INTO THE MIRE

Integrity is the lifeblood of democracy. Deceit is a poison in its veins.

— SENATOR TED KENNEDY

We don't know exactly what went through thirty-seven-year-old Senator Ted Kennedy's mind the night of the Chappaquiddick crash. We can guess he was acutely aware of having a smart, athletic twenty-eight-year-old woman in the passenger seat beside him in the car. It wasn't just lust, he may have told himself. Mary Jo Kopechne was a charming rising star among his cadre of young staffers. In the prominent senator's mind, it was only natural to want some time alone with her. And perhaps he assumed that she would want to spend some time with him: the scion of America's legendary political dynasty.

He may still have been thinking happily of the party he'd just left behind, where five other married men like himself were partying with five of Mary Jo's young, single female friends, with alcohol flowing freely. Ted probably didn't think too much about his mother, who owned the car he was now driving, or the family chauffeur he'd left back at the party.

He was a U.S. senator. He was a Kennedy. He was invincible.

He should have given more thought to the darkness and rain that July night in 1969, and to the slightly confusing layout of the road connecting the island of Chappaquiddick to Edgartown on the mainland of Massachusetts.

He stopped at the side of the road for a short time, confused by the route ahead, physically or morally. When he saw a cop approaching the car from behind, the reality of his situation may have come flooding back to him for a moment: It might look bad, a six-year senator from a powerful, high-profile family parking in the dark with a young beauty who admired liberal politicians and had worked for a few, including Ted's brother Robert, assassinated just a year earlier.

But this was no time to think of death, just of getting back to Edgartown and the hotel. Ted depressed the accelerator, bungled the shift for a moment, and lurched backward toward the cop. Not good. More shifting and the car rolled forward. The cop wandered off, and Ted drove forward, his path seemingly clear for a minute.

But the bridge at Chappaquiddick met the island's shore at an odd angle. It wasn't fair, really. Had Ted done anything so wrong? Had he done anything that a man of his stature wasn't entitled to do?

The car lurched and, for a sickening moment, seemed to hang in the air, then plunged into the narrow channel between Chappaquiddick and Edgartown. So narrow. So small. Yet it would separate Ted from all his ambitions to rise to an office higher than the one he held. How wrong it seems to members of the political class that such petty inconveniences can trip them up.

The car sank into the muddy channel bottom, wheels upward. Water rushed in immediately, and Ted thought with panic about how to save himself. He managed to get out the window. He rose to the surface and floundered over to the bank of the channel, near the bridge.

Ted later testified that he sat on the bank for a while, catching his breath, then began calling for Mary Jo. He shouted her name several times, he said, and got no response. He also testified that he tried several times to swim down to the car, to no avail.

Then, he did what any responsible member of the political elite might do. He decided to go back to the party — but first sat on the bank for about fifteen minutes, wondering if there were some way to keep all this from turning into a scandal. The political elite have learned to live with a great deal of ambient immorality. Scandal, though, is something to be avoided. The public should not get too long a glimpse of what lurks below the surface of the Swamp in the world of politics.

Ted trudged back to the party cottage, neither using a nearby pay phone to call the authorities nor stopping to ask for help at any of several cottages he passed, not even the one with a light on.

Perhaps Ted was in shock from the accident. Or perhaps the specter of death had ceased to hold much fear for this latest ill-fated member of the Kennedy clan. By that night, when Ted stumbled back to the Chappaquiddick party cottage, four of his eight siblings had already met untimely ends, best known among them President John F. Kennedy and his attorney general, Robert, both taken down by assassins.

Ted was the great remaining hope of the family.

At that very same moment that Ted reentered the party cottage, his brother John's loftiest ambition was reaching posthumous fruition as Apollo 11 made its way from Earth to the moon, having launched just two days before Ted's crash. The astronauts would successfully travel 239,000 miles and back. Ted only had to navigate the length of an eighty-foot bridge at Chappaquiddick and in all likelihood he would one day have gone on to win the presidency, buoyed by the nation's desire to recapture the romanticized Kennedy glory days. It was not to be.

Back inside the party cottage, where less than an hour earlier he had borrowed car keys from Crimmins, his family chauffeur, Ted was careful not to alert the others to the circumstances from which he had just dragged himself. He said later he didn't want to alarm Mary Jo's friends, nicknamed the Boiler Room Girls, veterans of his brother Robert's truncated presidential campaign.

We can only speculate how they might have reacted to word of Mary Jo's accident. They might well have saved her life, though. A local fire department diver, John Farrar, would later testify that Mary Jo did not appear to have been killed by the initial crash but to have been trapped in a small and slowly shrinking pocket of air inside the car. She may still have clung desperately to life, hoping for rescue, even as Ted was asking himself how best to keep the whole thing quiet.

* * *

Ted still didn't call for help from the party cottage. Instead, he collected two of the other male party guests — his cousin Joseph Gargan and Gargan's friend Paul Markham, a former U.S. attorney. Together, without alerting the women present and without alerting the authorities, they went back to the scene of the crash, where both Gargan and Markham repeated the failed effort to dive down and find Kopechne in the wreck.

The two also tried in vain to convince the sobbing and panicked Ted that he had to contact authorities immediately. Ted told the two men to go back and attend to the other women at the party, that he would alert authorities. He did not.

Instead, apparently still possessing a good deal of physical energy, Ted swam across the five-hundred-foot...