The late Ted Kennedy, vaunted “Lion of the Senate,” drove off a bridge and left a twenty-nine-year-old woman to die in three feet of water—his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, whose life could have been saved. Yet that criminal act has successfully been transformed into “Ted’s tragedy,” an awful event that unfairly kept him from ever becoming president of the United States. Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned.
