Victoria Reggie Kennedy

Victoria Reggie Kennedy

Victoria Reggie Kennedy as born in Crowley, Louisiana on February 26, 1954. She is the widow of late Ted Kennedy and a lawyer. She was born to Edmund M. Reggie who was a banker and judge of Louisiana and Doris Ann Boustany Reggie who was a national committee woman for the Democrats. She was 2nd of the six children of the couple. Victoria Reggie Kennedy is of Lebanese degeneration as her grandparents were actually from Beirut and were Maronites who settled in Crowley after migrating to the United States.

After completing her education from the law school, Victoria Reggie Kennedy joined Judge Robert A. Sprecher who was the judge in Chicago of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, for a prestigious post. Being an attorney, Victoria got her specialization in banking law. Grier C. Raclin was her first husband who was a telecommunications attorney.

She got married with Grier in a church of Crowley, Louisiana in 1981 in which around 400 guests were invited. Victoria Reggie Kennedy has two children from her first husband Grier C. Raclin. The first meeting between Ted Kennedy and Victoria was when she got a summer internship in the senate office of mailroom the year after completing her graduation. They got engaged in March 1992 and married on 3rd July 1992.

Mary Jo Kopechne

Mary Jo Kopechne

Mary Jo Kopechne was a schoolteacher, secretary, and political campaign worker, who was killed one night forty years ago, in an automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island at Martha's Vineyard. The driver, a prominent United States senator, claimed to have made several attempts to save her, but did not report the accident until the next morning, when the car and the body were found. The senator pleaded guilty to "leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury." He received a two month suspended sentence. The Kopechne family has never commented publicly on the incident.

The senator went on to a distinguished career in politics, but for a failed attempt at nomination to run for the Presidency. He died early this morning, after a long battle with cancer. The woman who was never able to live as full or as long a life as he, and whose family received little if any justice, can finally rest in peace.

May God have mercy on that senator. May God have mercy on us all.

Chappaquiddick

Chappaquiddick

The “Chappaquiddick incident” refers to circumstances surrounding the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for the assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. On July 18, 1969, Ted Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick, a small island connected via ferry to the town of Edgartown on the adjoining larger island of Martha’s Vineyard.

The party was a reunion for a group of six women, including Kopechne, known as the “boiler-room girls”,who had served in his brother Robert’s 1968 presidential campaign. Also present were Joseph Gargan (Ted Kennedy’s cousin), Paul Markham (a school friend of Gargan’s who would become United States Attorney for Massachusetts under the patronage of the Kennedys), Charles Tretter (an attorney), Raymond La Rosa and John Crimmins (Ted Kennedy’s part-time driver). Kennedy was also competing in the Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta, a sailing competition which was taking place over several days.

Kopechne’s dead body was discovered inside an overturned car belonging to Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts under water in a tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. After the body was found, Kennedy gave a statement to police saying that on the previous night he had taken a wrong turn and accidentally driven his car off a bridge into the water. He pled guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, and received a suspended sentence. The incident became a national scandal, and may have affected the Senator’s decision not to run for President in 1972.