It really is a puzzling case.
Seems to me that if he hadn’t been responsible, no matter HOW weird the explanation was, he would have told the truth. It would have been about as believable as the bizarre actual events. (Assuming it really happened the way he said.)
I am not old enough to remember how he was treated by the media at the time. Was public opinion with him? How quickly did it swing back to the point that he could resume his political aspirations?
My understanding is that he was pretty much given a pass. . . by law enforcement, the press, and the public. He was a Kennedy, after all. Not 'THE" Kennedy, but still ‘A’ Kennedy. Also, a lot of the attention during that same time frame was focused on the first Moon landing.
His support in Massachusetts never wavered much. They love their Kennedys, and had already come to terms with Teddy’s slips from virtue. Among them:
Nationally, the Kennedy mystique carried far less sway, and his decisions not to run for President had a lot to do with the results of polling.
no Kennedy has ever lost an election in Mass. They have lost in other states.
Him and Keough in the front seat, Kopechne sleeping in the back with them unaware shes back there doesn’t makes sense since if they didn’t know she was there before the car entered the water, they surely would been made aware of her presence after, unless she was glued to the back seat.
Ted taking the fall for her driving alone makes no sense either.
Her going in the back seat to “hide” after being spotted previously, does make sense.
It isn’t disproven, but I find the article unconvincing. It gives really no evidence at all and could just as easily say that I was in the car that night.
I’ll give Teddy the benefit of the doubt and say that he did dive down several times to try to rescue her. But after that, he was probably convinced she was dead (and she may very well have been). So after that and thinking she was dead, there was no need to report the accident immediately, especially if he was drunk. He needed time to come up with a decent story.
I don’t think it means much that Keough’s purse was in the car. They were not staying at the party cabin, so it would make as much sense to leave things in the car as it would to take them in the cabin. However, Mary Jo’s act of taking her purse and hotel key into the cabin and leaving it there when she left with Teddy is good evidence that when she left the cabin she was planning on returning.
IOW, they were going to the beach to have sex, return to the cabin, and have the ferry make a one off stop for her. That all seems so much more straight forward and believable than cover ups about Kennedy not being the driver and falsely claiming that he was for some reason.
If he wasn’t driving, his story would have been that he tossed her the keys and she drove off. There would be absolutely no benefit to “falsely” claim that he was driving.
I don’t see what’s so puzzling about it. He was driving drunk, and got in an accident that put his car in a lake. He managed to get out, but his passenger didn’t. No doubt due also to being drunk, compounded by the trauma of the accident itself, and possibly indicative of poor judgement on his part in general, he made poor choices in the immediate aftermath of the accident, that resulted in rescue not getting to the site of the accident until it was too late (even if he had acted promptly, it might already have been too late, but it was certainly too late by the time anyone sober actually did arrive).
Sure, there might be some unknown details like the precise time of the accident. But absent surveillance cameras everywhere, there are always going to be unknown details like that. There’s nothing mysterious about details being unknown.
Agreed. And not being a scientist, he probably didn’t understand the concept of an air pocket. I’m not sure I did prior to learning about this incident. He probably figured, “Well, she’s been down there for 20 minutes. Nobody can live that long underwater. Therefore, she’s dead.”
I mean, I never liked the guy, but I’ll give him the concession that he is human and that if he thought he could have saved her, he would have told someone. But as I said, he likely thought that she was indisputably dead and now it was time to come up with a cover story.
Puzzling to me is the fact that he turned and drove AWAY from the ferry back towards the little dinky Dike Bridge. I mean, it’s not really a confusing street layout. There’s ONE way on and off the island, how would you not know that if you’d ever been to Chappaquiddick even for a quick trip?
More puzzling is that the rescue/recovery efforts were delayed for so long. No excuse for that. None.
Absolutely bewildering is the fact that he remained in the Senate after he was, by his own admission, basically at fault for a woman’s death. He managed to live down the scandal somehow, at least to a bearable degree. Might have cost him the presidency, but he died a wealthy and revered public figure.
Thirded. If you think about it hard enough, it is often possible to come up with an explanation that is better than the truth, but it isn’t necessary in this case. He was drunk, horny, and a Kennedy - he thought he was bulletproof.
What put paid to his Presidential ambitions was that taking his side of the story as the truth meant that he was confronted with a sudden crisis with lives at stake - and he went home and went to bed.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not puzzling at all. He wasn’t going to the ferry. He was going to the beach to have sex with Mary Jo. Being married and all, he couldn’t say that in the official reports or to the public. That’s why he came up with his ridiculous story.
My take on things from reading the conspiracy debunking stuff in general is that the straightfoward explanation is the best.
While the woman sleeping the backseat unbeknownst to the other two people theory has some explaining power to it, it’s too complicated.
One thing I’m amazed at is the number of people who fail to realize how many big mistakes a drunk can make. I mean, really amazing stuff.
So Kennedy turning the wrong way is perfectly normal drunk behavior. He easily could have quickly forgotten a lot of what happened soon after the accident. He could have just not been able to recognize the nearby houses or fire station. Etc.
The guy was just flat out too stinko to really plot out anything so everything took a while to start with the coverup.
(The recent death of Rip Torn reminds of one of his incidents. Arrested for trying to break into a bank. He thought it was his house. Even when the police arrived he still thought it was his house and got into it with them. If you can’t tell a bank from your house, you certainly can take a wrong turn driving.)
So how the hell does this fat, out of shape, “drunk” get himself out the window of a quickly sinking car in just a few seconds after the vehicle flies of a bridge and crashes into the water? Don’t you realize how disorienting it would be to be drunk and drive off a bridge into the water? And he is going to have the where with all to get himself out a small car window in just seconds before the vehicle sinks under the water.
As any recovery diver if he thinks it possible.
Kennedy was not in the car.
Kennedy saw what he feared to be a sheriff vehicle behind them. Not wanting to be caught drunk behind the wheel with a young women in the car, he gets out and tells Mary Jo to drive herself back home even though he knows she too, has been drinking.
She has been drinking and forgets her purse and motel key. Is that had to believe? Or maybe they planned to find a spot just off the road where they could have sex and return to the party where her purse and key were.
Mary Jo was dead. By saying he was driving and tried to save her (twice), he looked to be a hero. Which sounds better for his reputation: “I let Mary Jo drive because I had too much to drink.” (Resulting in her driving off the bridge and her death). Or “I was driving and misjudged the location of the bridge and drove off.I really did try to save her, in fact I dove into the water twice”.
Again. Why didn’t he report the accident immediately? Simply because he didn’t know it had happened until he was told about it the next morning.
You’re missing the most libellous of the allegations told about the incident: that Mary Jo was pregnant, and that the death was a cover up.
Also, I’ve read the Readers Digest article (later). The Readers Digest was what America had before the internet. Kennedy was angling for Democrat selection at that time, and RD was credited for killing his presidential hopes.
The deputy definitely saw the car with two front-seat occupants turn hard right and proceed down the dirt road. Kennedy (and probably also Mary Jo) certainly knew that the way back to the motel involved a hard left, staying on the paved road. So there’s no way that further travel down the dirt road is compatible with any desire to return to the motel.
Not especially. But combined with the fact that they left the party after the ferry had stopped running, it’s more likely to indicate she wasn’t planning to return to the motel.
Yes, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Kennedy framed his story to make his role look as good as possible: tragic victim laboring under a family curse who nevertheless struggles heroically.
This makes some sense if what he didn’t know until morning was that Mary Jo was dead in the car. If he didn’t know about the crash at all, it really makes no sense that he’d want to falsely claim he was responsible for it.
He wasn’t fat and out of shape in 1969. And yes, I do know how disorienting it is to be drunk. I still managed to change a tire on the car I shouldn’t have been driving. Drunk and disoriented does not mean completely incapacitated, it just means you are incapable of making good decisions.
In the condition you described yourself to be in, would you have been able to get yourself out of a small car window in the few seconds you had before the car went under after surviving a horrific crash in which the car you were driving went off a bridge and crashed into the water? The impact could have easily given you a concussion.
You had all night to change that tire. Kennedy only had a few seconds to act. He had no time to “make a good decision”.
OK, he knew he was supposed to go to the ferry. But maybe he got confused about which way led to the ferry.
And yes, it’s quite possible for an accident like the one he was in to instantly incapacitate a driver. But it’s also possible for it not to do so. “He got lucky” is a perfectly reasonable explanation for how he managed to get out.
It certainly doesn’t make sense to assume that he wasn’t in the car. The fact that he was in the car was what led to all of the scandal. If it wasn’t true, he had no reason whatsoever to make it up.
The notion that he was intending to head to the beach to have sex isn’t as crazy as the notion that he wasn’t in the car, but I still don’t buy it. Not the part about wanting to have sex: That matches everything we know about him. But why the beach? Why not at the party they were both leaving, or at one or the other’s hotel room? Or just in the back seat of the car itself, just far enough away from the party for plausible deniability? Beaches have a romantic reputation, but they’re lousy places to have sex (which is something I’m sure Kennedy would have known).
I don’t understand why this is so unbelievable. The impact could have given him a concussion, but it didn’t. Opening a car door isn’t some difficult task. If the windows were open he could have opened it underwater.
Drunk gets in car accident. Drunk survives, passenger dies.
Why the need to make up an elaborate tale when the obvious explanation fits the facts.