Tabloid blanked Ted Kennedy’s sexcapades for gossip on Jackie Onassis

NEW YORK - A book has claimed that a story involving late US Senator Ted Kennedy and a young woman, believed to be pregnant by him, was kept in the dark by a paper in return for stories on Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her kids.

Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy is said to have stopped a National Enquirer story alleging Mary Jo Kopechne was pregnant with his child in 1969 when she drowned in the Chappaquiddick River in his car.

Paul Pope claims in his book, ‘The Deeds of My Fathers’, that his father, Generoso (Gene) Pope, who turned the Enquirer into the best-selling tabloid in America, had stopped the story from emerging.

Pope wrote 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 cover-up 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,” the New York Post quoted him as writing.

Pope revealed his father only bought the story to use as leverage against Kennedy, and to be one step closer to the person Gene considered the “Holy Grail of the Tabloid World” - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

But that was not the only story Gene supposedly had on Kennedy, as Paul claims that an Enquirer reporter caught the senator in the Bahamas with a young party girl, not his wife.

And instead of running the picture and story, Gene wrangled an exclusive with the senator, and spared him from further exposure in return for a sympathetic piece on his help in raising Jackie’s kids.

“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,” he stated. (ANI)