Mary Jo Kopechne
Summer, 1969. Richard Nixon is President, having narrowly defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 race for the White House, but the ghost in that campaign was Senator Robert Kennedy (D-New York). His life and campaign for the Democratic nomination were cut short on 5 June, 1968, when he was assassinated just moments after winning the California Democratic primary. Humphrey won the Democratic nomination at the Chicago convention, but he was tied to President Johnson and continuing the war in Vietnam, which was anathema to the “real” Democrats, and to those who yearned for the mythical Camelot of President John Kennedy. With the death of Robert Kennedy, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy was left as The One, the sole surviving Kennedy. There was already serious talk of his running against Nixon in the 1972 campaign, which sent shivers down the the spines of Nixon and his White House aides. All talk of of a 1972 campaign came to an end after the Chappaquiddick incident of 18 July, 1969.
Ted Kennedy attended a cook out on Chappaquiddick island, which is a small island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The cook out was a get-together for the “boiler room” girls, who were young women who had done the grunt work (stuffing envelopes, yard signs, manning phone banks) of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in 1968. At 2315 on 18 July, Senator Kennedy stated that he was leaving, and one of the girls, Mary Jo Kopechne, stated that she wished to leave as well, and would the Senator mind giving her a ride back to her hotel in Edgarton, on Martha’s Vineyard. Kennedy then asked his chauffeur for the keys to his car, and both he and Kopechne left together. Later it became known that Kopechne didn’t tell anyone else that she was leaving, and both her purse and hotel key were still at the cookout location.
Somehow, Kennedy got off the main road to the ferry landing, which was paved, and ended up on a dirt road that led to Dyke Bridge, a narrow wooden bridge with no guardrail. Just before he reached the bridge, Kennedy applied his brakes, which sent the car careening off the dirt road into Poucha pond, which is swept regularly by powerful tidal currents. The car ended up at the bottom of the pond, on its roof. Kennedy managed to escape and swim free, but Mary Jo did not. Kennedy testified at the inquest that he entered the water several times trying to help Mary Jo get free from the car, but it was dark and the current was strong. After several rescue attempts, Kennedy walked back to the site of the cookout, passing several houses where he could have called for help and reported the accident. Once back at the cookout, he enlisted the help of two friends, Joseph Gargan and Paul Markham, to return to the scene of the accident, where they also tried diving down to the car in order to help Mary Jo, but it was to no avail. The men insisted that Kennedy had to report the incident immediately, but he did not. Kennedy swam the 500-foot channel back to Edgarton, changed his clothes, and collapsed into bed. Later the hotel manager testified that Kennedy called the front desk to complain about noise from a party taking place near his room.
By the next morning the tide had begun to shift in Poucha Pond, and the partially submerged car was seen by two fishermen, who quickly called the sheriff. Kennedy still had not reported the accident, despite a heated argument with his friends, Markham and Gagan, both of whom were vehement that the accident had to be reported. Kennedy then went to a pay phone to call other advisors about what to do, but he didn’t make an official report until he heard that the sheriff had been notified and that a recovery team had found Mary Jo’s body.
I was 9 years old when this happened, and all I remember of that weekend was the Apollo XI moon mission. That was what most of the country, and indeed the world, were focused on that weekend, but once that story receded, all eyes turned to Kennedy and his actions at Chappaquiddick island. Wild rumors erupted that he was driving drunk, that he and Mary Jo were having an affair, that the affair had resulted in a pregnancy, which is why he drowned her. His behavior that evening helped fuel the rumors. Everything he did that evening, from not using his chauffeur, not realizing he was driving on a dirt road, not stopping at the first house he saw after the crash and heading back to the house where the cookout was held, and above all, not reporting the accident, made anything he subsequently said seem suspicious and self-serving. My parents, die-hard Democrats, never quite believed him after this tragedy, and it surfaced with a vengeance when he challenged President Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. The tragedy was also the fodder for savage jokes about Kennedy. After the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident, one bumper sticker was made that said “More people died at Chappaquiddick than at Three Mile Island” (there were no fatalities at Three Mile Island).
My life covered all of Senator Kennedy’s political career. I was 2 when he entered the Senate in 1962, when he won the special election for his brother’s Senate seat (JFK won the White House narrowly in 1960, defeating VP Nixon in one of the closest Presidential races in U.S. history), and I was 49 when he died. To this day I don’t understand his actions, or lack thereof, on 18 July 1969. The Chappaquiddick tragedy most effectively ended any hope he had for the White House, proving that in American politics, what is forgivable at the local and state level may not be forgivable on the national stage.
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