ON THIS DAY IN 1969: “Shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Edward ‘Ted’ Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours.”

Still though, as Charles Piece of Esquire infamously wrote in the Boston Globe in 2003, “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”