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"For me," Edward Kennedy had said in his attempt to explain his actions at Chappaquiddick, "this will be a difficult decision to make." Yet he considered the question of his political future for just four days before announcing last week that he would return to the Senate, seek another term next year and eschew any presidential bid in 1972. Although he had invited his state and, in effect, the nation, to participate in his decision, Kennedy made the choice quite privately. Then, instead of holding a briefing or press conference, he had the announcement mimeographed in his Boston office. Some skeptics doubted that resignation had ever been a real and serious consideration in Senator Kennedy's mind.
Subdued Greetings. Kennedy's return to the Senate might have seemed a welcome opportunity to plunge back into his duties. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield greeted him: "Come in, Ted. You're right back where you belong." But Kennedy sat seemingly distracted and depressed at his front-row Senate desk as summer tourists crowded the galleries for a glimpse of him and his colleagues offered subdued and embarrassed greetings.
The implication in his back-to-work announcement was that he carried a kind of renewed mandate. To be sure, the people of Massachusetts, from Pittsfield to Boston, had responded to Kennedy's testing of their faith with a sort of spontaneous plebiscite, an outpouring of letters and telegrams affirming their confidence. But, said the Boston Globe: "It is a bit like an umpire turning about in Fenway Park to ask the audience whether Carl Yastrzemski is safe at the plate."
The rest of the nation was more skeptical than Bay Staters. Yet the country was ambivalent. A Louis Harris poll commissioned by TIME revealed much sympathy for Kennedy. At the same time, the national survey found widespread doubts about Kennedy's explanation (see box, page 17).
Perhaps the most critical judgments of Kennedy's behavior in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne came from the nation's editorial writers and columnists. Many editorialists agreed with the Tulsa World, which wrote: "We can honestly feel for the Senator in his time of terrible anguish, but our Presidents must be elected for their reliable strengths, not out of sympathy for their misfortunes." The essence, said the New York Post's Max Lerner, was that "at a crisis moment in his life, when another human life was at stake, Senator Kennedy was either thrown into confusion or stunned into insensitivity and inaction."
James Reston of the New York Times concluded that the real question "is not whether the voters of Massachusetts can live with the Senator's account of the tragedy, but whether he can." To Columnists Frank Mankiewicz and Tom Braden, the case was tragic "in the Shakespearean sense of a puzzlement of the will, of judgment suspended and flawed at a crucial moment."