"Wait for me, Ellen: No one ever loved you as I love you!"

 War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it

"Yet one guesses that there was something more than an accelerating Catholic fanaticism in her resolute and zealous devotion. She was perhaps trying to expiate a little the horrors and griefs of Georgia, and her son's dedication to the priesthood was perhaps the price paid by his father for the reckless elation of the March to the Sea. In the remarkable painting of Ellen [pictured below] by G.P.A. Healy, the cross that hangs on her bosom, unobtrusive though it is at first sight, comes inevitably, as one looks, to draw attention as the center of the picture.

Ellen died in 1888. When her husband was called to her bedside, he came running upstairs, calling out, 'Wait for me, Ellen: No one ever loved you as I love you!'. He fell immediately after her death into one of his abysmal depressions and survived her only three years. He died in February, 1891; he had collapsed just after his 71st birthday, which he had spent in the room in which Ellen had died. He had been sitting in a rocking chair in front of the fire, rereading 'Great Expectations'."

... Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)  comments about William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-91) and wife Ellen. "Patriotic Gore"

Miss Mary who?

Clear evidence indicates Mary Jo Kopechne died an agonizing cruel death. John N. Farrar, a scuba diver with the Edgartown Rescue Squad which recovered the woman's body from an upside-down vehicle in eight feet of chilly water, testified she most likely stayed alive in an air pocket for several hours:

"Farrar thrust himself through the open window and into the car. Looking up, he found the body of a young woman. Her head was cocked back, her face pressed into the footwell. Both hands gripped the front edge of the back seat to hold herself in conformity with its upholstered contours. It was not the position assumed by a person knocked unconscious by the impact of a crash, Farrar said. "If she had been dead or unconscious, she would have been prone, sinking to the bottom or floating on top. She definitely was holding herself in a position to avail herself of the last remaining air that had to be trapped in the car.

Farrar took hold of the woman's thigh, and as soon as he touched the body he knew she was dead; the flesh in his hand was hard as wood. "Instead of life-saving, I realized I was now evidence-gathering," Farrar said. "Because I was the only person who would be able to observe this situation, it behooved me to pay attention to what I saw underwater to be able to report it."

(Grand jury testimony, 1969)

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009) who had driven the car off a small bridge in the middle of that fateful night in 1969 and had managed to free himself and swim to safety, abandoned the scene and his hapless trapped 28 year old "companion". Inconceivably, he didn't call for emergency help. Instead apparently, he squandered precious seconds, minutes, and hours conferring with Kennedy family operatives as survival chances for Mary Jo ebbed, and then went to bed. He only reported the mishap to authorities the next morning, some 11 hours after it happened, by which time the upside down car had been discovered. When he finally completed an accident report, he didn’t even know her name, referring to her simply as “Miss Mary ___.”