On this day, July 25, in 1969, Ted Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving in the scene of an accident, following the death of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.

A week earlier — after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, off Martha’s Vineyard — the car Kennedy was driving went off a bridge and overturned in water. The 37-year-old married U.S. senator from Massachusetts escaped, but Kopechne did not.

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