Word: chappaquiddick
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...although there is some legal argument that calling the Senator to testify would violate his constitutional rights in the event that the inquest were to lead to later criminal proceedings against him. The other witnesses will include the five girls and five other men who attended the cookout on Chappaquiddick. Arena will appear, as will Dr. Donald R. Wills, the Dukes County associate medical examiner, who pronounced Mary Jo's death an accidental drowning some eight or ten hours after Kennedy's sedan tum bled off the Dike Bridge...
...questions in what is be coming a peculiar and in some ways tragic episode in American political history. Or it may be that those who might have the answers will stick by the explanations already given, however implausible they seem. For the moment, all of the guests at the Chappaquiddick party continue to preserve what seems to be a preternatural silence...
Since his car drove off the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick, carrying Mary Jo Kopechne to her death, the scars of stress and self-doubt have etched themselves into Teddy Kennedy's face and affected his voice and actions. None of his friends expected him to regain his equilibrium soon. Now, among both friends and political intimates, who initially felt that his withdrawal from presidential contention and his expressed intention to remain in the Senate would suspend the harassments plaguing him, there is a growing fear that he is being driven from public life...
Privately, Kennedy has expressed astonishment at some of the speculation that he has read-such as the contention that he had not swum from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown. Why, he wonders, would people think he might have invented such a story? The public attitude, of course, is to wonder why Kennedy left so many odd details-such as the swim to Edgartown-unexplained. In private, Kennedy also marvels that anyone could imagine him so stupid as to attend a sex orgy in his own state, accompanied by a middle-aged chauffeur and girls from his own and his late brother...
Some longtime Kennedy supporters even seemed to be in the process of withdrawing from the family legend they had served so long. Theodore Sorensen, who supervised the drafting of Kennedy's televised explanation of Chappaquiddick, said on a television talk show last week: "I don't think that that, [his conduct] being so recent in the minds of the public, and that being so clear an indication of his action under pressure, he should try for the presidency in 1972." Privately, some of Kennedy's friends are baffled, and doubting even their own defense...