As someone raised in a family that revered John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, I grew up steeped in Kennedy lore. I was more familiar with JFK and his family, including his glamorous wife, Jackie, but was always a bit fascinated by Ethel Kennedy, widow of RFK and mother of his 11 children — the youngest of whom (Rory) was born six months after his assassination. Every photo I ever saw of Ethel, it seemed she had a twinkle in her eye.
I often wondered about that — what it must have been like to be the young mother of such a large brood — a high-profile family — widowed at 40 and in such a traumatic way. It can’t have been easy, though I can’t pretend to know much about Ethel Kennedy aside from what I could glean from the aforementioned photos and the carefully curated public accounts of her in the years since.
I wrote about Ethel Kennedy recently, in light of the rift that appears to have arisen among her children in the wake of son Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision first to run for president and oppose Joe Biden and then to drop out of the race and endorse former President Donald Trump. I thought it interesting — and quite sad — that several of her children had elected to publicly denounce their brother over his political choices.
‘I Would Never’: Ethel Kennedy on RFK and Telling Their Kids What
He Would Think About Certain Subjects
For her part, Ethel appears to have stayed out of the fray, though at her advanced age, one wonders the extent to which she was made aware of it — or what thoughts she may have shared with her family in private if she was.
As many have noted, Ethel Kennedy endured more than her share of grief over her long life.
In addition to her husband’s death, her parents were killed in a plane crash in 1955 and her brother died in a crash in 1966. Her son David died of a drug overdose and Michael Kennedy, another son, was killed in a skiing accident.
Her nephew, John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the slain president, was killed in a plane crash, while a second nephew, Michael Skakel, was convicted of murder in 2002 — a conviction vacated in 2018.
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She also buried one granddaughter who died of a drug overdose on the family compound in 2019, and another who died with her son in a freak canoe accident in 2020.
On coping with the deluge of tragedy, she told People in 2012: “I pretty well lived in the moment. And I was blessed with faith.”
Now, it is her family’s turn to grieve for her — Ethel Kennedy passed away Thursday at the age of 96.
She was born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois — the sixth of seven children born to George and Ann (Brannek) Skakel. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended Manhattanville College, where she met Jean Kennedy, through whom she met Jean’s brother, Robert. The two married in June 1950 and purchased Hickory Hill — the 13-bedroom estate in McLean, Virginia, where they raised their growing family and held famously eclectic gatherings — from John and Jackie Kennedy in 1956.
Shortly after Robert’s death in 1968, Ethel founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (now known as Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights). The center, now headed by daughter Kerry Kennedy, describes its mission thusly:
We advocate for human rights issues and pursue strategic litigation to hold governments accountable at home and around the world. We foster a social good approach to business, celebrate agents of change, and to ensure change that lasts, we educate millions of students about human rights, training the next generation of leaders.
We work with the bravest people on earth—partners at home and around the world—to realize Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s dream of a more just and peaceful world. Working to expose injustice and heal pain and suffering, our pursuit of racial and economic equality forms the foundation of all our programs at RFK Human Rights.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so long ago: ‘To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’” —Robert F. Kennedy
In 2012, Rory released a documentary about her mother’s life.
On Tuesday, Kerry Kennedy issued a statement disclosing that Ethel had suffered a stroke five days prior.
Late Thursday morning came the news that Ethel Kennedy had passed away. Kerry shared an announcement on X/Twitter:
She also shared a tribute from the center founded by her mother:
As of this writing, RFK Jr. has not issued a statement regarding his mother’s passing. However, his wife, Cheryl Hines, issued a sweet tribute to her mother-in-law early Thursday afternoon.
My mother in law, Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s mother, passed this morning. It has been my great honor to have shared laughter and love with Ethel. Her charisma, wisdom and strength will live on with me in every memory of her. Bobby and I spent many warm nights in Hyannis Port having dinner with her and hearing stories from her extraordinary life. She always made me laugh. She was never too serious except when she needed to be. She dressed to nines with bare feet. She will be missed. My love is with the family.
Hines’ description of Ethel Kennedy squares with that twinkle in the eye I always saw.
May she rest in peace.
Update:
RFK Jr. has issued a statement regarding Ethel Kennedy via his X/Twitter account. It’s a beautiful tribute to a remarkable woman:
My mom, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, passed peacefully into Heaven this morning. She was 96. She died in Boston surrounded by many of her nine surviving children and her friends. God gave her 34 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, and the energy to give them all the attention they required. He blessed her with a rich and eventful life. Even as she declined in recent months, she never lost her sense of fun, her humor, her spark, her spunk, and her joie de vivre. She wrung joy from every moment, but for 56 years she has spoken with yearning of the day she would reunite with her beloved husband. She is with him now, with my brothers David and Michael, with her parents, her six siblings, all of whom predeceased her, and her “adopted” Kennedy siblings Jack, Kick, Joe, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Rosemary, and Patricia. From the day she met my father, her new family observed that she was “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” She was never more enthusiastic about the afterlife than when she considered that she would also be reunited with her many dogs, including 16 Irish setters — all conveniently named “Rusty.”
The cognitive dissonance that allowed her to keep two inconsistent truths in her heart at the same time without budging made my mother a collection of irreconcilable convictions. Among these was her ironic combination of deep — nearly blind — reverence for the Catholic Church and irreverence toward its clerics. She was at once starstruck by America’s presidents, all of whom she came to know personally, and at the same time skeptical of government and toward all figures of authority. She balanced her contempt for pretension and hypocrisy with a boundless tolerance for error and mistakes in others.
God also endowed her with a perpetual attitude of gratitude that fueled her taste for adventure and an irrepressible buoyancy in a life beset by a continuous parade of heartbreaking tragedies. Her sunny optimism eventually brought my shattered father back to life following the assassination of his brother and then helped her children to thrive after her husband’s assassination five years later.
Among her most defining qualities were moral and physical fearlessness. She was a peerless equestrian and held the high jump record on horseback, jumping 7′9″ on a Quarter Horse. Critics named her among the best female amateur tennis players, and she was a competitive diver. But she did every sport well — from football to skiing, waterskiing and kayaking. Her disciplined stoicism and her deep faith in God enabled her to endure over ten years of pregnancy without complaint. She also suffered the murders of her husband and Uncle Jack, and the early deaths of two of her children. Various air crashes killed both of her parents, her brother, her sister-in-law, and her nephew John. She never enjoyed flying, but her worry never stopped her from boarding a plane. While giving short shrift to her own monumental suffering, she always showed intense compassion for others.
My mother invented tough love, and she could be hard on her children when we didn’t live up to her expectations. But she was also intensely loyal, and we always knew that she would stand fiercely behind us when we came under attack by others. She was our role model for self-discipline, for resilience, and for self-confidence. She deeded to each of her 11 children her love of good stories, her athleticism, her competitive spirit, and the deep curiosity about the world, and the intense interest in people of all backgrounds, which caused her to pepper everyone she met — from cab drivers to presidents — with a relentless cascade of questions about their lives. She also gave us all her love of language and for good storytelling. I credit her for all my virtues. I’m grateful for her generosity in overlooking my faults.
