with Mary Jo as his passenger, when they went off Dike Bridge into eight feet of water in Poucha Pond.
He lives. She drowns.
His next actions shadow him forever after. The consequences of the accident are compounded by questionable choices. When Ted gets out of the water, his first instinct is not to seek help from police, but to return on foot to his friends at the party, a little over a mile away. “So then he [Ted] went back up to the house and he was very badly advised by others who had probably had too many drinks as well,” Ted’s best friend John Tunney, who is not at the party, later relates. “So everything fell apart over the next several hours.”
“That was the tragedy of it. All of the people there [at the party] were dependent upon him in one form or another,” Tunney declares. “It’s so sad. It was so sad that he didn’t have somebody at that party to say we’ve got to get hold of the police immediately.”
Instead, Joe Gargan recalls fellow party guest Ray LaRosa, who works for the Massachusetts Department of Civil Defense, calling him and attorney Paul Markham out to the rented white Plymouth Valiant parked in the driveway, where Ted has collapsed. “The senator said to me, ‘The car has gone off the bridge down by the beach and Mary Jo is in it,’” Gargan says. “With that I backed up the car and went just as fast as I could toward the bridge.”
When a second attempt to rescue Mary Jo fails, Kennedy later testifies that he instructs Gargan and Markham, “You take care of the girls; I’ll take care of the accident.” Gargan and Markham return to the “Boiler Room Girls” and the cottage, while Ted, who’s missed the last ferry of the night, swims across the five-hundred-foot channel to Edgartown and the Shiretown Inn.
Once there, Ted makes a number of phone calls—but not to the police. Nor does he call his wife, Joan, but Gargan has also suggested his cousin call Kennedy family lawyer Burke Marshall and personal assistant David Burke. Ted pauses his phone calls at 2:25 a.m. to interact with the innkeeper, Russell Peachey—an encounter, some later surmise, meant to start establishing a timeline of his actions over the past several hours. He doesn’t mention the accident to Peachey.
He does reach Helga Wagner, his companion during Bobby’s California campaign, a “tall, slim, blond, athletic” woman whom one admirer calls “a veritable female 007.” Helga later insists to People magazine that she’s a friend to “all the Kennedys,” and Ted’s call that night is only to get the phone number where he can reach his brother-in-law (and known family fixer) Stephen Smith, vacationing in Spain.
Christopher Lawford remembers how his mother, Pat Kennedy Lawford, exhibits telltale Kennedy secretive behavior. “Nobody said a word about what happened. There were all these hushed phone conversations and then my mother packed her bags and said she had to go to the Cape. That was the way we were always informed of crises—someone arriving in a hurry, or someone leaving in a hurry.”
John Tunney receives one of those urgent calls. “I was in California campaigning for the Senate,” he recalls. “I got a call from Pat Lawford. She said, ‘Your best friend is in terrible trouble. He’s had a terrible accident and you’d better come back right now. You’ve got to get back here with him.’”
“It was a terrible thing,” Ted tells Tunney. “I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have been in a car when I’ve had a few drinks. I tried to save her but I couldn’t. I tried to dive down and I couldn’t. I almost drowned myself. I had water in my lungs. I didn’t see her and I thought she had gotten out.” Despite the beach being a well-known “lovers’ lane” spot, Ted insists to his friend that “he’d never had any kind of sexual relationship with that girl.”
As to “the morality of her death,” however, “I don’t feel guilty,” Ted says. “Obviously, I can be faulted terribly from a judgment point of view, but from the point of view of was it a killing, absolutely not. It was an accident.”
Chapter 41
Police Chief Dominick “Jim” Arena responds to an 8:30 a.m. call from two young fishermen who spot the Oldsmobile submerged in Poucha Pond.
Arena has been on the job in Edgartown for two years, and he swims out to make a routine survey of the wreck. He’s unable to