Born April 11th, 1928
Died October 10th, 2024
Ethel Kennedy, the widow of US Senator Robert F Kennedy and a popular and vital force in the Kennedy political dynasty has died aged 96.
Her death came a little more than six weeks after her third eldest child, Robert F Kennedy jnr, ended his long-shot independent presidential campaign and endorsed former president Donald Trump.
Kennedy’s decision to support the Republican nominee and his earlier choice to challenge Trump’s Democratic rivals, initially president Joe Biden and then vice-president Kamala Harris, caused a painful breach in the Kennedy family, compelling some of his many siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews – heirs to a staunchly Democratic lineage – to speak out in dismay and anger and originally endorse Biden, a friend of the family, over Kennedy.
Ethel Kennedy’s passion for politics was so consuming that she was often said to be “more Kennedy than the Kennedys”. Displaying energy and humour, she campaigned tirelessly for her husband and other Kennedys, much of the time while pregnant. Her 11th and last child was born after her husband’s assassination in 1968 in Los Angeles, as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Kennedy never remarried, and her subsequent life was devoted to rearing her children, keeping alive the memory of her husband and working on behalf of the causes he had championed.
Her display of grace and resilience after his murder recalled the equally brave face shown less than five years earlier by her sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy, when President John F Kennedy was assassinated. Yet the two Kennedy wives, though frequently compared, were mostly studies in contrasts. Where Jackie was regal and seemingly removed from the political fray, Ethel was competitive and dived into the thick of it. Where Jackie was glamorous, Ethel was athletic.
More than the White House, where Jacqueline Kennedy infused new elegance, Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 19th-century estate in McLean, Virginia, known as Hickory Hill, epitomised the vigour of the Kennedy administration and its theme of a New Frontier. While Robert, the president’s younger brother, was the attorney general and later a Democratic senator from New York, Ethel was ringmaster, chief practical joker and seasoned political pro at Hickory Hill.
The place was a beehive, where Washington kingmakers, Hollywood stars, Nobel Prize winners and neighbourhood children swarmed.
But if Kennedy’s life was robust, it was also, like the larger story of the Kennedy clan, punctuated by tragedy. In her late 20s, she lost her parents in a plane crash. Eleven years later, another plane crash took the life of a brother; soon after that, the brother’s wife choked to death. There were her husband’s and brother-in-law’s assassinations, and two of her sons, David and Michael, later died young.
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On the plane that carried her husband’s body to New York from Los Angeles, Kennedy walked the aisle making sure everyone had a blanket or pillow. On the long train ride to Washington for the burial, she spoke to many of the 1,100 passengers and waved to thousands of onlookers along the route from a window next to the coffin. One passenger was Coretta Scott King, whose own husband, the Rev Martin Luther King jnr, had been assassinated only two months earlier. “I don’t see how she has been able to go through this awful experience with so much dignity,” King said on the train.
When her husband wrestled with the idea of running for the Senate from New York in 1964, Kennedy pressed him to do so. He did run, and he won.
Ethel Skakel was born on April 11th, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of George and Ann (Brannack) Skakel. Her mother was a former teacher who became involved in civic, charitable and religious affairs. Her father started his career as a railway clerk earning $8 a week, then became a coal salesperson. He soon found partners and started his own company to sell the coal residue discarded by large mines. He did the same with waste coke from oil refineries.
The Skakels rivalled the Kennedys of Massachusetts in wealth. They moved to the east coast in 1934, when Ethel was five, and settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1936.
Though George Skakel remained a Protestant, the children were brought up in his wife’s Catholic religion.
Ethel attended Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, where her roommate was Jean Kennedy, Robert’s younger sister. Ethel was formally introduced to Robert Kennedy during a ski weekend at Mont Tremblant in Quebec. Her sister Patricia Skakel was dating him at the time.
Ethel also met Robert’s brother John on that ski trip, and she quickly developed a crush on him. But John was not romantically interested in Ethel, and she began dating Robert after he and her sister had ended their relationship.
Ethel seriously considered becoming a nun, but after her graduation in 1949 she accepted Kennedy’s proposal. They were married in Greenwich on June 17th, 1950.
The couple settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Kennedy attended the University of Virginia School of Law.
On July 4th, 1951, Ethel Kennedy gave birth to Kathleen, her first child. She sent a dozen roses to her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, and would again after the birth of each of her children. Some articles and books claimed that she had set out to have more children than Rose Kennedy. Whether the claim was true or not, she did, with 11, surpassing Rose, who had had nine.
The family moved into Hickory Hill in 1956, when Robert Kennedy worked as a counsel for Senate Democrats.
Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5th, 1968, by Sirhan B Sirhan just after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died in a hospital at 1.44am on June 6th, his wife at his side.
There were the deaths of two sons: David died of a drug overdose in 1984, and Michael was killed in 1997 when he crashed into a tree while playing ball with family members as he skied down a slope on Aspen Mountain in Colorado. And a granddaughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill – a daughter of Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four – died at 22 after an apparent overdose at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 2019.
In addition to Robert jnr, Ethel Kennedy is survived by four daughters, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Courtney Kennedy Hill; Kerry Kennedy, a human rights advocate and the author of Speak Truth to Power, who was previously married to Gov Andrew Cuomo of New York; and Rory Kennedy, the youngest child, a documentary film-maker; four other sons, Joe Kennedy II, a former US representative from Massachusetts; Christopher, the chairman of Joseph P Kennedy Enterprises Inc; Max, an author and a founder of an urban ecology programme in Boston; and Douglas, a Fox News Channel correspondent; and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. – The New York Times