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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Ultimately, of course, the issue is Edward Kennedy's character and personality. As Chicago's Daily News put it: those whom Ted may hope to serve as President are entitled "to know something of the inner workings of his mind under grave stress."
Pool of Blood
Some psychiatrists, both professional and amateur, posed some other interesting questions about those inner workings of his mind. Did the accident and his behavior after it represent some sort of subconscious desire to escape the path that seemed ahead of him? Or was it an unwitting wish to avoid the burdens of becoming a presidential candidate? Few who knew him doubted that in one sense he very much wanted to take that path, but that at the same time he had a fatalistic, almost doomed feeling about the prospect. Such speculation about his psyche may very well be entirely fanciful. But there is no question that since Robert's assassination he has been a different and deeply troubled man.
He was both more and less serious than he used to be—and more complicated. For one thing, he faced considerable responsibilities. He was suddenly, at the relatively young age of 36, the torch bearer of the Kennedy political tradition. "I came into politics in my brother Joe's place," his brother John had once said. "If anything happens to me, Bobby will take my place, and if Bobby goes, we have Teddy coming along." There were also family responsibilities. Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the clan, was partially paralyzed and only partly conscious of what happened around him, and Ted was now in effect acting as father to 15 children, three of his own, ten of his brother Robert's (an eleventh child was born later) and, until Jacqueline Kennedy's remarriage, two of John's.
By any standard, he handled his duties, official and nonofficial, with devotion. Ted was probably a better Senator than were his two brothers, who found the Senate confining; with only one or two missteps, he served ably. When the 91st Congress assembled in January, he unseated Louisiana's bombastic Russell Long as assistant majority leader. He was a beneficiary, of course, of the grace of being a Kennedy. Without that, he would probably never have won his Senate seat in the first place, and he certainly would never have been considered, at his age and level of experience, a serious presidential contender. Yet he was well-liked in the Senate, was deferential to his elders; he played by the rules and did his homework. If he was far less abrasive—and far less disliked—than Bobby, he also seemed to lack his brother's genuine heat and passion for the causes he backed. In recent months he had only just begun to make a record: speeches on Viet Nam, the space program and the ABM—all of them cautiously worked out with the help of advisers, on whom he relied more than his brother did. But he gained confidence in his own political judgment and seemed to believe a statement that has been attributed to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, that Ted is the best politician in the Kennedy family.
At the same time, he could not forget the image of his brother lying in a pool of his own blood in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. He made clear to his closest associates that he knew better than anyone else that there were uncounted numbers of psychopaths who might like to claim the murder of the last of the Kennedy brothers. Once he reportedly said: "I know that I'm going to get my ass shot off one day, and I don't want to." He talked privately of how his father had watched the Eisenhower funeral on television and of how the former ambassador had thought that his youngest son was being buried. Ted, who had always been the blithest brother, and the least intellectual or introspective, could now be morose at times.
The youngest, handsomest and most spoiled of the Kennedy brothers had often seemed shallow and irresponsible.
Apart from the famous exam-cheating episode at Harvard, there were numerous pranks—riding a bronco in the West or landing a plane without adequate training. Recently, his desire for kicks seemed to friends to be tinged with a tomorrow-we-die spirit. He seemed in private more fatigued by the demands of his public image. As LIFE reports this week, Kennedy would be in a room and feel people pressing in on him. His aides would hear him mumble "T.M.B.S."—Too Many Blue Suits —and they would know that it was time to clear the room.
As for women, there are countless rumors in Washington, many of them conveyed with a ring of conviction. Some who have long watched the Kennedys can say with certainty that he often flirts with pretty girls in situations indiscreet for someone named Ted Kennedy. At the same time, he and his wife Joan are rumored to have had their troubles. There is no question that they are frequently separated. On one journey alone last summer, he was seen in the company of another lovely blonde on Aristotle Onassis' yacht. Such incidents might be recounted about innumerable people in Washington and elsewhere; it is only the Martha's Vineyard tragedy that suddenly makes them seem pertinent.