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Beyond the Kopechne and Kennedy families,* it has been the girls at the party whose lives have been most unsettled by the accident. "You can't begin to understand what it has been like," says Susan Tannenbaum, a congressional secretary. "I place a tremendous value on the right of privacy, but suddenly I'm infamous. The real meaning of what you are and what you value remains intact inside yourself, but there you are, splashed all over the papers." There has been "lots of sick mail," says another of the girls, "lots of it." Susan asks indignantly: "How would you feel if a reporter called your mother at 8 a.m. and asked her whether she approved of her daughter's conduct in spending the night with a group of married men?"
The five girls who attended the cookout are uniformly bright, efficient, fascinated by politics and cultishly pro-Kennedy. None is strikingly attractive, and as a group they are hardly the sort that older men would invite for a weekend of dalliance. From the beginning, they have intended to go to the inquest. Explains one: "My God, can you imagine what the reaction would be if we refused to attend? The great coverup, right? We'll all be there, if for no other reason than to defend the reputation of Mary Jo." All of the girls were scheduled to spend the Labor Day weekend being briefed by Kennedy lawyers. Nothing in their backgrounds prepared them for the public scrutiny and suspicions to which they have been subjected.
Rosemary ("Crickett") Keough
"Crickett," as everyone calls her, did volunteer work in her home town of Philadelphia during John Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, was signed on to Robert Kennedy's staff in 1967 to answer mail from children—a task she performed with engaging touches of whimsy. Age 23, barely five feet tall, with red hair, she enjoyed playing with the Kennedy brood at Hickory Hill. Like the other girls from the "boiler room," she was shattered by Bobby Kennedy's death, seemed to snap out of her melancholy only considerably later, after she began working for the Kennedy family foundation for mentally retarded children.
Susan Tannenbaum
Susie, 24, is bright, sensitive, and perhaps the most attractive of the girls who attended the cookout. The daughter of a Greensboro, N.C., dentist, she attended Centenary College in Hackettstown, N.J., and later Miami University of Ohio. She went to Washington to work for Robert Kennedy in 1967. Her co-workers in the Kennedy mail room remember her as lively and exceptionally competent. She now works for New York's Representative Allard Lowenstein, one of the architects of the 1968 "Dump Johnson" movement.
Esther Newberg