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Never Forget: Mary Jo Kopechne drowned July 19, 1969 What happened: On this day (July 19) in 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in Sen. Ted Kennedy's (D., Mass.) car after the notorious philandering boozehound drove it off a bridge on Chappaquiddick island. What happened next: Nothing. Kennedy, the youngest brother of former president John F. Kennedy, fled the scene of the accident, which likely occurred sometime after midnight. He did not report it to police until 10 a.m. the following day. • The Democratic scion faced no meaningful consequences for his actions and would go on to serve four more...

<p>NEW YORK — In a posthumous memoir, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy writes of fear and remorse surrounding the fateful events on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, when his car accident left a woman dead.</p> <p>"True Compass" is to be published Sept. 14 by Twelve, a division of the Hachette book group. The 532-page book was obtained early by The New York Times.</p>

Three significant anniversaries passed this week. Only two have truly been noted. First, of course, is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing on Saturday, July 20. The second was the 20th anniversary of the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren Bessette in a small plane Kennedy was flying to Martha’s Vineyard. Only one of those deserves the hagiographic treatment both have been given, but I’ll get to that later. The third was also a 50th anniversary, one that passed just two days after JFK Jr.’s and was, in many ways, related....

Thursday marks 50 years since Ted Kennedy, the liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in the back seat. For decades, journalists and the TV networks downplayed the incident and portrayed the senator as the victim. Despite the circumstances, New York Times correspondent James Reston’s initial coverage in 1969 framed the story as a "Kennedy family" tragedy, rather than as a tragedy for the Kopechne family. As the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham explained in a 2015 column: Reston’s first draft on Chappaquiddick began “Tragedy has...

WILKES-BARRE — With the 50th anniversary of her death coming up this week, relatives of Mary Jo Kopechne are making public a letter the Luzerne County native’s parents received from boxer Muhammad Ali shortly after her passing. In it, Ali urges the family to sue Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was driving the car that plunged off a bridge into a pond on the night of July 18, 1969, from which Kennedy escaped and Kopechne’s lifeless body was recovered the next morning. She was 28. The letter has been released to the Times Leader by William Nelson and his mother, Georgetta...

John Kerry says Ted Kennedy was very different from Kavanaugh: "[Kennedy] stepped up and owned moments where he knew he stepped over the line." [video at link]

the lib spin is now that Graham had an “unhinged meltdown” because of course it is. There was nothing unhinged about the words coming out of Lindsey Graham’s mouth yesterday. He had more sense in his pinky finger than the entire Democratic party combined. Whatever. The libs are going with crap like this: "Oh my god. This is every woman’s nightmare. This is a terrifying image." https://t.co/mIgEN2ALhj — Maria Shriver (@mariashriver) September 27, 2018 um… "Just asked my wife. She said being left to drown in a car like your uncle did to Mary Jo Kopechne is a bigger nightmare...

"Chappaquiddick" did an estimated $1.9 million in ticket sales in 1,560 USA theaters. I can't find how much the movie cost, but if it's more than $20 million, it will have a very hard time breaking even.

In a New York Times op-ed published Friday, a liberal journalist and film critic complained the new film Chappaquiddick was a "character assassination" of its central character, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy. "How ‘Chappaquiddick’ Distorts a Tragedy" wrote Neal Gabler, who is working on a biography of Kennedy. Gabler complained the film, released in theaters Friday, has been "heavily promoted by conservative media outlets, and reviewers across the political spectrum have praised what they deem its damning but factual approach. Damning it is; factual it is not." There actually was no "cover-up" of Kennedy's car accident that led to the death...

What did people think..? Would you recommend the movie to other Freepers..? Do you plan on seeing the movie..?

On July 18, 1969, Sen. Ted Kennedy drives his car off of a bridge on Massachusetts' Chappaquiddick Island. The accident results in the death of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old campaign strategist who worked for Kennedy. The ongoing investigation into the mysterious and scandalous events forever alters his political legacy -- and ultimately changes the course of presidential history, and let's be honest, America as we knew it before Ted Kennedy.

The new movie about the Ted Kennedy's involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne highlights the progress women have made in the Democratic party. Mary Jo Kopechne was 28 years old when she died, trapped in a car that had plunged into a Massachusetts waterway. Experts believe she didn’t drown, but suffocated: Air pockets in the car allowed her to keep breathing for many hours after the crash. This is important because Kopechne wasn’t alone at the time of the accident: Then-Senator Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel. The left does continue to struggle with how to treat misdeeds...

Brian De Palma’s 1981 political thriller Blow Out was the first movie that dared address the events conjured by the single term “Chappaquiddick.” It was a generational provocation. De Palma, whose comedies Greetings, Phantom of the Paradise, and Hi, Mom! were obsessed with the JFK assassination, advanced to make a deeply emotional film reenacting a well-known loss of life (a supposedly disposable female victim played by Nancy Allen) and national disillusionment. De Palma raised that tragedy, involving both a callous political cover-up and society’s general naïveté, into larger concerns: Blow Out’s daring aesthetic examination of a film technician’s (John Travolta)...

This devastating time capsule can't help but stain the Kennedy legacy. There’s a good chance the upcoming biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney won’t be fair or balanced. The film’s writer/director, Adam McKay, is an ardent leftist who injects his politics into his work. McKay even flirted with a “comedy” about a dementia-addled President Ronald Reagan. Har har. The minds behind “Chappaquiddick” ditch the partisan approach like an inconvenient campaign promise. Their tale sticks to what we already know about the car accident that killed both Mary Jo Kopechne and Sen. Ted Kennedy’s presidential dreams. That’s more than enough.

Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the most famous members of America’s most famous family, understood that he belonged as much to popular culture as to political culture. Now, nine years after his death, comes a movie about the event that, almost as much as the circumstances of his birth, established him in the tabloid pantheon: Chappaquiddick.

One measure of how old we're getting is realizing how many voters today have no familiarity with the Chappaquiddick scandal. In July of 1969, then-Sen. Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge into a pond with a young woman in the passenger seat and left the scene of the accident alone. Kennedy waited 10 hours to report it, and Mary Jo Kopechne died. This is one compelling reason why many older voters thought liberals sounded preposterous when they suggested Donald Trump's presidential campaign should be canceled over the "Access Hollywood" tape of him boasting of grabbing women in the crotch. Kennedy...

On the April 5 Fox show The Five, the crew was discussing the movie Chappaquiddick and how some "powerful people on the left" tried to block the movie. It is telling that some still want to block a movie about how Kennedy left Mary Jo Kopechne to die inside the submerged car that he drove off the bridge in 1969. Kennedy is dead, so why hide the truth at this late stage? Williams said he didn't know the "story" of Chappaquiddick. You would expect that someone whose job is a paid political commentator would know the story. Kennedy would have...

Chappaquiddick, the movie, is going to be released nationwide tomorrow, nearly 50 years after the actual incident nearly deep-sixed Teddy Kennedy’s political career. It might surprise you to know that there is an entire generation that has never even heard of Chappaquiddick let alone Mary Jo Kopechne1, including the movie’s thirty-something screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan. “This is our first screenplay; it was something that we had been really passionate about since we first heard about Chappaquiddick. Which, despite being reasonably politically engaged people, I hadn’t heard of it until 2008 during the primary for that year’s presidential election…We...

So the producer of the new film about Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal says some “very powerful people” tried to kill his movie. What a surprise — NOT! “Unfortunately,” Byron Allen told Variety last week, “very powerful people tried to put pressure on me not to release this movie. They went out of their way to try and influence me in a negative way.” Byron Allen is a TV comedian from the ’80s who has become a successful Hollywood mogul. He just bought what’s left of The Weather Channel for $300 million. By the way, he’s also black, so you would...

remarkable.