TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO TOMORROW, on July 22, 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne was buried at St. Vincent's Cemetery in Plymouth, Penn. She had died three days earlier, pinned underwater when Sen. Kennedy's car swerved off Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island.
Within hours of Kopechne's death, a Kennedy aide named Dun Gifford flew a chartered plane into Edgartown (the Martha's Vineyard town of which Chappaquiddick is a part), with orders to get the body off the island. Before Massachusetts officials had even decided whether to perform an autopsy to settle the cause of death, Kopechne's remains were in Pennsylvania -- beyond the state's jurisdiction.
-- Did Kennedy order Gifford to remove the body?
That's one question the senator has never answered.
In fact, quite a few questions have never been answered.
At least, not by Kennedy.
At least, not truthfully.
Kennedy and Kopechne were part of a group of 12 that had come to Chappaquiddick for the Edgartown Regatta and a private barbecue afterward. Half the guests were married men, half were single women in their 20s. Kennedy and Kopechne left the party at some point that evening and ended up driving off the bridge.
Though Kennedy managed to extricate himself from the car and get back to his motel that night, Kopechne remained in the car until her body was recovered by a Fire Department diver at 8:45 the next morning. To the diver, Capt. John Farrar, it was clear that she had neither drowned nor died quickly. Kopechne survived for some time by breathing a pocket of trapped air, finally suffocating to death when the oxygen ran out. When Kennedy reported the accident to the Edgartown police, it was 9:45 a.m. -- some nine or 10 hours after he left Kopechne in his car.
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