What Really Happened at Chappaquiddick?
Remembering Mary Jo
Mary Jo Kopechne - another view
Mary Jo Kopechne - a biography
See also
Ted Kennedy and
Mary-Jo Kopechne.
What Really Happened at Chappaquiddick?
bocktherobber.com May 18, 2008
What Really Happened at Chappaquiddick?
bocktherobber.com May 18, 2008
What happened, Ted?
If you’re asking who the hell Ted Kennedy is, then you probably belong to Generation Meh, as one contributor here describes it, and you deserve no further waste of our attention. If, on the other hand, you remember Ted Kennedy, or know all about him, then you’ll be aware that this man has contributed greatly to the uneasy peace we experience on this island. You’ll also know that he has been what we Irish like to think of as a great friend to this country, in our Catholic-Israeli kind of way.
Ted, what the hell were you thinking?
If, like me, you belong to a generation whose parents believed Ted’s brother, President John F Kennedy, was a fucking saint, then you’ll be transfixed as you watch this last survivor of Camelot enter his final struggle.
What, Ted? What the fuck went on?
I can’t deny it, this guy seems to have batted on our behalf all his life, and yet, because I’m of that generation, every time I see Ted Kennedy on the TV, I want to know the answer to the question that’s bothered me since I was a kid. I want to ask him, Ted, what exactly happened to Mary-Jo Kopechne?
Isn’t it terrible? What kind of Irishman am I who would question this peerless icon of Irish-Americanism, this man who has challenged the war-mongering idiot Bush, who has tirelessly spoken out on behalf of our people? What a churlish, ungrateful Irishman I am.
And yet. No matter what this man has achieved in the course of his life, there’s always Chappaquiddick. I can’t shake it off, no matter how I try. I just want to ask him the questions: Ted, what happened on that bridge? Did the car really go into the water by accident? Did Mary-Jo really drown?
I can’t help it, but then again, I’m a bad man. A bad, ungrateful man.
Ted, did you really try to save Mary-Jo or did you just swim the fuck away? And why, Ted? Why did you just swim away and leave Mary-Jo to drown?
Senator Edward Kennedy has been lionised in Ireland as a great friend of this country, and so he has been. But the question remains: what really happened at Chappaquiddick?
What happened, Ted? Why did you just swim away?
Why does this matter? It just does, all right?
It just does.
Myrna Blyth July 20, 2004
This week we
may hear a little about the 35th anniversary of Neil
Armstrong's moonwalk, but there is another anniversary that has
alreeady gone unnoticed. On July 18, 1969, a couple of nights before
Armstrong took that "giant step for mankind," Ted Kennedy took a turn
onto a narrow bridge in Chappaquiddick. The passenger in his car that
night was Mary Jo Kopechne, a pretty, blond Capitol Hill secretary,
just about to celebrate her 29th birthday. The two events are
inextricably linked in my mind because my husband, who was a
correspondent for a British newspaper, instead of reporting on our
glorious odyssey into space, ended up at police headquarters on
Martha's Vineyard covering that sordid story. In case you have forgotten or never knew the details, Ted and five of his pals and six women known as the "Boiler Room Girls" who had worked in Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign, cut short by his assassination the year before, were weekending together. Afterward, the men claimed it was just a couple of days of innocent fun to thank the girls for their help, though the six guys were all married but partying without their wives, and the young women were all single. One of the "Boiler Room Girls" is now big-time New York literary agent Esther Newberg, who was Mary Jo's roommate for the weekend. Like everyone involved in the incident, Esther remains close-mouthed about what occurred.
What everyone testified at the time was that Kennedy and Mary Jo left the party before midnight. Kennedy said he was driving her back to the ferry to Edgartown, and took a wrong turn, though he was very familiar with the roads on the island. His car toppled off a narrow wooden-planked bridge, a bridge that is in the opposite direction to the road that led to the ferry but is on the way to the beach. The car landed upside-down in eight feet of water and, Kennedy claimed that after escaping, he tried unsuccessfully to rescue Mary Jo. He then staggered back to the party, called out his cousin Joe Gargan and his pal Paul Markham, to return to the scene. What he didn't do, inexplicably, was seek help in a lighted house only yards from the bridge or use the fire-alarm phone at a fire station he passed on the way back to the party.
Right from the start, the reporters who arrived at the scene were skeptical of his story, skeptical even of how he claimed he got back to Edgartown that night. Markham and Gargan said when they drove to the ferry landing — the ferry had stopped running by then — Kennedy took them by surprise by jumping in the water, and swimming across the channel towards Edgartown. They assumed, they said, he would report the accident that night to the police. Instead Kennedy went back to his hotel, ostensibly to change his clothes but instead, went downstairs to complain about a noisy party that was going on.
The next morning Markham and Gargan were waiting for Kennedy when he arrived at 9 A.M. on the first ferry. The ferry operator said Kennedy appeared to be in a jovial mood, but probably only until he was told that his car had been found. Only then did Kennedy return and report the accident.
Some reporters, primarily the foreign press, did ask tough questions. For example: Did Kennedy really swim back to Edgartown that night? No one saw him with wet clothes and my husband, for one, interviewed a young man who had tied up his rowboat at the Chappaquiddick dock on Saturday night. When he got there on Sunday morning, he said, it had been retied and with what he called a "land lubber's knot."
But the whole incident was overshadowed by the worldwide coverage of the moonwalk. Besides, all the people involved had, by midday, left Martha's Vineyard and headed home. When the police went to the cottage where the party had taken place, all they found were some washed Coca-Cola bottles. There was no one to interview and no one who would talk then — or ever. Besides, Kennedy was treated like Massachusetts royalty by the local police chief, Dominick Arena, who even gave up his office so that Kennedy could make telephone calls to advisers and lawyers in privacy.
It may have been the last time when a scandal was so under-investigated, so quickly dispatched — and the man involved seemed to get off so easily for what he had done. A week later, Kennedy, who arrived in court wearing a neck brace, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was given a two-month suspended sentence and a year's probation.
Next week Ted Kennedy will be center stage at the Democratic convention in Boston. "It will be a celebration...of the work of Ted Kennedy.... There will be a lot of appropriate attention paid to a person who has been at the center of national politics for the past forty years," his colleague Senator Christopher Dodd has enthused. And last year Boston Globe reporter Charles Pierce commented, "If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."
It would be funny — if it wasn't so sad.
From Uncyclopedia
| “ If you‘re going to party with sharks,
you‘d better be able to swim. ” Ted Kennedy
“ I regret that she had but one life to give to her
country. ” Ted Kennedy
“ I'm going to say that Mary Jo was driving. ” Ted Kennedy
“ Do we operate under a system of equal justice under
law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty? ”
Ted Kennedy
|
Mary Jo Kopechne (July 26, 1940 – July 18, 1969) was 29 years old when Senator Ted Kennedy took her for a late-night swim inside his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 after partying heartily all night to celebrate his late brother Bobby’s sexual affair with actress Marilyn Monroe, whom Bobby shared with brother John F. Kennedy, until they were, on different occasions, assassinated, possibly by their irate wives.
Unfortunately, Kopechne was not nearly as strong a swimmer as Kennedy, and, hampered by her clothing and unable to swim or dogpaddle inside the close confines of the automobile which Kennedy had parked upside down at the bottom of Poucha Pond, below Dyke Bridge, she drowned.
Kennedy said that, upon surfacing, he noticed that his companion was not beside him and, assuming that she was playing a prank on him, he dove, several times, back to the automobile to ask her to join him. The tide was against him, though, and, finally, he had to give up. He swam ashore and returned to the house on Chappaquiddick Island to party, assuming that Kopechne had also swum ashore and gone home. Some time during the next 10 hours, Kennedy, by now quite inebriated, called Kopechne’s parents to make sure that she had gotten home safely. When her parents told him that she had not returned and that they’d assumed she was having sex with him, Kennedy, very concerned, contacted his lawyer. Shortly thereafter, the police arrived. The party, for him, they said, was over.
Welcome to Chappaquiddick; population -1
Kopechne was born in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Coldwater College and, after a few false starts as a teacher, became a secretary for Bobby Kennedy. When Bobby was assassinated in 1968, Kopechne went to work for a firm that set up campaign headquarters for politicians and other lowlifes. The party at Chappaquiddik was to honor her work on behalf of the late Bobby.
Kopechne is buried in the St. Vincent's Roman Catholic Church parish cemetery on the side of Larksville Mountain in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Her headstone bears a carving of a life preserver and the epigraph, “There’s something fishy about all this.”
The sordid affair, known locally, as "The Incident at Chappaquiddick," is memorialized on the postcards sold at the island resort.
A few years after Kopechne’s burial, Kennedy bought the bridge, had it dismantled, moved it to his home, and had it installed in his back yard, over a wide stream, as "a memento," as he says, "of the night" that a woman upon whom he'd had sexual designs "got away."
Megan Marshak in the 1970s decided Mary Jo was a good role model, so she followed in Mary Jo's footsteps. Well, her boyfriend, Nelson Rockefeller, didn't drown her, but she came awfully close to that point. He died on top of her. Eeeeeew!
Another follower of Kopechne's philosophy was Monica Lewinsky. Luckily for her, the affair she generated only led to a failed impeachment.
Mary Jo Kopechne (July
26, 1940 –
July 18, 1969)
an American teacher, secretary and administrator who died in a car accident in Chappaquiddick Island while being driven by United States Senator Ted Kennedy.
an American teacher, secretary and administrator who died in a car accident in Chappaquiddick Island while being driven by United States Senator Ted Kennedy.
Kopechne, born in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, was the only child of insurance salesman Joseph Kopechne and his wife, Gwen. After graduation from Caldwell College for women in New Jersey, Kopechne moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to teach at the Montgomery Catholic High School. She then moved to Washington, D.C., to work as secretary to Florida Senator George Smathers before subsequently becoming secretary to New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy following his election in 1964. At the time of her death, she was working for Matt Reese Associates, a Washington, D.C., firm that helped establish campaign headquarters for politicians. She had taken that position in December 1968 after Kennedy's death from an assassin's bullet the previous June.
Death
On July 18, 1969, Kopechne attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, held in honor of the "Boiler Room Girls." This affectionate name was given to the six young women who had been vital to the late Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign and who had subsequently closed up his files and campaign office after his assassination.
Besides Kopechne, the other women, all single, were Susan Tannenbaum, Maryellen Lyons, Ann Lyons, Rosemary (Cricket) Keough, and Esther Newberg. The men in attendance, all married but present without their wives, were Ted Kennedy, Joe Gargan, U.S. Attorney Paul Markham, Charles Tretter, Raymond La Rosa, and John Crimmins. The festivity was held at Lawrence Cottage, rented for the occasion by Gargan, Kennedy's cousin and lawyer. The 12 attendees gathered at the cottage after two Kennedy boats raced in the Edgartown Regatta earlier in the day.
Kopechne left the party at 11:15 p.m. with Kennedy after he allegedly offered to drive her to catch the last ferry back to the Katama Shores Motor Inn in Edgartown where she was staying. (According to Kennedy, they left the party at 11:15 p.m. to catch the last ferry of the night -- at midnight.) Kennedy stated, on his way to the ferry crossing back to Edgartown, that he accidentally turned right onto Dike Road - a dirt road - instead of bearing sharply left on Main Street (Chappaquiddick Rd), which was a paved road. After proceeding one-half mile, he descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge set obliquely to the unlit road. Kennedy drove the 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 belonging to him, off the side of Dyke Bridge, and the car overturned into Poucha Pond, a fairly narrow tidal body of water. A Reader's Digest investigation estimated that the car was traveling at about 35 miles per hour when it left the bridge.
Kennedy extricated himself from the submerged car but Kopechne died. Kennedy said that he made several diving attempts to free her and, after exhausting himself, rested for fifteen minutes. He then walked some fifteen minutes, past several houses, back to the Lawrence Cottage where the party had been held. When Kennedy arrived back at the cottage, he saw the white Valiant his group had rented parked near the front door. The Senator testified that as he came up to the back of the vehicle, he saw Ray LaRosa. Kennedy made no mention of the accident to LaRosa, however, and instead told him to go get Joe Gargan, Senator Kennedy's cousin and lawyer, and another friend, former U.S. Attorney Paul Markham. Kennedy explained the situation, and although there was a working phone at the cottage, the trio allegedly drove to the scene of the accident to attempt a rescue. The group claimed that the tidal current was too strong and prevented them from reaching Kopechne.
Still, despite their failure to rescue Kopechne, Kennedy, Gargan, and Markham made no attempt to contact authorities. Instead, Kennedy was driven to the ferry dock where he jumped into the water and swam the distance between Chappaquiddick and Martha's Vineyard Islands, some 500 feet, and returned to his room at the Shiretown Inn, in Edgartown. Gargan and Marken claimed Kennedy said he was heading to contact the authorities, and they returned to the cottage. A night clerk at the Shiretown Inn said he encountered Kennedy on the premises at 2:50 a.m. The next morning, Gargan, Markham, and several female co-workers of Kopechne took the first ferry back to Edgartown. At the Shiretown Inn, Kennedy was seen around the hotel smartly dressed and calmly conversing with other guests. By 9 a.m. Gargan, Markham, and Kennedy were on a ferry back to Chappaquiddick Island, purportedly to return to the cottage.
By this time, however, two fishermen had happened upon Kennedy's submerged vehicle[citation needed], rushing to a house a few yards away to notify the authorities at around 8 a.m. Police arrived by 8:20, and a diver was on the scene by 8:30, discovering Kopechne by 8:45. By this time, the car was identified as Senator Kennedy's. Those at the scene feared another Kennedy tragedy might have occurred, and a search for other possible victims ensued; however, at 9:30 Kennedy was spotted on a phone at the Chappaquiddick side of the ferry, where he was asked by authorities if he knew that a dead woman's body had been retrieved from his car. Kennedy initially denied any knowledge of this, but later acknowledged his involvement during questioning at the Edgartown police station, which he documented through a short, written statement about the previous night's trip to the ferry with Miss Kopechne. When questioned about the details, Kennedy refused to answer without his attorney being present.
Kennedy's statement already had problems, however.[neutrality disputed] The previous evening, Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look, on returning from duty in Edgartown, had seen what he believed to be Kennedy's black sedan driving erratically with a male and female passenger sometime around 12:40 a.m. The sedan failed to negotiate a sharp left turn on paved Chappaquiddick Road leading toward the ferry, the direction from which Deputy Look was returning home. Instead, the sedan continued straight and came to a dusty, sudden stop on the dirt cemetery driveway then locally called Cemetery Road (today Willet Lane). The deputy came to a stop and in his rear-view mirror noticed the sedan backing up, leading him to believe the driver needed directions. Look exited his vehicle and walked toward the sedan, and the sedan's reverse-taillights more closely illuminated him as it emerged from the dirt driveway. However, no sooner was Look's deputy uniform lit, according to Look, the sedan quickly turned to its right -- the opposite direction from the ferry -- and sped down Dike road, which is dirt. Dike is the road leading to the beach, and the intersection where this occurred was about a half mile from Dike Bridge, where the accident was later discovered. Deputy Look caught an L and two 7s bracketing the Massachusetts license plate number, which would closely match Kennedy's L-78207 Oldsmobile plate.
Kennedy avoided the press gathering outside the police station, quietly exiting to an unmarked car that took him to a privately hired plane at the airport nearby, which took him back to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport. Likewise, guests of the party also quickly left for the mainland via the ferry long before the authorities concluded there had been a party at the Lawrence Cottage.
The incident carries a controversial dark-cloud for Kennedy because John Farrar, the diver who retrieved Kopechne's body early the following morning, stated Kopechne was in a position suggesting she had been breathing from a pocket of air trapped in the back-seat wheel well and had suffocated and not drowned, which implied that had Kennedy contacted authorities immediately, rescuers may have saved her life. However, since Kopechne's parents' lawyer, Joseph Flanagan, filed a petition barring an autopsy, the cause of death was never medically confirmed. When the car was recovered, all the doors were locked and three of the windows were either open or smashed in.
Kopechne's parents also claim that they learned of their daughter's death from Ted Kennedy before he reported his involvement to the authorities, and that they only learned he had been the driver through wire press releases some time later.
Kennedy ultimately received a deferred six-month sentence[citation needed] for leaving the scene of an accident. Kennedy defenders claim the legal case proved Kennedy was clear of guilt, whereas critics of the incident assert Kennedy got off lightly because of his family and political connections, and that many details were swept under the rug only to emerge later through journalistic efforts that suggested little effort was made to gather information detrimental to Kennedy.
Aftermath
On
television Kennedy later said he was not driving under the influence
of alcohol. This has been widely disputed by many reports. He
explained he was in a state of shock when he emerged from
the creek and confused by "a jumble of emotions," and that his conduct
in not reporting the accident was "inexcusable." He said he gave up
hope and remembers little of how he got back to his hotel in Edgartown,
except that he swam the narrow channel because there were no night
ferries, and nearly drowned in the process.Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. He received a two month suspended sentence and one year probation[citation needed]. Questions remain about his attempts to save Kopechne and the possibility of interference in the investigation and the trial by his family and friends. Kopechne's death severely damaged Kennedy's reputation and is regarded as a major reason that he was never able to mount a successful campaign for President of the United States.
A funeral for Kopechne was held on July 22, 1969, at St. Vincent's Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, attended by Kennedy. She is buried in the parish cemetery on the side of Larksville Mountain.
See also
Conspiracy theory
The Mossad Role in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy
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