political con job for decades, and now that the Kennedy family glamour quotient is dependent on the likes of Caroline Kennedy, whose "ya know" locutions were so pathetic that even New York voters found her laughable as a potential senator, it is time to expose the real evil of Ted Kennedy, waitress sandwich and all, to the American people, and mark him as the villain he was. The revisionist history of the Kennedy clan is a narrative whose time has come.