Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

And welcome to our special Sunday edition, This day July 26th, 1969. The Chappiquitic

incident is on the front pages of newspapers a day after Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy pled guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an

accident. The accident, which was about a week earlier, involved a single vehicle on the island

of Chappiquitic, which is on Martha's Vineyard, I believe.

Kennedy was driving and his companion 28-year-old Mary Joe Capekney was trapped in the car

after crashed off a bridge into water.

Capekney died in that accident for his guilty plea.

Kennedy received a two-month suspended jail sentence.

And listeners, if you can tell, I'm treading a little lightly with the sketch of the details

here. That is because one of the reasons we want to talk about this is because so many of the details are murky and so much of the fallout from this incident has been controversial for decades and at times conspiratorial so So I need some help talking about this.

Luckily, I have two people here to help me do that.

Nicole Hammer of Columbia, as always, is here.

Hello, Mickey.

Hello, Jody.

And special guest, Maive Higgins of the New York Times

and the podcast Mothers of Invention and lots more back for her third episode in a row. Hello,

Maif. Thanks for having me Dody. Is this a scandal that you heard about growing up in Ireland?

Yeah, the Kennedies are huge in Ireland, you know, they're

Irish Catholic background and we were so proud of them and I mean I didn't hear about it at the time,

you know because I wasn't born, but definitely there. I guess it was the type of scandal

...