Chappaquiddick: a night to remember
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The inten non was to open the campaign in Washington and to deluge the Party and the country with the third and no less invincible Kennedy. Problems manifested themselves immediately, however. An Iowa straw vote, like a previous one in Florida, went against Teddy, and, although Jane Byrne, the mayor of Chicago, endorsed the Massachusetts Senator almost within hours of the Carter administration announcing that the city would have to desegregate its schools, most Democratic mayors remained with the President.
Then Chappaquiddick was revived by the television people. Both ABC and CBS broadcast pieces that centered on the events of 18 July 1969, and the dynamic Edward Kennedy was replaced by a stuttering, defensive one. Chappaquiddick happened SO long ago that it is no longer an old scandal, but a new one. Almost everyone but' incorrigible anti-Kennedy fanatics had forgotten the particulars and, as they are re-taught to us, it is as though we are learning them for the first time.
Kennedy had invited six young women, who had worked with special dedication for his brother Robert, to attend the Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta on the island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. Kennedy and five other men, all married to wives not in attendance, completed the party. All the men, who were much older than the women, were old friends and political collaborators of Kennedy and his family. One of them, Joseph Gargan, was a cousin. The women stayed at one motel and the men stayed at another. On the night of the 18th, all of them took a small, two-car ferry across the 500-foot channel to the island of Chappaquiddick, where they had a 'cookout' at a rented cottage. From here the story gets cloudy.
In the intervening years since that night, the 11 living participants have refused to talk or answer any questions about what happened. It is suspected that Kennedy, who is known to have paid everybody's legal fees and to have paid the dead Mary Jo Kopechne's parents 90,000 dollars, is the reason for the general silence. He was recently asked if he would encourage the others to tell their versions of what happened. He replied: 'Many of them have been subject to wiretapping and other personal abuse. A number of them have got married and have families, and it would be completely up to their own discretion about making whatever comments that they'd want to. I'd neither encourage them nor discourage them from any comment on those events.'
Shortly after the death, some of them did say a few things at the inquest, one of which was that there had been only the most moderate drinking. Investigators have been able to establish that at least a half a gallon of vodka, a fifth of scotch and two bottles of rum, size unknown, disappeared in the course of the evening. (A blood test indicated that Miss Kopechne may have had three and a half to five ounces of whisky in the hour before her death, perhaps more in the course of the evening.) Whatever everyone's sobriety, the Senator's story is that at 11:15 pm, after announcing that he wanted to be rested for the next day's sailing, he left the place in the larger of the party's two cars. Mary Jo Kopechne, according to this version, said that she wasn't feeling well and asked if she could come along to take the ferry across the channel to her motel. But if going home to bed was her intention in taking that last car ride with Edward Kennedy, why did she leave her motel-room key and her handbag at the cottage?
Perhaps she was absent-minded. But there is another discrepancy. The last ferry departs at midnight. If Kennedy and Miss Kopechne did leave the party at 11:15, as he avers, he should have arrived at the ferry slip less than two miles away in plenty of time to catch the boat. He says he would have, had he not made a wrong turn down an unpaved, rutted lane called Dike Road. Since the road to the ferry is paved and marked, no one can understand how the Senator got on to Dike Road and stayed on it until his car went off into the water by an old wooden bridge. When asked by a TV interviewer how he could possibly have driven on Dike Road unintentionally, Kennedy replied, 'Oh, if you've travelled on the . .. either on Cape Cod, or in the islands of Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, you go from paved to unpaved, really without interruption.'
'But,' the TV reporter persisted, `you had been across that road twice that day to swim, had you not?'
'I'd been driven at that particular time. I was not driving during those particular occurrences,' Kennedy answered. 'And, maybe, I I should have recognised the difference of it. Probably I should have, but I didn't.'
There is a witness, however, to Kennedy's turn down Dike Road. At 12-45 a.m. the deputy sheriff, Christopher Look, Jr., saw the large black Oldsmobile stationary at the Dike Road turnoff. The policeman, dressed in uniform, thinking that the black car might need help, approached it on foot, only to see it accelerate down Dike Road. He noted that its licence plate number began L7 and ended with another 7. Seven has always been the deputy's lucky number. It wasn't the Senator's for the full licence plate of the car which took Mary Jo Kopechne to her death was L78207. Certain questions need to be asked: What was the car doing there at 12:45 a.m., if they had left an hour and half earlier to catch the last ferry at midnight? If they were going back to the motel, why did they leave all the other people at the cottage with only the small Chrysler Valiant to get them home?
Senator Kennedy says the car crashed into the water because he missed the turn on to the bridge. After he got out of the car, he claims he tried seven or eight times to dive down into the darkness and find the drowning woman, and then, by his account, he walked back to the cottage to get help. With Gargan and another one of the men, he says, he returned.to the place of the accident and they started diving. According to Kennedy the three returned to the bridge at 12:20, which would contradict the deputy sheriff's story. At the inquest, the Senator said, 'I believe that I looked at the Valiant's clock and believe that it was 12:20.'
That doesn't really solve the problem of time, however, because it turns out the Valiant didn't have a clock. When asked about that by a television reporter, Kennedy replied, 'Well, it later turned out that one of them, Mr Markham [the other marl who went with Gargan and Kennedy] had a watch on . I made that determination from what I thought was a clock in the car, or looking at his wrist, I was very conscious of time, at that moment.'
Perhaps he was, as he claims, very conscious of time, but then why didn't he knock on the doors of residents, closer to the accident than the rented cottage, to call for help? No one can saY with certainty what might have happened had help arrived shortly after the car went into the water, but the New York Times, in an exhaustivelY authoritative article on Chappaquiddiek, said, 'Police and firemen with rescue equipment would have been on hand within half an hour, as they were the next morning, and Miss Kopechne would have been out of the car within another half hour. John N. Farrar, captain of the Edgartown Department's scuba search and rescue (1011", sion, says he found Miss Kopechne's he cocked back, face pressed into the footwell, hand holding onto the front edge of the back seat. By holding herself in a position such as this, she could avail herself of the last remaining air in the car.' Farrar believe,s, that 'she died of suffocation in her owfl. al' void. But it took her at least three or four hours to die.' The actual cause of her death has nevers been established because no autopsY been performed. For the same reason, t very good explanation can be made ah°,uts the blood on the back of her blouse, or In sleeves. Nor was she examined for seorle,; or even to see if she might have been t_i'd victim of violence. Witnesses were allovv,,:e to leave the jurisdiction of the local polls:, without being questioned, subsequent ceedings were slow, cursory and kept see' for months so that, when what little information there was was made public, the trail was old and cold. No one of responsible position has gone so far as to suggest there was a conspiracy to protect the senator, but even the Boston press has said that — perhaps out of deference, or affection, or fear of the Kennedy power — officials treated the Senator in a manner which less well-connected persons in the same kind of scrape would not have expected. The judge who handled the case said that the evidence pointed to criminal misconduct on Ken nedy's part, although he was never charged with any crime and the only punishment he suffered was a two-month suspended sentence and a year's revocation of his driving licence for leaving the scene of an accident.
That leave-taking has also provoked a number of unanswered questions. According to the account given out by the Senator, after he and his two friends returned to the place of the accident and tried to dive into the waters and find the woman, they went over to the ferry slip where they talked for about ten minutes. Thereupon Edward Kennedy plunged into the channel without a word of any kind, and swam to the other island, Martha's Vineyard, made his way to his hotel room, slept for a while, then changed clothes, even putting on a jacket, went downstairs and chatted with the proprietor. Returning to his room, he Slept until he is next seen taking the morning air about eight o'clock, during which time he ran into a man who had won the yacht races the preceding day. The two men, evidently, were standing around talk ihg about the weather and sailing when Gargan and Markham arrived; only then, if everyone is to be believed, did they learn that Kennedy had not yet called the police, though it was no less than nine hours after the event, if the Senator's schedule of events is accepted. Even then he was in no hurry to inform the authorities, as It has been established that he next ordered copies of the Boston Globe and the New York Times from the motel desk, called his lawyer, rode over to Chappaquiddick on the ferry, rode back, and then paid a visit to the local chief of police. It has also been established that Kennedy made no less than 17 telephone calls between the time of the accident and the reporting of it to the police. The television reporter asked Edward Kennedy if he thought that his explanation of Chappaquiddick would come to be accepted as truthful. The Senator's verbatim reply was; 'Oh there's — the problem Is — from that night — I — I — found the conduct, the behaviour, almost beyond belief myself. I mean that's why it's been 7 but I think that that's that's, that's the way it Yvas, That . . . that happened to be the way it was. Now, I find it as I have stated. that I have found that the conduct that in in that evening and in in the — as a result of the pact of the accident of the and the sense of loss, the sense of hope, and, the and the sense of tragedy, and the whole set of — circumstances, that the the behaviour was inexplicable
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