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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Why Didn't He Call the Police
In all accounts of the accident, the most mysterious gap—and unquestionably the most serious—was in what happened next. Why did he not immediately summon the police or a fire department rescue crew? "My conduct and conversation during the next several hours," Kennedy told the TV audience, "to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all. My doctors informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion as well as shock. I do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either on physical or emotional trauma brought on by the accident or anything else. I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately." Instead, he walked back to the cottage, and along his route he passed four houses, at least one of which had lights showing.
At this point, the statement that Kennedy gave to the police and the accounting that he gave to the public seemed to diverge. In the first version, he said that on returning to the cottage he climbed into the back seat of a car and asked someone at the party to take him back to Edgartown. How he finally managed to get to Edgartown he did not relate. In the second explanation, he said that when he reached the cottage, he talked to Gargan and Paul Markham, a former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, and took them back to the bridge. Both of his friends then dived into the water, Kennedy said on TV, but failed to find Mary Jo. "All kinds of scrambled thoughts" went through his mind, said Kennedy, including the notion that perhaps the event had not happened at all, or, on the other hand, perhaps "some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys." He added: "I was overcome, I am frank to say, by a jumble of emotions —grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock."
Was Kennedy in Shock?
In many ways, common sense chafes at the idea of shock, particularly the kind that Kennedy described. How could he remember some things so well and other things not at all? His memory did indeed seem highly selective.
Questioned by TIME, three experts said, however, that Kennedy's behavior was not unusual for a person who had suffered such an experience. By simple definition, shock causes a person to dissociate himself temporarily from threatening circumstances. Subconsciously seeking the protective company of those he knew, Kennedy might thus have passed up nearby houses that could have offered help for the more certain, if more distant safety of his friends. "No one knows what his own breaking point is," says Dr. Max Sadove, professor at the University of Illinois Medical School. "It is different at different times for different people." Nevertheless, it remains somewhat difficult to accept the thought that Kennedy's state of shock could have allowed him the rational move of calling on his friends for help and giving them various instructions but would have prevented him from making the equally rational move of instructing them to call the police.
Why Didn't Gargan and Markham Call the Police?
Assuming that Kennedy was in a state of shock, the conduct of Gargan and Markham is nothing less than incomprehensible. They are both lawyers, although Gargan is used by Kennedy largely as companion for carrying out miscellaneous chores—making reservations, ordering food, emptying glasses and drawing baths. Though under no legal compulsion to do so, the two men could reasonably be expected to have called the police immediately if they were thinking of the girl. Not only would Mary Jo's body have been recovered faster, but her life might conceivably have been saved. Though only the slimmest of possibilities existed, there is a chance that an air bubble might have remained for a brief time within the submerged vehicle, giving the girl moments of life. If a bubble formed, it would have been in the car's rear, which was higher in the water than the heavy front end. Mary Jo's body was, in fact, found in the back seat, although she presumably had been riding in front next to Kennedy.