“Could you tell me,” they ask, “how to get to the Kennedy Memorial Bridge?” Five years and a day after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s black Oldsmobile lurched off the Dyke Bridge on Chappaquiddick, the senior Massachusetts senator at the wheel and the doomed Miss Mary Jo Kopechne beside him, tourists keep coming, at least 60 of them a day, to stand and stare at the scene of the Island’s - perhaps the nation’s - most celebrated automobile accident.

 

Dukes County’s quaint, picturesque, Georgian-Colonial red brick and white trimmed courthouse was the focus of much of the world’s attention this week, and the adjectives in the first part of this sentence are a fair sampling of the ones dredged up by the reporters straining to give their prose a desperately needed dash of color.

 

In a voice that was at first inaudible, Senator Edward M. Kennedy pleaded guilty this morning in district court to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after knowingly causing injury to Miss Mary Jo Kopechne without making himself known. Judge James A. Boyle imposed a suspended two-month sentence to the house of correction at Barnstable, with the comment that “the defendant has already been and will continue to be punished far beyond anything this court can impose.”