Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Chappaquiddick

 or: How I learned what value people place on a woman's life

On July 18 or 19 of 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne died on Chappaquiddick Island in Senator Ted Kennedy's car, when he drove it off a bridge and into a tidal pond. It isn't known for how long she struggled to get out of the car before she died.

The car was reported the next morning by two people who saw the rear tires poking up above the surface of the pond. A diver pulled Kopechne's body from the back seat of Kennedy's upside-down car, about 9 hours after it entered the water. Kennedy first went to the police about an hour later, after he learned that his car and the body had already been found. Kennedy made a number of phone calls, including to legal advisors and Kopechne's parents, before talking to the authorities.

I was 10 years old. Kopechne was "the girl in the car". When Kennedy and others referred to Kopechne as a "girl," I thought "I'm a girl. She's just like me." I thought about her desperately trying to open the car door, and gasping for breath. I thought that drowning would be the worst possible way to die. I remembered what felt like a near-drowning experience when I was about 4 years old. I got disoriented underwater, and desperately thrashed around as I tried to figure out which way was up. As I surfaced, coughed up the water I'd swallowed, and gasped for air, I saw my brother and father at the edge of the pool laughing at me. They hadn't tried to save me, and just found it funny. I don't think I've fully forgiven them for that.

I was surprised to learn that Kopechne was just a week away from her 29th birthday. A girl?

Kennedy and his entourage were focused on damage control, to protect Kennedy's reputation. The media focused on Kennedy and his political career. I wondered, "Someone died. Why isn't she important?"

While it was reported that Kopechne drowned, the diver who pulled her body from the car believed that she suffocated over a period of hours in an air pocket in which she held her head. No autopsy was ever performed.

An inquest the following January, which at the request of Kennedy's lawyers was held in private, determined that there was probable cause to believe that Kennedy drove negligently and thereby contributed to Kopechne's death.

Kennedy had a prior record of reckless driving and of driving without a license while attending law school. His only official punishments for Kopechne's death were temporary suspension of his driver's license and a two-month suspended sentence after he pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after knowingly causing injury to Kopechne. Barely a slap on the wrist.

That's how I learned what value grownups placed on a woman's life.

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For more details of what happened at Chappaquiddick, the disgraceful cover-up, and the many people who helped Kennedy get away with it, see for example https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/12/end-of-camelot or https://abc.com/shows/1969/episode-guide/season-01/03-the-girl-in-the-car .

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