For decades, the enduring common image of Ethel Kennedy was as the philosophical wife of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who marked the passing times kneeling with their many children at her father’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, near that of his nephew, President John F. Kennedy.
When the senator was shot on June 5, 1968, times after winning the California presidential Democratic primary, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, she was expecting their 11th child. Ethel was the one who quietly turned the stricken group away from her livid husband.
With her father’s nephew,  , Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Ethel helped create the advocacy organization now known as , Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, in 1968. Finding creative solutions to the country’s poverty and social disqualification led to the establishment of philanthropic and human rights initiatives.
Kennedy, who lived many of her existence in her father’s dark, died Thursday, her household said, according to the Associated Press. She was 96.
Kennedy had been hospitalized after , suffering a stroke , in her rest on Oct. 3.
Joe Kennedy III posted on X,” We are saddened by the passing of our wonderful grandmother. She died this morning from difficulties from a week-long injury.
The stress of damage she shouldered was tremendous. Two of her sons died earlier deaths, one from a drug abuse and the other from a monster riding accident, both of which her parents and her brother had suffered from in separate airplane crashes.
But she was able to maintain a Catholic belief that was so powerful that she took the idea of becoming a woman. When her coming father heard of her situation, he is said to have quipped,” I’ll engage with people, but how can I engage with God”?
Because of her religious views, she always considered remarrying, according to friends.
” How may I possibly do that if Bobby looked down from heaven?” asked the question. That would be adultery”, Ethel told friends who suggested she married once, People magazine reported in 1991.
Her husband’s sister, the late , Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and some gave another cause.
” I do n’t believe”, Shriver told People in 1998,” she ever thought any other man was as good as Bobby”, whom Ethel had married in 1950.
Ethel presented a bravely brave face to the earth when her father was killed, much like Jackie Kennedy’s lady, and friends claimed she was more Kennedy than many people who were born with the name.
Personally, Ethel was overwhelmed with anguish after her father’s dying and retreated to Hickory Hill, the McLean, Va., land previously owned by President Kennedy.
By most accounts, she struggled to increase but many children by herself. More than 17 times separated her eldest child, Kathleen, and her youngest, Rory, born about six weeks after her father died. Ethel’s enduring pain just intensified the process.
In Laurence Leamer’s 1994 history” The Kennedy Women,” Laurence Leamer wrote that her mood” swept from deep secret despair to psychotic irritability to frenzied highs of constant activity.”
In the 1970s, the family was frequently described as a three-ring rodeo with noisy children, lost pets, and erratic employees who frequently resigned because Ethel was difficult to work for. Barbara Gibson, lifelong director of Ethel’s mother-in-law,  , Rose Kennedy, again said the kids “ran prevalent”. Many people had issues with substance misuse.
The three eldest boys — Joseph, Robert Jr. and David — bore the brunt of their mum’s” unpredictable temperament”, Leamer wrote. Her management of the rebel teenagers had an angry superior, as if their habits were an affront to their family’s memory, friends after said.
Her seventh child, Max, said his family meted out skill in her own way, through good competition.
” If we were out flying, we’d had more fun than anyone else in the harbor”, Max told People in 1998. ” If we were memorizing a song, we’d strive to learn as best as we possibly had”.
Ethel Skakel was born April 11, 1928, in Chicago into a home not unlike the Kennedys — large, loud, Catholic and prosperous. She was George Skakel’s and his bright wife Ann’s fifth child.
Her papa was the owner of the coal-broking company Great Lakes Carbon Corp., one of the largest privately held companies in the country. Growing up, she generally lived on a big house in Greenwich, Conn.
At what was next Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, a school for women in New York, she roomed in 1945 with , Jean Kennedy, who immediately introduced her nephew Robert to Ethel during a skiing trip. He lightly dated her literary girl, Pat, before he turned to the cheerful Ethel.
After graduating with a degree in history in 1949, 22-year-old Ethel married Robert, finally 24 and a law student at the University of Virginia.
With Ethel at his side, the delicate Robert “blossomed”, his sister Eunice after said.
In” Robert Kennedy and His Times” ( 1978 ), historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said the marriage “was the best thing that could have happened” for Robert.
” Her dynamism and authenticity impressed him. His gags sucked him out. His persistent fear was offset by her cultural products. … Her devotion moved him. Her passion offered him comfort and safety”, Schlesinger wrote.
As a Washington guest, the passionate Ethel was known for her antics, particularly share dunkings of well-heeled customers. Her selection of animals was likely to surpass that of her children, including a wandering animal that disrupted drink parties and a pet bird that again perched on the hairpiece of a politician’s wife.
She afterwards recalled that she and her father never really considered leaving politicians in the wretched aftermath of President Kennedy’s death in 1963. Robert properly ran for the United States Senate from New York in 1964, and Ethel vehemently urged him to run for president.
She and her kids rolled down a banner from the inside glass that read” Kennedy for President” and played” The Difficult Desire” on the record player as they were undergoing anxious discussions on the subject. The music became the administration’s theme.
According to” The Kennedy Women,” Ethel vowed to spend the rest of her life honoring her husband’s memory and continue to reside in Hickory Hill even as a young widow — she was 40 when Robert passed away. When she put the house on the market in 2003, Frank Mankiewicz, who was Robert Kennedy’s hit director, compared it to” selling Mount Vernon”. In 2010, it sold for more than$ 8 million.
At Hickory Hill, her son’s days had brimmed with well-planned actions, Brad Blank, a close friend of her kids, told Vanity Fair in 1997. There was sport at 9 a. m., sailing at 11 a. m., a complete baseball match with 18 people at 3 p. m. every day.
” Meal was immediately at 7″, Blank said. “Ethel may remain at the head of the table, and Joe, or whoever the eldest one was, may remain at the other. There was plenty of talk, and no lack of attention from their family”.
However, it frequently appeared as though heartache and catastrophe were on the horizon.
In 1973, child Joseph, therefore 20, was charged with reckless driving when his Car overturned, greatly terrible a customer. Eleven years later, David, the child who had battled medication for years and seemed most haunted by his father’s passing, was discovered dead of a drug abuse in a Florida motel place.
Her brother Michael, who ran the volunteer Citizens Energy Corp. and had been in the media for having an affair with his children’s young girl caretaker, was killed in 1997 during a dangerous game of touch football, played while skiing down an Alpine slope. He was 39.
Nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. died, with his wife and sister-in-law, when the plane he was flying crashed in 1999 in the Atlantic Ocean. They were en route to her daughter Rory’s wedding.
Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill, was discovered dead in the Kennedy family’s Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in August of this year after an accidental overdose. She was 22. Less than a year later, another granddaughter, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, and her 8-year-old son drowned in a canoeing accident in the Chesapeake Bay.
Another nephew, Michael Skakel, was convicted in 2002 of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, a 15-year-old neighbor, and served 11 years in prison before his conviction , was overturned , in 2013 and later vacated.
In the wake of grief or catastrophe, Kennedy relied on her faith to hold herself together, those close to her said. She typically tried to stay active by attending Mass every day, whether it was swimming, golfing, or doing charity work.
Many of her children devoted themselves to the public.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor from 1995 to 2003. Joseph Kennedy II spent a dozen years in the U. S. Congress. Kennedy Hill became a human rights activist. The RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights is led by Robert Kennedy, a lawyer.
Son Christopher Kennedy was instrumental in founding the Merchandise Mart, the trade center in Chicago that his paternal grandfather built. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became a lawyer and noted environmentalist who also , promoted anti-vaccine propaganda , during the pandemic, while Max, also a lawyer, co-founded the Urban Ecology Institute in Boston.
Her 10th child, Douglas, became a broadcast journalist and her youngest, Rory, a documentary filmmaker whose 2012 project, “Ethel”, focused on her parents ‘ relationship. Her children laugh while recalling their mother as a force of nature who made them aware of the needs of the larger world when their father was no longer there.
In addition to her excellent work, Ethel helped with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Project in New York City, which had been important to her husband. She also raised money for Earth Conservation Corps, which sponsors environmental cleanup programs, co-chaired the Coalition of Gun Control, worked with various human rights organizations, and hosted fundraisers for political and other causes. President Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, making it a national honor.
In her daughter’s documentary, Ethel conceded that she had endured” a lot of loss” but added:” Nobody gets a free ride. So you dig in and do what you can with all your wits around you.
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