Word: chappaquiddick
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Exactly 21 days after Kennedy's Car plunged off the narrow Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, District Attorney Edmund Dinis and District Court Judge James Boyle met last week to resolve procedural confusion over whether or not to hold a belated inquest. The conference ended with Boyle's announcement that an inquest would be convened in Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard, on Sept. 3. At the same time, Dinis continued his efforts to have Mary Jo's body exhumed so that an autopsy could be conducted...
Even with Kennedy's testimony, it is doubtful how much clarity an inquest could now bring to the case. The ten other surviving members of the Chappaquiddick party could be subpoenaed. It would be extremely difficult, however, for the court to compel those out of state to appear. Kennedy's friends Paul Markham and Joseph Gargan, both lawyers, might attempt to avoid the witness chair on the ground that they had acted as Kennedy's counsel...
...inquest might determine at what time Kennedy and Mary Jo left the Chappaquiddick party and how much they had had to drink. But it is problematic whether such a hearing could legally consider some of the larger lacunae in Kennedy's account. Why did Gargan and Markham not report the accident and why did they permit Kennedy, clothed and presumably dazed, to plunge into the channel to swim from Chappaquiddick to Martha's Vineyard? Was Kennedy trying to establish an alibi when he appeared fully and dryly clothed before a hotelman in Edgartown and pointedly asked the time...
...mistake, that he dived several times in an effort to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne, that he returned later with Paul Markham and Joseph Gargan in an effort to reach the girl. By a plurality of 44% to 31%, those interviewed also accept his statement that he impulsively swam from Chappaquiddick to Martha's Vineyard...
...terms of the overall respect in which Kennedy is held, the poll indicated no radical shift as a result of Chappaquiddick: 63% said that they held him in the same degree of esteem now as before; 5% said that they had more respect; 28%, less respect. Trial heats now in anticipation of 1972 would be meaningless in ordinary circumstances, but in this case they give an indication of Kennedy's before-and-after standing. In a new three-way match with Richard Nixon and George Wallace, Kennedy received 38%, Nixon 48%, Wallace 8%. A Harris survey in late...