News on Chappaquiddick scandal: A wrong road taken and a long dim road that stretches ahead

By Frank Van Riper AND Frank Jackman
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Wednesday, August 26th 2009, 4:13 PM

Sen. Ted Kennedy's car is pulled from the water at Edgartown, Mass., on July 19, 1969. a day after the fatal crash that killed Mary Jo Kopechne.

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FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVES: JULY 27, 1960

It was only a matter of a few minutes on a muggy night in July. Yet the dark shadow of that midnight time has dimmed -- perhaps permanently -- the rising star of Edward Monroe Kennedy.

On Friday, July 18 the 37-year-old Kennedy, inheritor of one of the most famous names in American public life and assistant majority leader of the United States Senate, was the odds-on favorite for the presidential nomination of his party in 1972. All he had to do, it seemed was to step forward and claim it.

But by Saturday, July 19, all that had changed. The long ordeal of Ted Kennedy had begun.

Kennedy was in high spirits that Friday morning when, clutching the inevitable briefcase full of homework, he dashed out of his Capitol Hill office to catch the 10:40 Northeast Airlines flight to Boston. Ahead of him was the inviting prospect of a long weekend of sun and sailing off Cape Cod.

He had entered a boat in the Edgartown Yacht Club's annual regatta on Nantucket Sound, off the resort island of Martha's Vineyard, an event in which his family had competed for the last 20 years. He was also looking forward to a reunion party that night with friends and campaign workers who had shared with him the fleeting triumphs -- and the agony -- of his brother Robert's ill-fated drive for the presidency last year.

A Cookout at a Rented Cottage

Six young women had been invited to the party, a sleek cookout at a rented cottage on the island of Chappaquiddick across a narrow channel from Martha's Vineyard. The six were Esther Newberg, 26, Nance Lyons, 26, and her sister Maryellen, 27, Susan Tannenbaum, 24, Rosemary Keough, 23, and Mary Jo Kopechne, who would have been 29 yesterday.

The girls, bright, attractive, dedicated, absolutely devoted to the Kennedys, had been workers in RFK's top secret boiler room, one of the most important operations of the campaign. It was they who did the fatiguing, often boring, but immensely important work of delegate-watching that enabled the Kennedy team to read the pulse of the key Democrats RFK knew he had to sway to win the nomination.

"We all revere the Kennedys," Miss Newberg said later. "We all had a special feeling. We all were in college when President Kennedy was in the White House. We all came to Washington, hoping to work for some of them."

Only "the great ones" worked in the boiler room, Ethel Kennedy recalled.

The girls worked together from mid-March until June 6, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. After that, reluctant to drift apart, they helped close the senator's Washington office and aided Ethel Kennedy in answering the hundreds of thousands of letters that came to her that summer. Then they went on to other jobs.

But the bond that had been forged in the boiler room was not broken. There were three reunions: A swimming and sailing party at Ethel Kennedy's Hyannis Port home, a party last January at the suburban Maryland home of their boss, David Hackett, and a party they gave themselves in late June. Last weekend at Martha's Vineyard was the fourth get together.

The cookout was I had encouraged and helped sponsor," Ted Kennedy said later. His cousin Joseph Gargan, had rented the Chappaquiddick cottage for it, then reserved rooms for the girls at a motel in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard. The girls arrived Thursday afternoon and were shown around the Chappaquiddick cottage by Gargan before returning to the motel to spend the night.

On Friday, as Kennedy was leaving Washington for Massachusetts, the girls were swimming and watching the early races of the regatta. Shortly after 1 p.m., Kennedy arrived and, by the time his colleagues back in the Senate were getting around to the blue-hulled Victura, the old gaff-rigged, Wianno senior class sloop that once had been the pride and joy of his brother John.

Boat Is a Victim of Light Air

Despite the best efforts of Kennedy and his four-man grew -- Gargan, Paul Markham, a family friend Tretter and Ray La Rosa, two frequent sailing companions, Victura was the victim of what yachtsmen call "light air" and finished ninth. A second race in which Victura was entered was called off because of no wind.

The girls watched Victura's progress from the deck of a motorboat trailing the sailing fleet, then went back to their motel to rest and change for the evening cookout. Kennedy went back to his motel to change, and sent La Rosa to pick up the girls. When they arrived at the two-bedroom grey-shingled cottage at about 8:30 p.m. the cookout was already under way.

There was laughter, there was singing and there were bugs -- the gnats and sandfleas that plague any outdoor gathering on a summer night near the shore -- and the party moved indoors.

Neighbors could not recall and special noise. Mrs. James Sullivan of Boston who has a cottage across the street, thought it rather quiet. "I wouldn't even call it a party," she said. "I would call it people in for the evening." Others with cottages along the unlighted permanent resident said the "laughing and loud talking" disturbed the neighborhood dogs and "they barked half the night. I couldn't go to sleep."

At some point in the evening -- Kennedy later said it was about 11:15 -- one of the girls decided to go back to her motel room in Edgartown. She was Mary Jo Kopechne. "It had been a long day," recalled Miss Newberg. "Everybody was tired." Kennedy, who implied in his Friday night television statement that he, too, had decided to call it quits for the night apparently offered her a ride.

That was the last time anyone at the cottage saw Mary Jo alive.

That party lingered on for a long time. When it started to break up shortly after midnight, the girls found they had missed the last ferry from Chappaquiddick back to the vineyard, so they set about bedding down for the night at the cottage. It was uncomfortable, Miss Newberg recalled, and they envied Mary Jo in bed back at the motel.

But she was not at the motel. Mary Jo was dead, her body imprisoned in Kennedy's car, lying upside down in the cold, black waters of a tidal pond about a mile from the cottage.

In driving to the ferry slip, Kennedy later said, he had taken a wrong turn, going right instead of left where the road diverged.

To the left runs a blacktop road which ends at the ferry slip. To the right runs an unpaved road which leads to a bump-backed wooden bridge slightly more than 10 feet wide and without railings, used mostly by fishermen and for beach buggies.

The dusty road crosses a slight knoll veering to the left, then to the right, and meets the bridge at an angle. Kennedy, who later told the state officials he was going about 20 miles an hour, apparently failed to realize he had lost his way. The black Oldsmobile sedan plunged into the four-knot current of the pond. Three of its four windows were open and it immediately filled with water.

"I remember thinking as the cold water rushed around my head that I was for certain drowning," Kennedy said in his television statement. "Then water entered my lungs and I actually felt a sensation of drowning; but somehow I struggled to the surface alive."

Kennedy said he made "repeated efforts to save Mary Jo by diving into the strong murky current." But, he said, he succeeded "only in increasing my state of utter exhaustion and alarm."

"My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all," he said. "I was overcome ... by a jumble of emotion -- grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock."

In his original statement, Kennedy said that when he awoke and "fully realized what had happened," he immediately contacted the Martha's Vineyard police. But his television statement indicated that he was aware of what had happened during most of the night. "I regard as indefensible," he said, "the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately."

Two Youths Spot the Car

In the morning "with my mind somewhat more lucid," Kennedy said he attempted to contact Burke Marshall, an assistant attorney general when Robert Kennedy ran the Justice Department, from a public ferry. Then, shortly before 10 a.m., he "belatedly" reported the accident to the police.

"Meantime, two youths fishing from the fatal bridge spotted the rear wheels of the overturned car at 8:20 a.m. and told a neighbor, who called Edgartown Police Chief Dominick J. Arena.

Arena conferred with Kennedy and Markham until about noon, when he finally released the senator's statement. Kennedy then flew by private plane back to Hyannis Port. He remained there in seclusion, emerging only to attend Mary Jo's funeral on Monday as Plymouth, Pa., her birthplace, and to appear at Edgartown District Court Friday morning to plead guilty to the charge of leaving the scene of an accident.

On television Friday night, Ted quoted from his brother's book, "Profiles in Courage." "A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressure -- and that is the basis of all human morality .... Whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience -- the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow-men -- each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage ... cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul."