The Tide in Ted's Life

New challenges to his account of Chappaquiddick

When Senator Edward Kennedy began his presidential campaign, he was encouraged by polls to believe that his conduct a decade ago at Chappaquiddick Island would not be an important issue. He knew that a significant number of voters would never fully trust his account of what happened on the night of July 18-19, 1969, when his car careered off narrow Dike Bridge and Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. But he thought that voters would at least believe his assertion that there was nothing more to be said about the accident and finally turn their attention to more topical questions.

But Chappaquiddick has turned out to be the Campaign Issue That Will Not go Away. The Senator himself revived interest in the tragedy with his hesitant answers to questions about it posed by Roger Mudd during the now celebrated CBS interview in November. Last week separate stories in the Washington Star, Reader's Digest and New York Post fanned a new controversy at a critical time: just before the Jan. 21 Democratic caucuses in Iowa that began the process of selecting delegates to the presidential nominating convention in August.

The Post story did not bear directly on the tragedy; it was an account of previous parties that Kennedy had allegedly thrown for his aides and various young women on Martha's Vineyard. The Digest and Star articles, however, challenged the truthfulness of the Senator's description of his behavior following Kopechne's death.

She died soon after she and Kennedy had left a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick, where he had thrown a party for eleven aides--five men and six women. Kennedy later claimed that he and Kopechne were driving back to their separate hotels in Edgartown, the main town on Martha's Vineyard, when he made a wrong turn and headed east down a dirt road to Dike Bridge. After the accident, Kennedy said, he managed to struggle out of the submerged car. As his story goes, after several dives in an attempt to save Kopechne, he walked back to the cottage to summon two close aides, Joseph Gargan and Paul Markham. They returned with him to the bridge and dived repeatedly but were unable to save Kopechne. Then they drove to the opposite end of Chappaquiddick, where, Kennedy said, he jumped into the water and battled a ferocious northward-flowing current to reach Edgartown, on the other side of a 500-ft. channel from Chappaquiddick (see map). For different reasons, the Star and Reader's Digest concluded that the tide had actually been flowing in the opposite direction and would have helped rather than endangered the Senator during his swim. The Digest flatly said that Kennedy's story "is false."

The direction and strength of the tide during the swim are central to one of the most important questions about Chappaquiddick: Why did Kennedy wait until almost ten hours after the accident before reporting it to the police? At a January 1970 inquest, he gave a vivid account of how he had plunged into the water and then "felt an extraordinary shove ... the tide began to draw me out, and for the second time that evening I knew I was going to drown ... I remembered being swept down toward the direction of the Edgartown Light and well out into the darkness." He eventually reached Edgartown but, he said, was so exhausted by the struggle that he could do nothing but stagger the few blocks to his hotel and fall into bed.

Government tide tables for the area seemed to back up the Senator's story, but both the Digest and Star raised serious questions. Bernard Le Mehaute, an oceanographic engineer commissioned by the Digest, studied the tides on Nov. 9-10,1979, which he determined were nearly identical, after some minor adjustments, to those on the night of the accident. He concluded that a northward current could have been flowing that night, just as Kennedy said. But Mehaute found that by 1:30 a.m., when the Senator said he had jumped into the channel, the tide would have been "weak to zero." Moreover, Mehaute said, just about then the tide turned and the current through the channel started flowing south. The implication was that the current would have carried Kennedy toward Edgartown's narrow inner harbor and the shore, not north toward Nantucket Sound. In rebuttal, Kennedy Brother-in-Law Stephen Smith produced oceanographic studies, commissioned by the Senator, showing that the tide had been running north until 1:36 a.m., a few minutes after Kennedy said he began the swim.

The Washington Star relied on entirely different evidence. It produced aerial photos, dated May and November 1969, of the sandbar opening through which ocean tides swept northward into Katama Bay, through the channel between Edgartown and Chappaquiddick and out into the sound. According to the pictures, the opening into Katama Bay was still clear in May but had been blocked by sand by November. The Star indicated that the opening had gradually silted up during the intervening months. The newspaper concluded that by July 18 the gap would have been too narrow and shallow to let in a northward current of any strength. That interpretation concurs with what Ralph Martin, racing secretary of the local yacht club for 40 years, told TIME a few weeks after the accident. He said that winter storms in 1968-69 had so narrowed the opening in the sand bar as to reduce drastically the strength of the tide flowing into the bay and inner harbor. Said he: "It's not anywhere like what it used to be. The tide used to run like the devil through here."

Kennedy accused the Star of "irresponsible, shoddy and incomplete" reporting. His aides produced aerial photos showing the sand bar still open to the south on July 2--and indeed, on Oct. 24, 1969. The Star did not have the July 2 picture, which was obtained by the Kennedy staff two weeks ago from J. Gordon Ogden, a longtime summer resident of Martha's Vineyard who has compiled a book on the area's tides. But the Star did have the Oct. 24 photo. The newspaper's editors decided not to publish it because it was taken from an oblique angle and did not show the channel clearly enough --though it demonstrates that the channel had not narrowed since May, despite the Star's assertion to the contrary.

Kennedy's aides also released statements from two experts disputing quotes attributed to them by the Star. One was Ogden, who was said by the Star to have waded through "chest-deep" water across the sandbar opening in the summer of 1969. But he told Kennedy's staff that "no one in his right mind [would do so] because of the depth and rapidly flowing tidal currents." His wading, he said, had been at a different spot, where the bay was wider and shallower. Replied Star Reporter Duncan Spencer: "I've got it in my notes. That's all I can say."

The other expert, Ed Rolle, an interpreter of photographs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, was quoted by the Star as saying that the May picture indicated that the sandbar opening was "shallow, possibly one to four feet." But he told Kennedy's staff that he had been misquoted. Actually, he said, "there is no way to tell if the depth is one foot, four feet or some other depth." A third expert, Jerome Milgram, a professor of ocean engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was hired by Kennedy's staff to study the currents, concluded that the opening was "more than twelve feet deep." The depth of the opening is important because only a large volume of water pouring through it could produce the northward current that Kennedy described at the inquest.

Kennedy is unlikely to set to rest doubts about his story. Both the Digest and Star pointed out that his account of nearly drowning during the swim conflicted with the testimony of Gargan and Markham at the January 1970 inquest. They said that they had watched the start of the Senator's swim, observed no struggle, concluded that he could reach Edgartown with no trouble and returned to the cottage. Kennedy told reporters last week that he might not have shown any signs of difficulty that were visible to Gargan and Markham, but that he nonetheless had battled against a fierce tide.

The Digest, in addition, produced a second allegation: when Kennedy's rented 1967 Oldsmobile approached the bridge, he had been driving at 30 to 38 m.p.h., rather than 20 m.p.h., as he testified at the inquest. It based this conclusion on computer studies conducted by an auto-safety expert. Had "a reasonably attentive driver" actually approached the bridge at 20 m.p.h. or so, the Digest asserted, he would have seen the bridge in time to brake safely to a stop. The point seems secondary; whatever Kennedy's speed that fateful night, it obviously was too fast for the washboard-like road leading up to the bridge.

In any case, the Senator's actions that night are so odd, by his own description, that Kennedy himself has called them "irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable." Thus they offer a fertile field for investigative reporters, and more attempted exposes may be on the way. Nicholas Horrock and a team of fellow New York Timesmen are reported to be poking anew into the tragedy. Ladislas Farago, a writer on military and espionage subjects, is said to be preparing a long book about Chappaquiddick.

What more may be published, and when, is uncertain. But the issue has not left voters' minds. A New York Times-CBS News poll two months ago found that 69% of the Democrats queried had a favorable opinion of Kennedy vs. only 19% unfavorable. A new poll published last week disclosed that the favorable figure had shrunk to 51%, while the unfavorable number had doubled to 38% --and those questioned who disliked the Senator repeatedly cited doubts about Chappaquiddick.

Last week Kennedy's wife Joan, campaigning with her husband in Iowa, insisted: "Yes, I believe my husband's story." She expressed a belief that "these stories coming out now at this crucial time, just before the Iowa caucuses, should not be given any attention at all when we really should be discussing the important issues that my husband has been raising in his campaign." Her wish seems unlikely to be fulfilled.

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