Justice not served
I’ve always had an interest in the Kennedy family and the curse that seemingly haunted that family going back at least to the assassination of JFK in 1963.
So I was intrigued by the recent Associated Press story about the 50th anniversary of the drowning death of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne and the role the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy played in that tragedy when he was 37 and a promising presidential threat to Richard Nixon.
On the night of July 18, 1969, following a party with political staffers which included Kopechne, Kennedy’s Oldsmobile carrying Kopechne inexplicably veered off the narrow wooden Dike Bridge and flipped into the relatively shallow Poucha Pond below.
Kennedy somehow freed himself from the submerged vehicle and later claimed he failed to rescue Mary Jo from inside the car. Instead, in an act Kennedy himself later labeled “indefensible,” he waited 10 hours to notify police and attributed that lapse to shock, exhaustion and a concussion.
I stood on Dike Bridge in 1976, surveying both ends and trying to figure out how a driver could possibly careen headlong over the side then
somehow manage to escape after hitting the water and leave a woman inside the vehicle for hours to drown.
I couldn’t make any sense of it, which told me there had to be significant pieces of the puzzle missing by design, pieces that elitist political power brokers in Massachusetts with much invested in Kennedy and that family dynasty, didn’t want found.
Those who study history know the thrust of Kennedy’s unbelievable story. He says he swam across the bay to a place on Martha’s Vineyard where he says he spent the night before alerting authorities who removed Kopechne’s lifeless body from the car after daylight.
According to the story datelined Boston, Leslie Leland, a Martha’s Vineyard pharmacist who was the youthful foreman for the grand jury investigation of this tragedy, said the judge blocked subpoenas for anyone who’d attended the party with Kennedy and Kopechne, and wouldn’t share key investigative documents with them.
Leads me to believe convening a grand jury was nothing more than an attempt to make it appear this incident wasn’t being covered up.
Now 79, Leland says he remains frustrated to this day that the grand jury was blocked from discovering whether Kennedy had been drinking that night. Making it even worse, Leland said he required round-the-clock police protection after receiving death threats for his role on the grand jury.
Today, Leland pulls no punches when reflecting on those tumultuous days under the media spotlight. “If we’d been allowed to do our job, there would have been an indictment and a request to have a jury trial. Justice wasn’t served. There were so many discrepancies, but we weren’t allowed to do our jobs to get to the truth, whatever the truth may have been.”
Then he expressed what, sadly, 50 years later has become a noble refrain that I, too, once idealistically believed: No one in the United States (especially not sworn and elected “public servants”) is above the law. “I was young and I believed in the system,” he said. “I believed everyone played by the same rules. I learned they don’t.”
Perhaps the biggest mystery to the Chappaquiddick drowning for me has been how Kennedy managed to get out of the upside-down car without also freeing Mary Jo. I mean, if he’d opened a door to exit, she could have used the same door, right? If he kicked out a window, why couldn’t he (in his alleged rescue attempts) have helped her through the same way? Yet the 6’2” senator told authorities he’d tried to save her in water that was barely over six feet deep.
People Magazine reported this month that a man wrote the Kopechne family to say he and his wife shared lunch with a woman years afterwards who’d been at the party with Kennedy and Kopechne. While refusing to be publicly interviewed by People, the letter-writer said the woman told them Mary Jo had been intoxicated and felt ill that evening when she placed her in the back seat of Kennedy’s car to sleep.
Kennedy and another female guest later that evening took off in his car, apparently unaware Kopechne was in the car. Following the wreck, Kennedy and the woman escaped and returned to the party. The next morning the woman who’d helped Kopechne into the car asked her whereabouts after finding out about the crash, and was surprised to find no one knew Kopechne was in the car.
Fishermen already had discovered the submerged car when Kennedy went to the police to report his version. That’s when political damage control by his handlers kicked into action, the letter said.
True or not, that scenario makes much better sense to me of what actually happened that night. All I can say for certain is, for whatever reason, the man who sacrificed his presidential aspirations yet would eventually become known as “The Lion of the Senate” managed to find a way out of the car and left Mary Jo Kopechne behind to die.
He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and got a twomonth suspended sentence, which I imagine was reinforcement for Leland’s comment about being disillusioned to discover our justice system has different set of rules for the privileged.
And that, valued readers, I suppose is all you really I need to know 50 years later.