50 years ago, Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne were in a black Oldsmobile that ran off Dike Bridge and into Poncha Pond on Chappaquiddick Island. He escaped the flooded car; she died there.
The accepted date is July 18, 1969 - but this is based on Kennedy’s claim to have left the party they were attending at around 11:15 pm. A deputy sheriff saw the car make a hard right onto the dirt road leading to the bridge at a time almost certainly within a few minutes of 12:40 am on the 19th.
The time discrepancy is just one of a great many aspects of this curious incident and its aftermath that never have been explained. A few people who are in a position to say more are still alive, but the chance they will seems remote.
So many unanswered questions about that whole incident.
Mostly though, I do wish we knew more about Mary Jo. Why is she a footnote in her own story of how she died?
Except for, 'young, pretty, smart and working for the Kennedy campaign machine" I barely know a thing about her. Why’d she get into that car with a drunk driver? Too trusting? Too intimidated to say no? Were they having an affair? Was drunk driving just not really as big a deal back then? Was there a sense of being removed from the eye of the law, on that small island?
Why didn’t her parents make a bigger stink? (Or did they, and has history not made proper note of it?)
How the hell did Ted manage to live this scandal down? It seems nothing short of miraculous to me that his political aspirations eventually came to fruition.
I can’t speak for the rest, but this one is a “yes”.
The time discrepancy: sounds to me like Ted Kennedy has the same sense of time as Middlebro. I know other people like that but, my brother being by definition a close relative, I encounter his more often that those of other people.
That kind of sense of time was the main source of friction between Middlebro and our father. They’d agree on an arrival time of, say, 10pm. Bro would be in a place 15’ away and think “ok, so I leave at 21:45 and I’m home on time”, start making his goodbyes at 21:45… plus 15 or 20… and be home at 10:42. The further away he’d happened to be, the larger the delay. He didn’t see what the big fucking deal was; Dad saw it as breaking a deal, as breaking his word. Both Bro and his wife are always the last ones to arrive to any family meal not held at their house, and the ones who haven’t even started the meal at the time we were supposed to start eating when it is held there. When those meals are at another home we start without them more often than not.
IIRC, the ferry back to the mainland closed at midnight and his cover story was that he was giving Mary Jo a ride back to her hotel room. Therefore his story had to be that it was earlier than midnight (as he was familiar with the ferry and nobody would believe that he didn’t know that)
His story that he turned off of a paved road onto an unpaved road “by mistake” was laughable as well.
I think it is pretty clear that he was driving her to the beach to have sex with her and the mixture of excitement and alcohol caused him to drive off the narrow bridge with no guardrails.
Further, his behavior afterwards of making his presence known at his hotel on the mainland is odd at best. The most likely explanation was that his original cover story would have been something like Mary Jo dropped him off at the ferry and as far as he knew she went back to the cabin. After realizing that this story would have been verifiably false, he and his handlers came up with the one he came up with.
From my understanding, it wasn’t so much that people drove drunk, but that people didn’t differentiate between drunk as used in everyday parlance and drunk while driving a car. The two were the same. There was no “buzzed driving is drunk driving.”
So long as you weren’t staggering around blasted out of your gourd, you were good enough to drive. IIRC, the DUI limit was 0.15 in MA at the time.
I was 9 years old when it happened and remember reading about it in Time magazine when it happened. Mary Jo’s photo struck me even then; she reminded me of my sweet 1st grade teacher.
It really wasn’t. The Howard-Barnes Alcohol Traffic Safety Law, which gave states financial incentive to pass laws lowering the legal BAC levels for impaired driving from 0.15 percent to 0.1 percent, wasn’t passed until 1982. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), one of the organizations that significantly raised awareness of drunk driving, wasn’t founded until 1980.
I think back to holiday parties in the 60s and 70s, especially New Year’s Eve, and realize that quite a number of the uncles and male family friends were driving home drunk. There was no concept of using a designated driver. I don’t remember ever seeing any of the (less drunk) wives driving instead of their husbands.
Car safety wasn’t a big deal either–no seat belts or airbags back in the 60s, no kids carseats either. I remember jumping around in the back of the car and scrambling over from the back to the front seat while the car was moving.
Here’s a page re. MADD and changes:
Social attitudes have really changed in the past 50 years.
I do realize that he had eyes on the presidency. But lots of politicians do, and never have this level of scandal, and never get to the White House.
How did public perception about this incident change enough, and quickly enough, that he managed to win ANY public office at all in his lifetime? The Kennedy aura? Was it covered up or downplayed by a sympathetic media? Were his other perceived good deeds seen as enough to outweigh his bad judgment in this one instance?
There’s a theory - not widely accepted, but not disproven - that she didn’t.
This theory says that Kennedy’s front-seat passenger was another of the “boiler room girls” - Rosemary Keough. Mary Jo had grown tired of the party, left the party house and fallen asleep in the back seat of the car. When the car went off the bridge, the two in the front seat escaped, and walked (~20 minutes) back to the party, unaware that Mary Jo was in the car. This would readily account for the otherwise strange fact that on the way back from the bridge, Kennedy walked past a fire station and two occupied houses with lights on, from which he could have called to report the accident.
The principal evidence for this is that a purse was found in the car belonging to Keough, whereas Mary Jo’s purse & motel room key were found at the party house, and that her body was found in the back seat of the car.
Ted admittedly left her in the water, not knowing her status. Passed by several houses on the walk to the hotel, asked no one for help. Went to hotel, showered, changed, then contacted his people, who finally contacted police. She clearly lived for a bit underwater before drowning. If he had her life on his mind instead of his political career and had acted swiftly, she probably would not have died.
There was recently a series called 1969 that aired on ABC. One of the episodes, The Girl in the Car, was about Mary Jo Kopechne and the accident. About 15 minutes in, the search and rescue squad captain who responded to the accident says he believes Mary Jo didn’t drown, but suffocated.
It’s worth a watch if you want to know more about her; there are interviews with two of her cousins and a friend.
Fascinating, I had never heard that theory before, and it would actually mean he’s really not the asshole everyone assumes!
Just that it would mean he would rather people think he knowingly left her in the water alive, than know he was (possibly) having an affair? If he didn’t know she was back there, he could have said that, the other woman could have confirmed, and he could have just said he was taking Keough to hotel only, no relationship between them?
To me the big mystery has always been, “How did Teddy make it out?” Pretty reasonable to assume Teddy had been drinking. It was late, and there would have been just a sliver of moonlight. Seems like suddenly crashing into the water in the dark while you’re sauced would be pretty disorienting, but somehow he was able to make it out.
Simple. He didn’t have to make it out of the car window after the accident. He wasn’t in the car. After leaving the party together, he exited the vehicle and told Mary Jo to drive herself home. She drove off the bridge. Look at photos of the car. The passenger’s side is smashed. Any one sitting there would have also had their body smashed, yet the diver who recovered her body said that she hardly had a scratch on her. She was driving and had the steering wheel to hold on to. Even a highly skilled diver would have had an extremely hard time escaping a vehicle after such a terrible accident. A fat, drunk, disoriented Ted Kennedy? IMPOSSIBLE. He was a LIAR. And the neck brace for his court room appearance? Give me a break!
Why didn’t he report the accident right away? Because he didn’t know it happened! Not until the next morning.
Check out the A&E – Investigative Reports Chappaquiddick video. Its all there and MORE.