Any suggestion that she might be involved in scandal would have appalled Mary Jo Kopechne. Then it might have amused her, for she was often kidded for not being a swinger. Girlish and gung-ho, she led a life that revolved around the Catholic Church, politics and the Kennedy family. Mary Jo, as everyone who knew her agreed last week, was the girl next door, or perhaps the tomboy, who played catcher on the office softball team. When she took her first Capitol Hill job in 1963, working for Florida's Senator George Smathers, there was a standing joke that only Mary Jo, in an office full of more chic, sleek numbers, knew how to take dictation.
An only child, Mary Jo was born in Plymouth, Pa., where her father was an insurance salesman. In 1962, she graduated with a degree in business from New Jersey's Caldwell College for Women, a small liberal arts school operated by the Sisters of St. Dominic. She immediately sought social and political commitments, starting with a job teaching black children in a civil rights project in Montgomery, Ala.
Once in the capital, "M.J." could not resist the lure of employment in Freshman Senator Robert Kennedy's office; Smathers recommended her because of her adoration of the Kennedys. Mary Jo soon became respected for thoroughness, industriousness and discretion. "She was the one who stayed up all night and typed Bobby's speech on Viet Nam" in February 1966, Ethel Kennedy recalled last week. During the 1968 campaign, Mary Jo worked in the "Boiler Room" of R.F.K.'s Washington campaign headquarters, where the running count of convention delegates was kept. Mary Jo joined three other young women in renting a small Georgetown house on Olive Street. Though bright, blonde and at least conventionally pretty, she had little social life outside of the office. Michael Dinunzio, who later worked with her in a Colorado Senate campaign, recalled: "She had no plans for marriage. Her total life was politics." He could not remember her having a date over a period of six months.
Though she became increasingly sophisticated politically, some of her friends thought that Mary Jo, at 28, was somewhat naive in social relationships. She was engagingly wholesome, did not smoke and rarely drank. Whenever she traveled, she telephoned her parents to tell them where she was. Says former R.F.K. Aide Wendell Pigman, "She was the kind of girl who almost scowled at hearing a dirty word."
After Robert Kennedy's death, Mary Jo, like other former staffers, worked for a time helping Ethel with correspondence. Then she joined the Southern Political Education and Action Committee, registering Negro voters in Florida. When she was hired last September by Matt Reese Associates, which runs campaigns for Democrats across the country, she was proud to have graduated to the status of political organizer and all-round campaign aide.
Mary Jo had been looking forward to the weekend on Martha's Vineyard. It meant seeing her old friends from the Boiler Room, perhaps playing some nostalgic games of touch football and having yet another chance to root for a Kennedy. She had never worked directly for Ted Kennedy. In fact, some of her friends remember that, in comparison with his brothers, Ted Kennedy was not an idol to Mary Jo Kopechne.