Mary Jo Kopechne Biography

Mary Jo Kopechne was content working behind the scenes for the political candidates and causes in which she believed. In 1960, she was one of the many idealistic young Catholic college students who worked to get John Kennedy elected president. In 1968, Kopechne had eagerly been a part of Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, which was cut short by his assassination during the California primary. But due to her untimely death, Mary Jo Kopechne became a symbol of the thwarted presidential ambition of Senator Edward Kennedy and the lingering unanswered questions of her parents.

On the night of July 18, 1969, near Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, Kopechne and Kennedy were among a group 12 people who had gathered for a barbecue following the Edgartown Regatta on Chappaquiddick Island. The two left the party together in a car Kennedy was driving. Not long after that, Kennedy drove the car off a bridge, got himself out of the car and the water, and walked away from the scene of the accident. The next morning, an hour before Kennedy reported the incident to the Edgartown police, a fire department diver recovered Kopechne's body. Evidence indicated that Kopechne survived for a significant period of time, breathing a pocket of trapped air, according to reports, but eventually suffocated. A Kennedy aide, Dun Gifford, flew a chartered plane into Edgartown prepared by the instruction to take the body off the island. Within a few hours, before an autopsy could be performed, Kopechne's body had been returned to her parents in Pennsylvania. Three days later she was buried in St. Vincent's Cemetery in Plymouth.

Amidst public outrage, some observers loudly proclaimed that Kennedy got off too easily. His responsibility regarding the accident was not as crucial as the fact that he left the scene and failed to report it immediately to the police. The fact that the only investigation of the possible crime was based solely on Kennedy's testimony brought even more criticism. Leslie Leland, a local pharmacist who served as grand jury foreman of the case, claimed in a 1989 interview, 20 years after Kopechne's death, that a cover-up took place in order to direct attention away from Kennedy's guilt. According to Boston Globe reporter Jeff Jacoby, writing in 1994, while three days following Kopechne's burial, Kennedy had pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, he was sentenced to only two months in jail. That sentence was suspended. An inquest took place behind closed doors that January. Jacoby wrote that "District Judge James Boyle determined 'probable cause' that Kennedy had driven 'negligently' and had engaged in 'criminal conduct' that 'contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.' The senator was never prosecuted and never tried."

In 1972, Kennedy did not seek the presidential nomination as some expected. He was reelected to the Senate in 1970, and in the years that ensued through 2000. Popular opinion continued to point to the never-solved Kopechne case and Kennedy's suspected criminal actions as the major incident, among other questionable behaviors, that kept him from the presidency. Kopechne, a bright young 28-year-old graduate of Caldwell College in New Jersey, hoping to marry her boyfriend in the Foreign Service, according to her parents, had never held the same respect for Edward Kennedy that she had for his brothers, especially Robert. Kopechne was a campaign organizer for a political consulting firm at the time of her death.