Word: digesting
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...Campaign Issue That Will Not go Away. The Senator himself revived interest in the tragedy with his hesitant answers to questions about it posed by Roger Mudd during the now celebrated CBS interview in November. Last week separate stories in the Washington Star, Reader's Digest and New York Post fanned a new controversy at a critical time: just before the Jan. 21 Democratic caucuses in Iowa that began the process of selecting delegates to the presidential nominating convention in August...
...Post story did not bear directly on the tragedy; it was an account of previous parties that Kennedy had allegedly thrown for his aides and various young women on Martha's Vineyard. The Digest and Star articles, however, challenged the truthfulness of the Senator's description of his behavior following Kopechne's death...
...Then they drove to the opposite end of Chappaquiddick, where, Kennedy said, he jumped into the water and battled a ferocious northward-flowing current to reach Edgartown, on the other side of a 500-ft. channel from Chappaquiddick (see map). For different reasons, the Star and Reader's Digest concluded that the tide had actually been flowing in the opposite direction and would have helped rather than endangered the Senator during his swim. The Digest flatly said that Kennedy's story "is false...
Government tide tables for the area seemed to back up the Senator's story, but both the Digest and Star raised serious questions. Bernard Le Mehaute, an oceanographic engineer commissioned by the Digest, studied the tides on Nov. 9-10,1979, which he determined were nearly identical, after some minor adjustments, to those on the night of the accident. He concluded that a northward current could have been flowing that night, just as Kennedy said. But Mehaute found that by 1:30 a.m., when the Senator said he had jumped into the channel, the tide would have been "weak...
Kennedy is unlikely to set to rest doubts about his story. Both the Digest and Star pointed out that his account of nearly drowning during the swim conflicted with the testimony of Gargan and Markham at the January 1970 inquest. They said that they had watched the start of the Senator's swim, observed no struggle, concluded that he could reach Edgartown with no trouble and returned to the cottage. Kennedy told reporters last week that he might not have shown any signs of difficulty that were visible to Gargan and Markham, but that he nonetheless had battled against...