WHO'S WHO AT THE KENNEDY INQUEST

ONLY Edward Moore Kennedy knows exactly what happened from the time he left the cookout on Chappaquiddick last month until his black Oldsmobile sedan capsized off the Dike Bridge, taking Mary Jo Kopechne to her death at the bottom of Poucha Pond. From that moment until some time before he reported the accident at 9:30 a.m., according to Kennedy's televised accounting a week later, he was "overcome by a jumble of emotions." "My conduct and conversations during the next several hours make no sense at all to me," he said.

What will the inquest, due to begin this week at Edgartown, do to make sense of that bizarre and tragic night? The answer will obviously depend upon the candor and character of those who attended the cookout, including Kennedy, and upon the acuity of the questions raised by District Attorney Edmund Dinis. It will also rest significantly upon how far the presiding judge, James A. Boyle, permits Dinis to range in exploring not only the immediate circumstances of the accident but also the actions and omissions of Kennedy and his friends afterward. Last week Boyle indicated that he would allow Dinis considerable freedom. The judge ruled that he will not permit lawyers for Kennedy or any of the others who were at the Chappaquiddick party to cross-examine witnesses or to challenge the district attorney's questions on grounds of irrelevance (see THE LAW).

Here is a succinct guide to the characters, other than Kennedy himself, who are most likely to play leading roles in the inquest:

Judge James A. Boyle

A balding, rubicund resident of Martha's Vineyard for 38 years, Boyle must control the tone as well as the direction of questioning in the "nonaccusatory" proceeding. A 1929 graduate of what was then the Southeastern Massachusetts Law School, Boyle, 62, served as Dukes County Superior Court clerk for 27 years before former Governor John A. Volpe appointed him to the District Court bench in 1961. Some observers question his judicial competence, and one acquaintance asserts that Boyle was so innocent of the law that he thought he could remain superior court clerk even after his appointment to the District Court. Yet he is generally regarded as a fair jurist who conducts court business in open court, shunning closed-door conferences. His brusque conduct at last week's pre-inquest hearings suggested that he hopes and intends to preserve the decorum of a procedure that, as he knows, could dissolve into a constitutional morass.

District Attorney Edmund Dinis

Although his performance early in the case was erratic and ill-formed, Dinis promises an aggressive pursuit at the inquest. He has some lapses to make up. It was he who agreed that an autopsy did not seem necessary immediately after the accident, permitted Mary Jo's body to be shipped to Pennsylvania and, many believe, avoided involvement in the matter until he belatedly saw an opportunity to make political capital out of it. In 1948, Dinis, a Democrat, replaced his late father, an immigrant Portuguese furniture maker, in the Massachusetts state legislature. Ten years ago he became the youngest district attorney ever elected in Massachusetts, but since then his ambition and oratory have failed to carry him to any higher office. Last year he lost a race for a seat in the House in part because Ted Kennedy refused to support him. Because of recent threats against his life, he now has a state trooper bodyguard.

Paul Markham and Joseph Gargan are the two witnesses who, besides Kennedy, have the most explaining to do about that July night on Chappaquiddick. In some ways, they have much more to clarify than Kennedy, since they were presumably lucid when Kennedy returned to the cottage dazed from his accident. Not the least of the mysteries is why the two lawyers failed to summon help immediately, report the crash to the police, and later supposedly permitted Kennedy to swim the channel to Edgartown alone. That swim is all the more incredible because both men are among Ted's oldest friends. Markham and Joey Gargan, Ted's cousin, attended prep school together, and it was through Gargan that Markham became a regular member of Kennedy touch-football squads.

Paul Markham

Markham worked in Ted Kennedy's 1962 senatorial campaign, and through Robert Kennedy became an assistant U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts in 1964. Three years later, Lyndon Johnson named Markham to be the state's U.S. Attorney, the highest federal law officer in Massachusetts. Until July 19, Markham enjoyed a reasonably good reputation in Boston's legal circles. He was known as quick-witted and charming, even though some questioned his legal talents. As U.S. Attorney, he had the distinction of convicting Raymond Patriarca, a New England Cosa Nostra boss, on two counts of conspiracy to murder. Yet he was blamed for allowing four defendants to escape punishment for the $ 1,551,277 Plymouth mail robbery. The Kennedy disaster was a hard blow professionally, since it was only last May that Markham resigned as U.S. Attorney to join a private law firm in Boston. Now his legal reputation is at least diminished.

Joseph Gargan

Joey Gargan was an assistant U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts from 1961 to 1964, when he entered private practice in Boston. If Gargan failed to advise Kennedy to report his accident promptly, it was not through ignorance of motor vehicle laws; he had handled countless claims arising from car accidents. Gargan has been generally respected for his competence as a lawyer, yet the Kennedy family has absorbed almost all of his loyalty and attention. The son of Rose Kennedy's sister Mary Agnes Fitzgerald and Joseph F. Gargan, a prominent Lowell, Mass., attorney and World War I hero, Joey Gargan virtually grew up with the Kennedys. His parents died when he was young, and Rose saw to his school and college expenses. Almost Ted's age, Gargan became more like a brother than a cousin to Teddy, although Gargan has always found himself in a somewhat subservient role. He served as advance man for Kennedy's appearances and enjoyed total personal confidence.

Gargan has the gregarious wit of a Boston pol. In July he became president of a bank in Hyannisport, and moved his wife Betty and two children to a house there partly in order to live close to the Kennedy compound.

The other three men at the party were also friends and cronies of Ted's, although none knew him nearly so well as Gargan and Markham.

Jack Crimmins

An investigator for the Suffolk County, Mass., district attorney's office, Crimmins, 63, is a taciturn South Boston Irishman who has been driving cars for Ted Kennedy since his 1962 senatorial campaign. Apart from his chauffeur's role, Crimmins' principal contribution has been to relay the advice of some "Southie" voters: "Tell the kid to stop singing Sweet Adeline. He sings off key." Kennedy took the advice.

Ray La Rosa

LaRosa, 51, met Kennedy through "Boots" Moss, an aide who died in Kennedy's 1964 airplane crash. Now a civil defense adviser in Massachusetts, he was a professional fireman in Andover, Mass., for almost nine years. He was highly trained in all forms of rescue work and, had he been called upon, might have been invaluable on the night of Mary Jo Kopechne's drowning: even if Mary Jo was beyond saving, his presence would have strengthened Ted's claim to have done everything he could for the girl.

Charles Tretter

A Boston attorney and occasional sailing companion of Ted's, Tretter, 30, is typical of the smart, clean-cut young men whom the Kennedys have attracted to their campaigns. A 1960 dean's list graduate of Boston College, Tretter volunteered for Ted's first Senate race and worked as an advance man, mapping itineraries and revving up crowds for the candidate's appearance. He now works for the New England Regional Commission in Boston.

Beyond the Kopechne and Kennedy families,* it has been the girls at the party whose lives have been most unsettled by the accident. "You can't begin to understand what it has been like," says Susan Tannenbaum, a congressional secretary. "I place a tremendous value on the right of privacy, but suddenly I'm infamous. The real meaning of what you are and what you value remains intact inside yourself, but there you are, splashed all over the papers." There has been "lots of sick mail," says another of the girls, "lots of it." Susan asks indignantly: "How would you feel if a reporter called your mother at 8 a.m. and asked her whether she approved of her daughter's conduct in spending the night with a group of married men?"

The five girls who attended the cookout are uniformly bright, efficient, fascinated by politics and cultishly pro-Kennedy. None is strikingly attractive, and as a group they are hardly the sort that older men would invite for a weekend of dalliance. From the beginning, they have intended to go to the inquest. Explains one: "My God, can you imagine what the reaction would be if we refused to attend? The great coverup, right? We'll all be there, if for no other reason than to defend the reputation of Mary Jo." All of the girls were scheduled to spend the Labor Day weekend being briefed by Kennedy lawyers. Nothing in their backgrounds prepared them for the public scrutiny and suspicions to which they have been subjected.

Rosemary ("Crickett") Keough

"Crickett," as everyone calls her, did volunteer work in her home town of Philadelphia during John Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, was signed on to Robert Kennedy's staff in 1967 to answer mail from children--a task she performed with engaging touches of whimsy. Age 23, barely five feet tall, with red hair, she enjoyed playing with the Kennedy brood at Hickory Hill. Like the other girls from the "boiler room," she was shattered by Bobby Kennedy's death, seemed to snap out of her melancholy only considerably later, after she began working for the Kennedy family foundation for mentally retarded children.

Susan Tannenbaum

Susie, 24, is bright, sensitive, and perhaps the most attractive of the girls who attended the cookout. The daughter of a Greensboro, N.C., dentist, she attended Centenary College in Hackettstown, N.J., and later Miami University of Ohio. She went to Washington to work for Robert Kennedy in 1967. Her co-workers in the Kennedy mail room remember her as lively and exceptionally competent. She now works for New York's Representative Allard Lowenstein, one of the architects of the 1968 "Dump Johnson" movement.

Esther Newberg

Her friends describe Esther, 26, as sophisticated, reasonably chic and tough-minded. "In contrast to some of the other girls in the office," recalls one of Robert Kennedy's former aides, "she gave the impression of having something else in her life besides working for Robert Kennedy. For some of the younger girls, that was all there was." Esther's mother is a former Democratic National Committeewoman from Connecticut. Esther worked for the Senate subcommittee on government reorganization before she joined R.F.K.'s staff in 1968. She now assists the vice president of the Urban Institute in Washington.

Maryellen Lyons

An administrative assistant to a protegee of Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts State Senator Beryl Cohen, Maryellen has on the wall above her desk a placard: HAPPINESS IS TED KENNEDY IN 1972. At the Chicago Convention last summer, the Democratic National Committee praised her as a "woman doer." In 1963, after she was graduated from Regis College in Weston, Mass., Maryellen decided to work in politics. "John Kennedy said that it was the only way to make things better, and that the whole world needed us," she says. Ted Kennedy recruited her to help in Bobby's presidential campaign--"A wild and wonderful day. I thought it was just for the weekend, but they wanted me to stay, and of course I did."

Nance Lyons

Maryellen's sister Nance, 26, shared a Georgetown townhouse with Mary Jo Kopechne and two other girls. She was graduated from the Newton (Mass.) College of the Sacred Heart in 1964, and did public relations for the Norfolk County Tuberculosis and Health Association before she got a job, through an employment agency, in Ted Kennedy's office. Discussing the inquest, she remarks: "Anonymity is the name of the game when you're a staff person, and it's very tough to all of a sudden be in the public eye."

District Attorney Dinis has said that he may call some ten or more witnesses in addition to these. If he has any surprises in store, he is keeping them out of sight. Most likely the supporting cast will be drawn from officials involved in the event--Edgartown Police Chief Dominick Arena and Associate Dukes County Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Mills--and the residents of Edgartown and Chappaquiddick. One of the latter is Christopher ("Huck") Look Jr., a part-time deputy sheriff, who can testify that he saw two people in a black car with the license prefix "L" (Kennedy's license plate was L-78207) heading for the Dike Bridge at approximately 12:45 a.m., an hour and a half after Kennedy said that he and Mary Jo had left for the ferry. Another is Russell Peachey, co-owner of Edgartown's Shiretown Inn, where Kennedy was staying, who could describe the Senator's appearance to ask the time at 2:25 a.m. There is Steve Hewitt, the ferryman, who can help to establish whether Markham spent the night in Edgartown or on Chappaquiddick.

By a strict construction, the law should be concerned with the simple questions: Was Kennedy driving while drunk? Did he drive recklessly? Why did he not report the accident immediately? Dinis can be expected to ask some of the broader questions that devil the public:

Did Kennedy and Mary Jo actually leave the party at 11:15 p.m., as he claims, in order to catch a ferry to Edgartown, or did they leave more than an hour later, after the ferry had shut down? Did Kennedy deliberately turn from the paved road leading to the ferry onto the dirt road toward the bridge?

Did Markham and Gargan return to the bridge and dive down into the murky water in efforts to recover the body? Did Kennedy really swim the channel to Edgartown, or did Markham, Gargan and Kennedy cross the channel together in a small boat they borrowed from a pier on Chappaquiddick? Or did Kennedy indeed make the impulsive swim, with Markham and Gargan following in a boat? Whatever the answers that emerge, all of the witnesses will have parts in one of the most extraordinary political and human courtroom dramas ever staged.

*Adding to Kennedy's burden of grief, his wife Joan last week suffered her third miscarriage. They have three children.

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