10 Most Scandalous DC Affairs
3. Edward Kennedy
Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party.
Kennedy’s personal life came to dominate his image. On a nine-nation Latin American trip in 1961, FBI reports from the time showed Kennedy meeting with Lauchlin Currie, an alleged former Soviet spy, together with locals in each country whom the reports deemed left-wingers and Communist sympathizers. Reports from the FBI and other sources had Kennedy renting a brothel and opening up bordellos after hours during the tour.
On the night of July 18, 1969, Kennedy was on Martha’s Vineyard’s Chappaquiddick Island at a party he gave for the “Boiler Room Girls”, a group of young women who had worked on his brother Robert’s presidential campaign the year before. Kennedy left the party, driving a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 with one of the women, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, and later drove off Dike Bridge into the Poucha Pond inlet, a tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy escaped the overturned vehicle, and, by his description, dove below the surface seven or eight times, vainly attempting to reach Kopechne. Ultimately, he swam to shore and left the scene. He contacted authorities the next morning, but Kopechne’s body had already been discovered
In 1989, the European paparazzi stalked him on a vacation there and photographed him having sex on a motorboat. Kennedy was often portrayed scandalously in gossip columns and tabloids, owing to numerous and barely concealed extramarital affairs plus notorious public incidents, including public sex in 1985 and 1987 at La Brasserie restaurant in Washington D.C.
