AT least six songs entitled The Ballad of Mary Jo were submitted to New York publishers. Someone visiting the remote Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick carved TED & MARY in the bridge's wooden planks. Reporters and columnists kept up a flow of speculation that prompted the New York Times's James Reston, who agrees that Edward Kennedy's account of the fatal accident at Poucha Pond has not been satisfactory, to object that "he is being tried in the press before he gets to court."
Kennedy himself told a Boston Globe reporter last week, "I feel the tragedy of the girl's death. That's what I'll always have to live with. But what I don't have to live with are the whispers and innuendoes and falsehoods." Yet in the continued absence of an adequate public explanation from Kennedy about the night when Mary Jo Kopechne died, the whispers and innuendoes refused to fade away. The popular memory may be short, but it generally endures, as Kennedy is unhappily discovering, at least until curiosity about public figures has been satisfied (see TIME ESSAY).
No one yet knows how deeply the Sept. 3 inquest at Edgartown will test Kennedy's story. Some lawyers think that the hearing can legally consider only the immediately pertinent questions of whether and how much Kennedy had been drinking, what time he left the party with Mary Jo and how fast he was driving at the time his black Oldsmobile leaped off the Dike Bridge. After all, an inquest is structured to be a kind of legal fishing expedition to determine whether or not a crime may have been committed.
However, it is possible that Massachusetts District Attorney Edmund Dinis will range farther to investigate where Kennedy and Mary Jo were going, why the accident went unreported for so long and whether, as Columnist Jack Anderson has claimed, Kennedy at first weighed letting his cousin, Joe Gargan, "take the rap," If that is Dinis' purpose, there is an easier way to go about it than an inquest. Dinis could charge Kennedy and all his associates that night, both partygoers and advisers after the tragedy, with "conspiracy to present a false statement." Such a charge requires a grand jury, and the grand jury could summon anyone who is not a lawyer to tell the court everything that Ted had told them.