Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

wild Bobby—well, her feelings for him weren’t

percent of Americans did not believe him. At the inquest, John Farrar, the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body the next afternoon, testified that Mary Jo had not drowned but had suffocated to death. He said she had been alive for at least an hour in the water, maybe longer. That didn’t matter to Ted. He was sticking to his story. “Was there any particular reason,” prosecutor Edmund Dinis asked Ted, “why you did not call either the police or the fire department?” “Well,” Ted testified, “I intended to call for assistance and report the accident to police within a few short moments of going back into the car.” “Did something transpire to prevent this?” Ted dodged the question. Instead, he became most talkative about his own physical pain, self-pity, fear, and a childlike belief that the whole problem—Mary Jo’s death and his responsibility for it—would just go away. He was afraid, he said, to call Mary Jo’s mother. “I just couldn’t gain the strength within me, the

neglect when

Joan hadn’t