Ethel Kennedy dies at 96; widow of Robert Kennedy lived her life in his long shadow
For years, the enduring public image of Ethel Kennedy was as the stoic widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who marked the passing years kneeling with their many children at her husband’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, near that of his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
She was pregnant with their 11th child when the senator was shot June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after declaring victory in the California presidential Democratic primary. It was Ethel who calmly pushed back the surging crowd to give her dying husband air.
With her husband’s brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Ethel helped establish the advocacy organization now known as Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, in 1968. Its mission grew from finding creative solutions to poverty and political disenfranchisement in the U.S. to funding humanitarian and human rights projects around the world.
Critic’s Notebook: The day I met Ethel Kennedy
Kennedy, who lived much of her life in her husband’s shadow, died Thursday, her family said, according to the Associated Press. She was 96.
Kennedy had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke in her sleep on Oct. 3.
“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother,” Joe Kennedy III posted on X. “She died this morning from complications related to a stroke suffered last week.”
The burden of loss she shouldered was enormous. Her parents and a brother were killed in separate plane crashes and, decades later, two of her sons died early deaths — one from a drug overdose, another in a freak skiing accident.
But a Catholic faith so strong that she once seriously contemplated becoming a nun helped sustain her. When her future husband heard of her quandary, he is said to have quipped, “I’ll compete with anyone, but how can I compete with God?”
Because of her religious beliefs, she never considered remarrying, according to friends.
“How could I possibly do that with Bobby looking down from heaven? That would be adultery,” Ethel told friends who suggested she marry again, People magazine reported in 1991.
Her husband’s sister, the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and others gave another reason.
“I don’t believe,” Shriver told People in 1998, “she ever thought any other man was as good as Bobby,” whom Ethel had married in 1950.
Friends said Ethel was more Kennedy than many born with the name — she truly loved politics and campaigning and, when her husband was assassinated, she presented a gallantly brave face to the world, much as President Kennedy’s widow Jackie had.
Privately, Ethel was overwhelmed with grief after her husband’s death and retreated to Hickory Hill, the McLean, Va., estate once owned by President Kennedy.
By most accounts, she struggled to raise so many children by herself. More than 17 years separated her eldest child, Kathleen, and her youngest, Rory, born about six months after her father died. Ethel’s enduring grief only intensified the task.
Her mood “swept from deep private despair to manic irritability to frenetic highs of ceaseless activity,” Laurence Leamer wrote in the 1994 biography “The Kennedy Women.”
The household in the 1970s was routinely described as a three-ring circus filled with rowdy kids, lost pets and haggard servants who often quit in frustration, saying Ethel was difficult to work for. Barbara Gibson, longtime secretary of Ethel’s mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, once said the children “ran rampant.” Several struggled with substance abuse.
The three eldest boys — Joseph, Robert Jr. and David — bore the brunt of their mother’s “capricious temperament,” Leamer wrote. Her handling of the rebellious teenagers had an angry quality, as if their behavior were an insult to their father’s memory, friends later said.
Her ninth child, Max, said his mother meted out discipline in her own way, through healthy competition.
“If we were out sailing, we’d have more fun than anyone else in the harbor,” Max told People in 1998. “If we were memorizing a poem, we’d try to memorize as best as we possibly could.”
Ethel Skakel was born April 11, 1928, in Chicago into a family not unlike the Kennedys — big, boisterous, Catholic and rich. She was the sixth of seven children of George Skakel and his cheerful wife, Ann.
Her father owned the Great Lakes Carbon Corp., a coal brokerage that became one of the largest privately held corporations in America. Growing up, she mainly lived on a large estate in Greenwich, Conn.
At what was then Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, a school for women in New York, she roomed in 1945 with Jean Kennedy, who soon introduced her brother Robert to Ethel during a ski trip. He casually dated her bookish sister, Pat, before he turned to the outgoing Ethel.
After graduating with a degree in history in 1949, 22-year-old Ethel married Robert, then 24 and a law student at the University of Virginia.
With Ethel at his side, the sensitive Robert “blossomed,” his sister Eunice later 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 enthusiasm and spontaneity delighted him. Her jokes diverted him. Her social gifts offset his abiding shyness. ... Her passion moved him. Her devotion offered him reassurance and security,” Schlesinger wrote.
As a Washington hostess, the spirited Ethel was known for her pranks, especially pool dunkings of well-heeled guests. Her collection of animals could outnumber her children and included a wandering armadillo that broke up tea parties and a pet hawk that once landed on the wig of a politician’s wife.
During the devastating aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, she later recalled that she and her husband never really considered pulling out of politics. Robert successfully ran for the U.S. Senate from New York in 1964, and Ethel strongly urged him to run for president.
In the midst of tense talks on the subject, she and their children rolled down a banner from the upstairs window that read “Kennedy for President” and played “The Impossible Dream” on the record player. The song became the campaign’s theme.
Even as a young widow — she was 40 when Robert died — Ethel vowed to spend the rest of her life honoring her husband’s memory, according to “The Kennedy Women,” and to keep living at Hickory Hill. When she put the estate on the market in 2003, Frank Mankiewicz, who was Robert Kennedy’s press secretary, compared it to “selling Mount Vernon.” It sold for more than $8 million in 2010.
At Hickory Hill, her children’s days had brimmed with well-planned activities, Brad Blank, a close friend of her children, told Vanity Fair in 1997. There was tennis at 9 a.m., sailing at 11 a.m., a full baseball game with 18 players at 3 p.m. every day.
“Dinner was promptly at 7,” Blank said. “Ethel would sit at the head of the table, and Joe, or whoever the eldest one was, would sit at the other. There was lots of conversation, and no lack of attention from their mother.”
Yet calamity and heartbreak often seemed to be around the corner.
In 1973, son Joseph, then 20, was charged with reckless driving when his Jeep overturned, severely crippling a passenger. Eleven years later, David — the child who seemed most haunted by his father’s death and had battled drugs for years — was found dead of a drug overdose in a Florida motel room.
Her son Michael, who ran the nonprofit Citizens Energy Corp. and had been in the news for having an affair with his children’s teenage baby sitter, was killed in 1997 during a dangerous game of touch football, played while skiing down an Aspen 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.
Granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill — daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill — was found dead of an accidental overdose in August 2019 at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. 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 attended Mass daily and typically tried to stay active — swimming, playing golf or engaging in charity work.
Many of her children committed themselves to public service.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served as lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. Joseph Kennedy II spent a dozen years in the U.S. Congress. Kennedy Hill became a human rights activist. Kerry Kennedy is a lawyer and president of the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.
Son Christopher Kennedy helped run the Merchandise Mart, the downtown Chicago trade center started by his paternal grandfather. 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. In the film, her children laughingly remember their mother as a force of nature who made them aware of the needs of the broader world when their father was no longer there.
Ethel’s good works included the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Project in New York City that 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. In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.
In her daughter’s documentary, Ethel conceded that she had endured “a lot of loss” but added: “Nobody gets a free ride. ... So you have your wits about you and dig in and do what you can.”
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