Remembering Ted Kennedy.

Chappaquiddick incident
Main article: Chappaquiddick incident
Mary Jo Kopechne

On the night of July 18, 1969, Kennedy was on Martha's Vineyard's Chappaquiddick Island at a party for the "Boiler Room Girls", a group of young women who had worked on his brother Robert's presidential campaign the year before. Leaving the party, Kennedy was driving a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 with one of the women, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, as his passenger, when Kennedy drove off Dike Bridge into the Poucha Pond inlet. Kennedy escaped the overturned vehicle and swam to safety, but Kopechne died in the car. Kennedy left the scene and did not call authorities until after Kopechne's body was discovered the following day.

On July 25, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was given a sentence of two months in jail, suspended. That night, he gave a national broadcast in which he said, "I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately", but denied driving under the influence of alcohol and denied any immoral conduct between him and Kopechne. Kennedy asked the Massachusetts electorate whether he should stay in office and, after getting a favorable response, he did so.

In January 1970, an inquest into Kopechne's death took place in Edgartown, Massachusetts. At the request of Kennedy's lawyers, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered the inquest be conducted in secret. The presiding judge, James A. Boyle, concluded that some aspects of Kennedy's story of that night were not true, and that "negligent driving appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne." A grand jury on Martha's Vineyard staged a two-day investigation in April 1970 but issued no indictment, after which Boyle made his inquest report public. Kennedy deemed its conclusions "not justified." Doubts about the Chappaquiddick incident generated a large number of articles and books over the next several years.

Kennedy easily won re-election to another term in the Senate in 1970 with 62 percent of the vote against underfunded Republican candidate Josiah Spaulding, although he received about 500,000 fewer votes than in 1964.

On Easter weekend 1991, Kennedy was at a get-together at the family's Palm Beach, Florida estate when, restless and maudlin after reminiscing about his brother-in-law, he left for a late-night visit to a local bar, getting his son Patrick and nephew William Kennedy Smith to accompany him. Patrick Kennedy and Smith returned with women they met there, Michelle Cassone and Patricia Bowman. Cassone said that Ted Kennedy subsequently walked in on her and Patrick, dressed only in a nightshirt and with a weird look on his face. Smith and Bowman went out on the beach, where they had sex that he said was consensual and she said was rape. The local police made a delayed investigation; soon Kennedy sources were feeding the press with negative information about Bowman's background and several mainstream newspapers broke a taboo by publishing her name. The case quickly became a media frenzy. While not directly implicated in the case, Kennedy became the frequent butt of jokes on The Tonight Show and other late-night television programs. Time magazine said Kennedy was being perceived as a "Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque" while Newsweek said Kennedy was "the living symbol of the family flaws."

Meanwhile, at a June 17, 1991 dinner party, Kennedy saw Victoria Anne Reggie, a Washington lawyer at Keck, Mahin & Cate, a divorced mother of two, and the daughter of an old Kennedy family ally, Louisiana judge Edmund Reggie. They began dating and by September were in a serious relationship. In a late October speech at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Kennedy sought to begin a political recovery, saying: "I am painfully aware that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than disagreements with my positions ... [It] involves the disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight. To them I say, I recognize my own shortcomings — the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them." In December 1991, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial was held; it was nationally televised and the most watched until the O. J. Simpson murder case several years later. Kennedy's testimony at the trial seem relaxed, confident, and forthcoming, and helped convince the public that his involvement had been peripheral and unintended. Smith was acquitted.

With Kennedy's death, the Senate Democratic Party caucus has lost its 60-seat supermajority in the US Senate. Massachusetts law requires that his successor be chosen in a special election between 145 and 160 days of a vacancy. Prior to his death, Kennedy had appealed to Democratic Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick and the legislature to change state law, to allow U.S. Senate vacancies to be temporarily filled pending a special election. This law was changed in 2004 to prevent then-Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, from appointing a replacement for Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, in the event Kerry won the presidency.

Ironically, it was Kennedy who originally suggested the law to be changed in 2004. Way to go Ted.