○  edward m. kennedy: chappaquiddick  ○

ext several hours, to the extent that i can remember them, make no sense to me at all.

although my doctors informed me that i suffered a cerebral concussion, as well as shock, i do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either in the physical, emotional trauma brought on by the accident, or on anyone else. i regard as indefensible the fact that i did not report the accident to the policy immediately.

instead of looking directly for a telephone after lying exhausted in the grass for an undetermined time, i walked back to the cottage where the party was being held and requested the help of two friends, my cousin, joseph gargan and phil markham, and directed them to return immediately to the scene with me -- this was sometime after midnight -- in order to undertake a new effort to dive down and locate miss kopechne. their strenuous efforts, undertaken at some risk to their own lives also proved futile.

all kinds of scrambled thoughts -- all of them confused, some of them irrational, many of them which i cannot recall, and some of which i would not have seriously entertained under normal circumstances -- went through my mind during this period. they were reflected in the various inexplicable, inconsistent, and inconclusive things i said and did, including such questions as whether the girl might still be alive somewhere out of that immediate area, whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what has happened and to delay my report, whether somehow the awful weight of this incredible incident might, in some way, pass from my shoulders. i was overcome, i'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions, grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock.

instructing gargan and markham not to alarm mary jo's friends that night, i had them take me to the ferry crossing. the ferry having shut down for the night, i suddenly jumped into the w

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