Peter Kanellis

speaker

250 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 26 May

Peter Kanellis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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American Scandal · Chappaquiddick | The Weight of the Name | 5 · 26 May 2026 podcast

You know, he starts talking like there was nothing that happened that night that would cause any question to Mary Jo Kopechny's honor, as though she were somehow the focus of attention in this conversation.

But it sends out sort of the subtle message that if you're looking at this as Ted Kennedy behaving in a in a loose way and cheating on his wife, that you're maligning the memory of Mary Jo Kopechny.

They also staged the cervical collar that Kennedy was wearing and his whole appearance at the funeral designed to make it look like he was very seriously injured in this crash.

I think it's easy to believe that he would have been shaken up, that he would have been sort of

mentally traumatized and all of that.

But I think they went out of their way to make it seem like he had, you know, suffered physically and that he was as much a victim as a perpetrator in this case.

In the book that we did, Last Lion, The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, we revealed a very shocking kind of thing, which is that Joan Kennedy was in the early stages of pregnancy at that time and had had a series of miscarriages and was trying very hard to maintain bed rest and to preserve the pregnancy.

But Ted prevailed on her to come with him to Mary Jo Kopechny's funeral in West Virginia, up in the mountains and everything.

And, you know, you can imagine Joan Kennedy's situation.

You know, here's her husband's been in this perhaps career ending accident and it's with a young woman in his car and the drinking and all this kind of stuff.

And where was she and what was she doing and all that?

So Ted clearly needed her at his side to show her loyal support to him that, you know, she backed him in every way.

So he insisted that she go to the funeral and fly in this tiny plane to mountainous West Virginia for this funeral.

And she suffered a miscarriage and she she's just recently passed away.

But she had always thought that Ted was sort of putting his career over their family at that moment.

So there was a lot to lay at Kennedy's doorstep from Chappaquiddick, a lot of questionable behavior.

At the end of the day, was it brutal or murderous or, you know, casting this woman aside for his ambitions?

It doesn't really add up that way, in my opinion.

It adds up as a person showing poor judgment on a lot of different levels.

I think that it's quite possible to imagine that if it happened in a later era when there were more of these like tabloid type, you know, TV shows and things like that going on, that it would have ended Kennedy's career.

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