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.
“Once people read it, there’d be no way that Ted Kennedy could ever run for president, maybe not even for dog catcher in Massachusetts,” Paul writes.
But the story never ran. According to Paul, his father bought it as a way to gain access to Kennedy in order to get one step closer to the person Gene considered the “Holy Grail of the Tabloid World” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
That wasn’t the only dirt Gene supposedly had on Kennedy. Paul claims that an Enquirer reporter caught him in the Bahamas with a young party girl, not his wife. But instead of running the picture and story, Gene finagled an exclusive with the senator.
Gene spared Kennedy from further exposure in return for a sympathetic piece on his help raising Jackie’s kids, his son writes.
“Gene didn’t care about Teddy Kennedy, because he was convinced that his readers didn’t care about Teddy Kennedy,” Paul wrote. “What they did care about was Jackie Kennedy . . . He was willing to bank that chit, even though might never have a chance to collect on it.”