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By TOM MOONEY; Times Leader Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 1999     Page: 1B

Thirty years ago today, the event sometimes called the most famous
automobile accident in American history left a young woman from Wyoming Valley
dead and a famous U.S. senator’s presidential hopes dashed.
   
At 10 a.m. on July 19, 1969, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy walked into the
Edgartown, Mass., police station on Martha’s Vineyard island. He reported that
his car had crashed off the small Dike Bridge into a pond on the nearby
Chappaquiddick Island late the previous evening.
    But police already had been alerted by two boys who spotted the car while
fishing earlier that morning and had been at the scene for several hours.
   
Divers pulled from the Oldsmobile the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, a
28-year-old Forty Fort native and former Democratic campaign worker.
   
News stories said Kennedy told investigators he had been driving Kopechne
from a cookout when the accident occurred. He said he had freed himself from
the car and then dived into the water, but had been unable to save her. He
said he had walked back to the cookout scene and gotten a ride back to the
accident site, where a cousin and a friend also tried to rescue Kopechne.
   
Questions immediately arose about the senator’s behavior. Why had Kennedy
taken so many hours to report the accident? Why, instead of heading right for
the area’s police station, did he return to his hotel? Was the nationally
famous senator and Democratic presidential aspirant more concerned with his
own image and political career than someone’s death?
   
Kennedy, in his second term in the Senate, carried one of the most famous
names in American politics- and also a legacy of tragedy. Older brother
President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated on a visit to Dallas, Texas,
in 1963. Brother Robert F. Kennedy, next in line, was a senator from New York
who had been campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968
when he was assassinated in Los Angeles.
   
Many Democrats in 1969 were looking to “Ted” Kennedy as their best hope to
recapture the White House. Democrat and former Vice President Hubert H.
Humphrey had narrowly lost the 1968 presidential race to Republican Richard M.
Nixon, and with the popular Nixon the logical Republican choice for 1972, the
Democrats would need a strong candidate.
   
The senator’s surname was magic. Brother John had defeated Nixon in an
exciting campaign in 1960, sparkling in a series of nationally televised
debates and putting to rest the belief that a Catholic could not win the
presidency. Only six years after the Dallas assassination, Democrats were
already glorifying John F. Kennedy’s brief administration as a time of good
will and excitement, naming it “Camelot,” after the mythical tale of King
Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
   
Almost lost in the speculation was the death of Mary Jo Kopechne- the Forty
Fort native who had been a campaign worker for Robert F. Kennedy- and the
bereavement of her parents, Joseph and Gwen Kopechne. Some people faulted
coroner Dr. Donald Mills for not performing an autopsy on Kopechne before
putting “drowned” on the death certificate and shipping her body to
Wilkes-Barre. She was buried in Larksville.
   
“They don’t write about Mary Jo,” Gwen Kopechne told The Times Leader in
1994, 25 years after the crash.
   
In court, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and
received a two-month suspended jail sentence and a year’s probation. After a
period of seclusion, Kennedy went on TV to apologize for his actions and to
ask his constituents’ advice. They urged him to continue in office, which he
did.
   
Only days later, a Massachusetts U.S. attorney called for an inquest, which
would have required the exhumation of Kopechne’s body, a move opposed by the
Kopechne family. After a hearing that drew national press to Wilkes-Barre,
Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas Judge Bernard Brominski rejected the
exhumation plea.
   
The death and Kennedy’s actions continued to spark questions. The very
title of the 1988 book “Senatorial Privilege- The Chappaquiddick Cover-up,” by
Leo Damore, showed that the public might never let the tragedy be put to rest.
   
In 1972, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern lost to Nixon by a
huge margin. Kennedy sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980,
but lost to incumbent President Jimmy Carter, who was then defeated by Ronald
Reagan. Kennedy remains as a leader of the Senate’s Democrats and a spokesman
for the party’s liberal wing.
   
TIMES LEADER FILE PHOTO
   
U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, second from right, wearing a neck brace, leaves
the rectory of St. Vincent’s Church in Plymouth on July 22, 1969, to attend a
Mass for Mary Jo Kopechne, who died when the senator’s car plunged into a
Massachusetts pond. At right is Kennedy’s wife, Joan. At left is his
sister-in-law, widow of Robert Kennedy. Others in the photo are unidentified.
   
TIMES LEADER FILE PHOTO
   
Joseph and Gwen Kopechne leave the Kielty Funeral Home in Plymouth on July
22, 1969, on the way to a Mass for their daughter, Mary Jo.
   
TIMES LEADER FILE PHOTO
   
The grave of Mary Jo Kopechne.