Blank hours of Kennedy after car crash

Originally published on 21 July 1969

New York, July 20

It would be hard to dream up a domestic story that could distract anyone from the first human landing on the moon. But the luckless Kennedy family has managed it. In the moonless early hours of Saturday morning a car tumbled off a bridge on a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts. A girl drowned. The driver escaped.

It is, on the face of it, a routine holiday misfortune. But the driver was Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the leading contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972, and he did not show up on the main island of Martha's Vineyard for another eight hours to report to police.

Senator Kennedy had flown to Martha's Vineyard for a weekend of boat races and parties. Among the guests were several former campaign workers. One of them was Jo Ann Kopechne, a 28-year-old former secretary to Robert Kennedy. Some time late on Friday evening, Senator Kennedy drove his car on to the ferry that runs between the Vineyard and Chappaquiddick. He went to a party given by an old friend of his brother, and later left with Miss Kopechne to ferry back to Edgartown.

He took the wrong turn, came upon a narrow bridge, and the car fell into the water. According to his statement, he had no idea how he managed to free himself, though he did remember "repeatedly diving down" to see if the girl was there. At last he was out on the bridge and the bank and recalls walking back "exhausted and in a state of shock ... to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the back seat. I then asked someone to bring me back to Edgartown."

The puzzles accumulate in these last sentences. The police figure that the car fell into the water some time between midnight and 1 am. Where was the Senator between, say, 1.30 in the morning and 7.30, when the ferry service resumed? Could he have stayed mum in the parked car all those hours? Who was the "someone" who took him back to the Vineyard?

The papers today rehearsed again the record of doom that has dogged the Kennedy family: the retarded sister, the brother killed in the Second World War, the sister dead in an aeroplane crash, the famous victims of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan. The youngest has had few ordeals to face that might so crucially affect his political future as that of unravelling the eight blank hours between his abandoning his sunken car and his appearance at the Edgartown police station.

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