LIVING WITH WHISPERS

AT least six songs entitled The Ballad of Mary Jo were submitted to New York publishers. Someone visiting the remote Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick carved TED & MARY in the bridge's wooden planks. Reporters and columnists kept up a flow of speculation that prompted the New York Times's James Reston, who agrees that Edward Kennedy's account of the fatal accident at Poucha Pond has not been satisfactory, to object that "he is being tried in the press before he gets to court."

Kennedy himself told a Boston Globe reporter last week, "I feel the tragedy of the girl's death. That's what I'll always have to live with. But what I don't have to live with are the whispers and innuendoes and falsehoods." Yet in the continued absence of an adequate public explanation from Kennedy about the night when Mary Jo Kopechne died, the whispers and innuendoes refused to fade away. The popular memory may be short, but it generally endures, as Kennedy is unhappily discovering, at least until curiosity about public figures has been satisfied (see TIME ESSAY).

No one yet knows how deeply the Sept. 3 inquest at Edgartown will test Kennedy's story. Some lawyers think that the hearing can legally consider only the immediately pertinent questions of whether and how much Kennedy had been drinking, what time he left the party with Mary Jo and how fast he was driving at the time his black Oldsmobile leaped off the Dike Bridge. After all, an inquest is structured to be a kind of legal fishing expedition to determine whether or not a crime may have been committed.

However, it is possible that Massachusetts District Attorney Edmund Dinis will range farther to investigate where Kennedy and Mary Jo were going, why the accident went unreported for so long and whether, as Columnist Jack Anderson has claimed, Kennedy at first weighed letting his cousin, Joe Gargan, "take the rap," If that is Dinis' purpose, there is an easier way to go about it than an inquest. Dinis could charge Kennedy and all his associates that night, both partygoers and advisers after the tragedy, with "conspiracy to present a false statement." Such a charge requires a grand jury, and the grand jury could summon anyone who is not a lawyer to tell the court everything that Ted had told them.

One intriguing report that Dinis was investigating last week was the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader's claim that on the night of the accident, 17 long distance phone calls from Chappaquiddick and Edgartown were charged to Kennedy's telephone credit card. Five of the calls, said the Union Leader, were placed before midnight. Even acknowledging the strong anti-Kennedy prejudices of the right-wing newspaper, its report does have a certain precision that lends verisimilitude. The paper stated, for example, that the five premid-night calls were placed from the party cottage to 1) the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port, 2) John Kennedy's former speech writer, Theodore Sorensen, in New York, 3) former Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, in Washington, 4) an unlisted Boston number and 5) Sorensen again. The phone calls, if indeed made, would be damaging evidence that, far from being a dazed accident victim, Kennedy was a lucid politician trying to avoid a scandal. There remains the possibility that someone else could have made the calls, using Kennedy's credit-card number.

Still, the overwhelming evidence seemed to be against the "17 calls" theory. Operators do not normally ask for the telephone number from which a credit-card call is made, and thus there would be no record of their origin. It is unclear what records, if any, the Union Leader has to support its story. There was no telephone at the Chappaquiddick cottage itself; the phone mentioned by the Union Leader was in a locked studio behind the cottage, and the owners reported no indication that anyone had broken in to use the phone. If Kennedy had later made the twelve calls that the paper said he placed from the pay phone at the Shiretown Inn, where he was staying in Edgartown, it is highly unlikely that the night clerk would not have seen or heard him from his desk 20 feet away. The Shiretown has no telephones in its rooms.

Doubtful Swim. Columnist Anderson's claim that Kennedy did not, in fact, go to Edgartown alone after the accident seems more plausible. It is almost unthinkable that Joe Gargan and Lawyer Paul Markham would stand by while Kennedy plunged into the 500-ft. channel, his back in a brace and his mind in a daze. It seems more likely that Markham and Gargan "borrowed" a small boat from a pier some 200 yds. from the ferry landing and rowed Kennedy to the Edgartown side. According to this theory, Markham and Kennedy walked to the Senator's room in the Shiretown Inn, a block from the waterfront, while Gargan returned the boat to Chappaquiddick and drove back to the cottage. If this version is true, the question remains why Kennedy would conceal the facts and invent the swimming story. One explanation might be that Teddy was making a rather misdirected effort to absolve Markham and Gargan of some of their responsibility for not reporting the accident promptly.

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