Mary Jo Kopechne Died 40 Years Ago Today, but How?
This is a murky tale of death and deceit. What really happened that night? We may never know the truth. The only man who did know the facts, Ted Kennedy, is now in his grave. ~Mergie
Mary Jo Kopechne Died 40 Years Ago Today, but How?
Today is the anniversary of Mary Jo Kopechne's death, a death which occurred after the car in which she was riding plunged off a bridge into a tidal channel from Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. What made Mary Jo Kopechne a household name and her death nationally noteworthy was the identity of the car's driver, Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy.
On July 18, 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne attended a party honoring "the Boiler Room Girls," a handful of young women who had served in key positions on presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's campaign. Robert F. Kennedy was Ted Kennedy's older brother; he was murdered a year earlier during his presidential run. Official reports indicate that Ted Kennedy left the party at 11:15 to drive Mary Jo Kopechne to the Edgartown Ferry, the only way off the island. The physical facts have never supported this official version of the story. Kennedy's car was headed in the opposite direction of the ferry, and Kennedy knew the territory well.
Kennedy escaped from the car and claims to have tried to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne to no avail.
Kennedy did not make a police report until the following day, raising questions as to his intentions. Was he trying to avoid responsibility? Or was he protecting Mary Jo Kopechne's reputation or that of someone else?
By 1975, Mary Jo Kopechne's mother Gwen had publicly stated that the official accident report given by Ted Kennedy to authorities was false and was the result of bad counsel. According to Mrs. Kopechne, her daughter Mary Jo was asleep in the back seat of the Senator's car when the car plunged off the bridge.
When Ted Kennedy ran for President in 1980, a story professing to be the truth about Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne circulated in the college community where I was living. This version of what happened at Chappaquiddick Island the night Mary Jo Kopechne died made perfect sense, taking into account the Senator's actions, his reputation, and the times in which Mary Jo Kopechne's drowing occurred.
The story circulating in 1980 described the events of the night of July 18, 1969 thusly: Senator Ted Kennedy and a married woman left the party together, not headed for the ferry but for the beach. [There was a witness in 1969 who passed Ted Kennedy's car on the road that night and reported seeing a woman older than and different in appearance than Mary Jo Kopechne in the passenger seat. A purse recovered from the front seat when the car was raised belonged not to a married woman, however, but to one of the single Boiler Room Girls, Rosemary Keough.] Mary Jo Kopechne, unbeknownst to the parties in the front seat, had passed out on the back seat floor of the Senator's car before they entered it.
According to the 1980 story, when the car went off the bridge, Ted Kennedy and his front seat passenger escaped and left the scene. He did not report the accident to protect the identity of his married companion, lest the revelation destroy her marriage. He did not learn that Mary Jo Kopechne was in his car until the following morning at which point he allegedly manufactured an explanation that would not implicate his female companion.
Why does this story make sense?
• Kennedy had a reputation as a womanizer, but in 1969, an affair with a married woman would have been political suicide. (As an 11 year old girl living in Massachusetts in 1969, I clearly remember the day Mary Jo Kopechne's death made the newspaper and the talk of Kennedy's infidelity to his own wife by a presumed relationship with Mary Jo Kopechne being asserted as grounds for his ouster from office. Whether it was a married woman or Keough that Ted Kennedy may have protected by allegedly lying about the accident, the rationale is similar. Acknowledging an affair would have been political suicide for him and devastating to her reputation.)
• People who saw Ted Kennedy after the accident reported him to be in a jovial mood. While the extremely cynical attribute this to a callous attitude toward Mary Jo Kopechne's life, a much simpler explanation would be that he was relived to have avoided drowning and protected his companion's identity, as yet unaware of Kopechne's death.
• Believing that Ted Kennedy knew Mary Jo Kopechne was in the car yet failed to report the accident makes no sense, regardless of what he theoretically could have been doing with her in the car that night and regardless of his opinion of her worth. It doesn't take a Kennedy fan to recognize that the Senator was and remains intelligent and strategically gifted. No one with his sights on the American presidency or even a high profile career as a United States Senator would have failed to report that accident knowing that Mary Jo Kopechne was missing under water in his car, presumably drowned.
• Mary Jo Kopechne's body was found in the back seat, not the passenger seat, of Ted Kennedy's car.
This 1980 story is very similar to what Mary Wentworth is reporting in Cape Cod Today on this 40th anniversary of Mary Jo Kopechne's death. Wentworth's piece is one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful analyses of Mary Jo Kopechne's death published today. Many of the other pieces suggest that the senator's concern for saving his political career initially motivated him not to report her death- a conclusion that makes no sense at all given that her death was bound to be discovered.
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