Divers try to raise the car belonging to Senator Edward Kennedy in which he was seriously injured and his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne was killed, at the Chappaquiddick Bridge.
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Edgartown Police Chief Dominick Arena, who had investigated the accident and brought the charge against the Senator, found no fault. "I'm satisfied," he told reporters, "and the case is closed."
In legal terms, the chief was almost certainly right. Politically and morally, he could scarcely have been farther from the truth. Speaking to the nation before a bookcase in his father's house in Hyannisport—his own house had insufficient electrical capacity for TV equipment—Kennedy sought not only to fill some of the gaping holes in his earlier story, but, in an appeal slightly reminiscent of Richard Nixon's famous Checkers speech in 1952,* to salvage his political future as well. The appearance did, in fact, answer a few of the questions, but left the most serious ones unanswered and raised a few that had not been asked before. The questions and the facts, so far as they are known:
What Was the Occcasion?
A group of secretaries and women aides from Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and several male Kennedy friends and retainers met for a cookout Friday, July 18, at the small, two-bedroom Lawrence cottage that Kennedy's cousin, Joseph Gargan, had rented on Chappaquiddick. Kennedy said he had "encouraged and helped sponsor" the gathering for the "devoted group" of women. It is a fact that such social reunions of Kennedy people are held occasionally, and this one was not at all unusual.
There were six women and six men, including the Senator. Besides Mary Jo, the women, all from Washington, were Susan Tannenbaum, Rosemary Keough, Esther Newberg, and two sisters, Nancy and Mary Ellen Lyons. Besides Kennedy and Gargan, the men were Paul Markham, a former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts; Jack Crimmins, a Kennedy employee; Charles Tredder and Raymond Larusso, frequent sailing companions. Kennedy was registered at the Shiretown Inn in Edgartown, across the channel from Chappaquiddick; the women were put up at The Dunes, a motel several miles away. Kennedy had raced his yacht, the Victura, that afternoon in the first heat of the annual Edgartown Regatta, an event long attended by members of his family. Kennedy's wife Joan remained at their summer home on Squaw Island off Hyannisport. "Only reasons of health," Kennedy said, prevented her from joining him. Mrs. Kennedy is expecting their fourth child around the first of the year, though this was not necessarily the "reason of health." No other wives attended the party, and no reasons were given for their absence.
Why Did Kennedy and Miss Kopechne Leave?
According to both his first written statement and his television accounting, Kennedy and Mary Jo left the party about 11:15 p.m. Though he failed to repeat it on TV, his purpose, Kennedy told police, was to catch the last ferry at midnight back to Martha's Vineyard. The Senator, said one of the women last week, wanted to turn in early so that he would be rested for the second race the next day, and Mary Jo's mother later observed that "M.J." was a "sleeper" who usually retired early. Kennedy reportedly offered to take Miss Kopechne back with him when Mary Jo said that she was tired.
Some of the other women, however, did not even know that Kennedy had left; none were aware of the accident until the following morning.
At this point, according to the TV recounting, Kennedy faced up to one of the most damaging and obvious questions: "There is no truth, no truth whatever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening. There has never been a private relationship between us of any kind." No one can prove conclusively, of course, that Kennedy was telling the truth about this aspect of the incident, but most evidence indicates that he was, if for no other reason than that an affair in the night seemed totally out of character for Mary Jo (see box, overleaf). Says Esther Newberg: "Mary Jo was not a stranger or a pickup. She was like a member of the family." On the other hand, says a longtime Kennedy watcher, "one can also sense that Kennedy, jovial, relaxed, perhaps high, might have said: 'Come on, Mary Jo, and let's have a look at the ocean.' "