How much will Kennedy say?

Sen. Ted Kennedy has plenty of stories to tell, said Susan Milligan in The Boston Globe, so it's not surprising that a publisher was willing to cough up one of the largest paydays in history for his memoirs. The publisher will never recoup the more than $

What happened

An imprint of the Hachette Book Group beat out eight other publishers to win an auction to print Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s memoirs. Terms of the deal weren’t released, but a source close to the negotiations said this week that it was comparable to the $8 million Hillary Clinton received for her book, Living History. (The Seattle Times)

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It’s anybody’s guess how far Kennedy wil go “to satisfy public curiosity about his family's history of scandal and tragedy,” said Suzanne Goldenberg in the London Guardian. The real question is what he’ll reveal about “the episode that blighted his own career” and probably cost him the 1980 Democratic nomination for the presidency—the night in 1969 when he drove his car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was killed.

The publisher stands little chance of recouping such a whopping advance unless Kennedy “finally tells what really happened” that night, said Richard Johnson in the New York Post’s Page Six. Jonathan Karp, president of Hachette’s Twelve imprint, said the 75-year-old senator has promised to be “candid,” but conservative pundits are betting that won’t apply to the crash, which Kennedy didn’t report for hours.