It’s the other 40th anniversary this week, the one no one has talked about thus far. Monday marked the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s feet first kicking moondust around. But 40 years ago today marks the funeral of Mary Jo Kopechne, who died in Ted Kennedy’s ’67 Oldsmobile when it went off an unmarked bridge in Chappaquiddick and he couldn’t save her.

It is understandable if four decades later we now remember—and celebrate— one of the watershed events in human history and think of Chappaquiddick, if at all, as a footnote in American history. It ended, for all time, the possibility that the Kennedys would join the Adamses and the Bushes in having two members of the same immediate family sit in the White House.

Not only did Ted Kennedy go on to have a distinguished career in the Senate, he is now battling a brain tumor. Few anymore have an appetite for rehashing one of his darkest hours. (When he finally got around to talking about his delay in reporting the accident and Kopechne’s death in a TV interview with Roger Mudd, he could only call it “the conduct” on that dark, awful night, as if it had happened to someone else.)

And yet those of us who were around at the time and paying attention to the world couldn’t get away from Chappaquiddick.

I remember once sitting in my car waiting for someone and listening to the radio. I was, as so many were, full of Apollo 11, but all I could hear on any Buffalo radio news broadcast were stories about Chappaquiddick—Kennedy’s unfolding version, the possibility of criminal charges (he ultimately pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and received a suspended sentence, with a one-year license suspension), the fruitless attempts to make something salacious out of it.

The moon landing confirmed what was possible if our species kept exploring. Chappaquiddick put a period to Camelot.

But it’s worth remembering, I think —not because of Ted Kennedy, really, but because of Kopechne, who remains symbolic of a whole class of people we’re sadly and usually delighted to ignore.

I’m talking about the people—so often young—who are the backbone of every idealistic political campaign since John F. Kennedy’s—the paid staffers and unpaid volunteers who stay up all night typing (as Kopechne reputedly did), the ones who go door to door, or make the cold calls, or stuff envelopes, or clean up after rallies, or find enough chairs to hold them in the first place.

Kopechne started out working passionately and tirelessly for Bobby Kennedy as his secretary (she previously was a secretary to Florida Sen. George Smathers).

Bobby Kennedy’s murder by Sirhan Sirhan rocked her. The possibility of a future presidential run by Ted kept her involved with the family while she worked for a political consultant.

Nothing salacious that any malicious pol or reputation demolitionist could cook up has ever stuck to her, no matter how strenuous the effort.

The worst that can be said of her by the worst of people is that she wasn’t accustomed to drinking much and may possibly have had too much that night.

Otherwise, she’s a martyr to the cause —any political cause at all from any side.

She’s familiar to anyone who has ever spent any time at all near any political campaign, local or national—the anonymous, hair-raisingly competent “unknown soldiers” of the American political system, the devoted people who make Kennedys and Obamas, etc., possible.

On that July night 40 years ago, her pitiless misfortune made anonymity impossible.

It also made it impossible, it seems to me, to forget everyone she represents.