Sometime around midnight, on July 18, 1969 Ted Kennedy - who had been drinking all day with a group of married men and six single girls - drove his Oldsmobile 88 off of a small bridge on Chappaquiddick island, into eight feet of chilly water. The vehicle landed upside-down. While Kennedy managed to free himself from the wreck and swim to safety, his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, one of Robert Kennedy's six "Boiler Room girls", was left in the car to drown.
Ted Kennedy lived forty years, one month and one week longer than Mary Jo.
I have physically stood at the exact spot where I was told that Ted Kennedy turned his Oldsmobile 88 to the right, ultimately leading to that infamous "bridge". I was taken there by a family member, a longtime resident of Martha's Vineyard, who was showing me the sights.
At that particular point the road made two sharp turns, one to the right, one to the left. You could not go straight.If you turned to the left, you would end up at the ferry crossing to Woods Hole. If you turned to the right, it ended at a four-foot wide foot bridge.
Here's the thing... The paved road to the ferry, it was the one that turned left. The road to the bridge? It was a dirt road.
I have often wondered why anyone, even one a bit tipsy, could have mistaken a dirt road, hardly more than a cow path, for a marked and paved two-lane highway.
But what the heck... I suppose if a man is drunk enough, he can get confused over directions, turn right, stop his car, open a barbed-wire gate, get back into his car and then drive off a four-foot wide bridge never designed for automobile traffic. But... Maybe the fence and gate weren't there at the time. Maybe the bridge was wider at the time.
I suppose one has to have a much larger world-view than I have to understand the complexities involved in the death of just another pretty face, a death caused by the direct actions of a United States Senator.
But then again... Maybe this whole story was just another one of those myths that had developed around the long and soiled Kennedy saga, sorta like the Maryln Monroe/Bobby Kennedy/Jack Kennedy one.
2 comments:
Things look very different during the well lit day then during the night where the moon (or lack thereof) casts odd shadows.
When I was young (well after Kennedy's time,) I began noticing reflectors on the road. They were there to combat this nighttime effect because there were a lot of accidents because driver's eyes were playing tricks on them in my area growing up.
Today, children are advised to wear bright costumes on Halloween.
OK..................
But tell me that a dirt track thru a grassy field can be confused for a paved, marked and graded two lane highway, even at night.
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