But Crimmins won’t be driving that evening.
Instead, the senator leaves with the keys—and Mary Jo Kopechne.
Testimony as to what happens next runs to 763 pages in the inquest document released nearly eighteen months later, on April 29, 1970.
In short: Ted was driving the Olds, with Mary Jo as his passenger, when they went off Dike Bridge into eight feet of water in Poucha Pond.
He lives. She drowns.
His next actions shadow him forever after. The consequences of the accident are compounded by questionable choices. When Ted gets out of the water, his first instinct is not to seek help from police, but to return on foot to his friends at the party, a little over a mile away. “So then he [Ted] went back up to the house and he was very badly advised by others who had probably had too many drinks as well,” Ted’s best friend John Tunney, who is not at the party, later relates. “So everything fell apart over the next several hours.”
“That was the tragedy of it. All of the people there [at the party] were dependent upon him in one form or another,” Tunney declares. “It’s so sad. It was so sad that he didn’t have somebody at that party to say we’ve got to get hold of the police immediately.”
Instead, Joe Gargan recalls fellow party guest Ray LaRosa, who works for the Massachusetts Department of Civil Defense, calling him and attorney Paul Markham out to the rented white Plymouth Valiant parked in the driveway, where Ted has collapsed. “The senator said to me, ‘The car has gone off the bridge down by the beach and Mary Jo is in it,’” Gargan says. “With that I backed up the car and went just as fast as I could toward the bridge.”
When a second attempt to rescue Mary Jo fails, Kennedy later testifies that he instructs Gargan and Markham, “You take care of the girls; I’ll take care of the accident.” Gargan and Markham return to the “Boiler Room Girls” and the cottage, while Ted, who’s missed the last ferry of the night, swims across the five-hundred-foot channel to Edgartown and the Shiretown Inn.
Once there, Ted makes a number of phone calls—but not to the police. Nor does he call his wife, Joan, but Gargan has also suggested his cousin call Kennedy family lawyer Burke Marshall and personal assistant David Burke. Ted pauses his phone calls at 2:25 a.m. to interact with the innkeeper, Russell Peachey—an encounter, some later surmise, meant to start establishing a timeline of his actions over the past several hours. He doesn’t mention the accident to Peachey.
He does reach Helga Wagner, his companion during Bobby’s California campaign, a “tall, slim, blond, athletic” woman whom one admirer calls “a veritable female 007.” Helga later insists to People magazine that she’s a friend to “all the Kennedys,” and Ted’s call that night is only to get the phone number where he can reach his brother-in-law (and known family fixer) Stephen Smith, vacationing in Spain.
Christopher Lawford remembers how his mother, Pat Kennedy Lawford, exhibits telltale Kennedy secretive behavior. “Nobody said a word about what happened. There were all these hushed phone conversations and then my mother packed her bags and said she had to go to the Cape. That was the way we were always informed of crises—someone arriving in a hurry, or someone leaving in a hurry.”
John Tunney receives one of those urgent calls. “I was in California campaigning for the Senate,” he recalls. “I got a call from Pat Lawford. She said, ‘Your best friend is in terrible trouble. He’s had a terrible accident and you’d better come back right now. You’ve got to get back here with him.’”
“It was a terrible thing,” Ted tells Tunney. “I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have been in a car when I’ve had a few drinks. I tried to save her but I couldn’t. I tried to dive down and I couldn’t. I almost drowned myself. I had water in my lungs. I didn’t see her and I thought she had gotten out.” Despite the beach being a well-known “lovers’ lane” spot, Ted insists to his friend that “he’d never had any kind of sexual relationship with that girl.”
As to “the morality of her death,” however, “I don’t feel guilty,” Ted says. “Obviously, I can be faulted terribly from a judgment point of view, but from the point of view of was it a killing, absolutely not. It was an accident.”
Chapter 41
Police Chief Dominick “Jim” Arena responds to an 8:30 a.m. call from two young fishermen who spot the Oldsmobile submerged in Poucha Pond.
Arena has been on the job in Edgartown for two years, and he swims out to make a routine survey of the wreck. He’s unable to enter the car, but is struck by a chilling thought. “Something told me it was more than just a car in the water. Sitting there [on the undercarriage], I had the feeling that there was someone in that car.”
Deputy Sheriff Christopher S. “Huck” Look Jr. witnesses the vehicle being pulled from the water and has a startling revelation—it’s the same big black car he’d noticed while patrolling the night before about 12:45 a.m. (contradicting the police statement Ted gives on Saturday morning, July 19, where he notes the time he was driving the car as “approximately 11:15 p.m.” When Walter Steele, special prosecutor for the Vineyard learns of the incident, he says, “That’s impossible. They [the Kennedys] don’t drive anywhere”).
Look had specifically noticed two sevens in the license plate number, just like his high school jersey. Police confirm that the wrecked car with license plate L78207 is registered to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
After a diver retrieves Mary Jo’s body, the associate county medical examiner, Dr. Donald Mills, examines it at around 9:30 a.m. Though he does not perform an autopsy, Dr. Mills puts Mary Jo’s time of death at no earlier than 12:30 in the early hours of that morning, and her cause of death as drowning. The doctor’s time line doesn’t square with Ted’s—that the accident happened shortly after 11:15 p.m., and that there was a second rescue attempt made at 12:20 a.m. in the rented white Valiant (license Y98-746).
“I believe,” Look, who in 1971 will be appointed sheriff, says, “that I know the difference between a big black car and a little white car.”
Look is speaking as an investigator seeking to prepare a criminal case. Though local law enforcement is first on the scene, the FBI is the first to break the news to the White House.
On Saturday, July 19, J. Edgar Hoover, still FBI director, receives a teletype “flashing the first news of the drowning, initially misidentifying Ms. Kopechne as ‘Mary Palporki.’” The communication is entered into Ted’s FBI file with a notation that the “fact Senator Kennedy was driver is not being revealed to anyone.”
Diaries kept by White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reveal that Nixon becomes obsessed with the Chappaquiddick incident, ordering aide John Ehrlichman to get investigators “working on what really happened.”
According to the Boston Globe’s Robert Healy, “He had a fixation, Nixon did, on the Kennedys. Of course, what the hell? He was looking down the barrel of a gun at Bobby and Jack, and the guy was paranoid anyway and the Kennedys just wiped him out…[A]ll he wanted to talk about was Ted Kennedy.”
The Boston-area papers, led by the Globe, are in the incredible situation of having to decide whether to “lead with the moonwalk or Chappaquiddick.” Robert Healy describes the front-page layout: “We did a dual job that [Saturday] night”—in advance of the Sunday, July 20, paper. “Split right in half.”