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What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if RFK hadn’t? And what if Ted Kennedy didn’t get (allegedly) drunk as fuck and drive his car off a bridge and kill Mary Jo Kopechne and kill his chances of ever being president at the same time?
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 19, 1969--
Was he drunk? The circumstantial evidence suggests well of fucking course he was. He left a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts at 11:15 p.m. He was known to drink. A lot. People didn’t care near so much about drinking and driving in the 60s. Plus, he was a senator and they’re allowed to break the rules. He failed to report the accident for ten hours, which is conveniently enough time to sober up. So. Probably drunk as fuck.
Kopechne, aged 28, had been a campaign strategist and speech writer for RFK, with a promising political career ahead of her. Ted said he was giving her a ride to catch the last ferry back to her hotel, except she left her purse with her wallet and hotel key back at the party. Sometime after midnight, on July 19, 1969, Ted drove the car off a one-lane bridge where it flipped over and sunk to the bottom upside down. Kennedy escaped the submerged vehicle. Kopechne did not.
According to Ted, he made many attempts to rescue her, then wandered back to the party. He passed several houses but didn’t ask anyone to call for help. He got back to the cottage where the party was still going on and instead of saying oh fuck something terrible happened, he summoned the fucking lawyers. Joseph Gargan was one of them, a former campaign manager for RFK. Paul Markham was the other, the motherfucking U.S. Attorney for the motherfucking state the crash happened in. Talk about having friends in high places.
Gargan drove the three of them to the crash and he tried to rescue Kopechne, but the current was too strong. Then they drove to the ferry landing and talked about what they should do while standing next to a pay phone. Ted said fuck it, jumped in the water and swam the 500 feet across the channel to pass out in his hotel room.
The next morning a boy and his dad went fishing and said uh there is a car in the water someone call the cops. A rescue diver found Kopechne’s body along with documents showing it was Kennedy’s car. Meanwhile Kennedy and his lawyer pals were back on Chappaquiddick and calling more powerful friends and still not reporting the fucking accident. Only when he learned the car was discovered with Kopechne’s body in it did he go back to the mainland and file an accident report.
The captain of the rescue unit alleged Kopechne might have survived had there been a timely rescue because there was an air pocket in the car; she didn’t drown, she suffocated. Kennedy was only charged with leaving the scene of an accident, and lost his license for 16 months. Fucking rich people.
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Fucker.