The Kennedys: Calling the Witnesses

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Edgartown Police Chief Dominick Arena was back at his pre-Chappaquiddick chore of directing traffic. The sum mer residents of Martha's Vineyard were savoring the final days before they would pack their station wagons on Labor Day and head for the ferry at Vine yard Haven for their ride back to the mainland. But the Vineyard summer crowd will no sooner be gone than scores of reporters and camera crews will pour into Edgartown for the Sept. 3 inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Poucha Pond.

District Attorney Edmund Dinis estimates that the inquest in the small Dukes County courthouse will last as long as a week. He will call about 20 wit nesses. One of them is almost certain to be Edward Kennedy himself, although there is some legal argument that calling the Senator to testify would violate his constitutional rights in the event that the inquest were to lead to later criminal proceedings against him. The other witnesses will include the five girls and five other men who attended the cookout on Chappaquiddick. Arena will appear, as will Dr. Donald R. Wills, the Dukes County associate medical examiner, who pronounced Mary Jo's death an accidental drowning some eight or ten hours after Kennedy's sedan tum bled off the Dike Bridge.

Autopsy Delayed. "We intend to trace the movements of Senator Kennedy and all the others at the party both before and after the accident," said Dinis. He wants to explore not only the immediate questions surrounding the fatal accident but also the larger discrepancies in Kennedy's public accounting of that night. The district attorney will call the ferrymen who carried Kennedy and his friends back and forth from Edgartown to Chappaquid dick, the owner of the Shiretown Inn, where the Senator was staying, and the local manager of the New England Telephone Co., whose records may disclose what calls the members of the Kennedy party had made, and precisely when.

Dinis had hoped for an autopsy on Mary Jo's body before the inquest, but last week the opposition of the girl's parents succeeded at least temporarily in preventing it. The Kopechnes' lawyers won a hearing in Luzerne County, Pa., where Mary Jo is buried, on whether exhumation and autopsy would now be necessary or legal.

The inquest may serve to answer the unanswered questions in what is be coming a peculiar and in some ways tragic episode in American political history. Or it may be that those who might have the answers will stick by the explanations already given, however implausible they seem. For the moment, all of the guests at the Chappaquiddick party continue to preserve what seems to be a preternatural silence.