Relationship with Ted Kennedy

In the summer of 1940, when Gargan was 10 years old and Ted Kennedy was 8, Joe visited the Kennedy home at Hyannis Port. The Kennedys looked to Gargan to take Teddy under his wing as a peer big brother and keep him out of trouble, something his older brothers could not do because of their greater age difference.

Education

Despite disinformation spread by the Kennedys that Joseph Kennedy financed his orphan nephew's education,^[4] the estate of Gargan's father financed his secondary education at Georgetown Preparatory School, 1942–1948. For college, Gargan chose to attend Notre Dame as his father did, rather than Harvard as Joseph Kennedy and all of his sons did. Gargan said in 1983 that he considered Harvard "a crap school. In those days, you were kind of a fairy if you went to Harvard."^[5] Notre Dame provided a Catholic parochial education; he received his undergraduate degree in 1952, and graduated from Notre Dame Law School in 1955.

Chappaquiddick

According to Ted Kennedy's account of events, sometime before or after midnight July 18–19, 1969, Kennedy accidentally drove his Oldsmobile into a tidal pond on Chappaquiddick Island, with Mary Jo Kopechne trapped inside the car. He walked just over a mile back to the cottage where a party he hosted was occurring, and summoned Gargan and Paul Markham to drive him back to the site, where Gargan dived into the pond in a futile attempt to find Kopechne.

After recovering, Gargan vehemently insisted that Kennedy report the accident to the police immediately. Markham seconded this opinion, but Kennedy argued against it, and according to Gargan, said he could plausibly deny knowledge of the accident if they agreed that he had gotten out of the Oldsmobile beforehand and Kopechne was the one who drove it off the bridge. Gargan said this lie was not safe, as neighbors could have seen their car at the bridge, and he would have no part of it. Finally, Kennedy said "All right, all right, I'll take care of it. You take care of the girls." He told Gargan and Markham to go back to the cottage and tell the other partygoers that Kopechne went back to Edgartown, but to say nothing about the accident. Gargan understood this at the time to mean that Kennedy would go to the police station and report the accident; however, he came to understand later that Kennedy thought it meant that Gargan and Markham would go along with his cover-up lie.

According to Gargan, Kennedy then abruptly cut off the discussion by jumping into the channel and swimming the 500 feet to the Edgartown shore. Kennedy in fact did not report the accident until about 9:50 a.m. that morning, after the Oldsmobile and Kopechne's body had been discovered.

Later, Kennedy used Gargan's and Markham's status as lawyers to falsely assert attorney-client privilege, preventing them from saying anything about the conversation on the island. Gargan was disappointed in his misjudgement of Kennedy's character, when he believed he would do the right thing.