Honest introspection—Ethel Kennedy hated it.
She once said as much to her daughter Rory, who has called her mother’s life “one of the great untold stories.”
By her own choice, Kennedy—the human rights advocate, dinnertime quizmaster, and acquitted horse thief—spent decades in the background. Though privately said to be warm, with a wryly self-deprecating sense of humor, her public persona usually oscillated between that of the dutiful wife and the strong and silent matriarch. But stoically loyal and only occasionally nettlesome, she was her husband’s secret weapon and, particularly after his assassination, her family’s rock.
On Thursday, she died after a stroke. She was 96.
“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother, Ethel Kennedy,” Joe Kennedy III said in a statement. “She died this morning from complications related to a stroke suffered last week. Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly.”
Ethel Skakel was born in Chicago in 1928 to a self-made coal magnate and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was an outdoorsy, fiercely competitive kid who grew into a young woman with a puckish disregard for authority. Befriending Jean Kennedy at Manhattanville College, the two had their names printed in the demerit book frequently—for, among other crimes, “disorder in the tea room.” (Eventually, the demerit book was mysteriously stolen and incinerated.)
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Ethel met her future husband on a group ski trip to Quebec in 1945. “He was standing in front of a roaring fireplace in the living room,” Kennedy remembered in a 2012 documentary. Her first thought upon seeing him: “Wow. Pretty great.” She immediately bet him she could fly down the mountain faster than he could. Recalling the story with a grin more than half a century later, Kennedy declined to say who won.
Despite the fact that Bobby began rather inconveniently dating Ethel’s older sister, Patricia, he and Ethel were eventually drawn together like opposing poles. The gentlest and most timid Kennedy boy, Bobby was intense and introspective where Ethel was outgoing and mischievous. Her vivacity brought him out of his shell; she thought he was brilliant. They were married in the summer of 1950 in “a garden setting of white peonies, lilies and dogwood,” The New York Times reported.
“For Robert Kennedy, it was the best thing that could have happened,” biographer and family friend Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. later wrote. “She awakened his sympathy, and his humor, and brought him out emotionally. He never had to prove himself to her. Ethel gave him unquestioning confidence, unwavering direction, and unstinted love.”
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Settling into the sprawling Virginia estate known as Hickory Hill, the couple accumulated a staggering number of pets alongside their growing brood of children. Time magazine, calling theirs a “gay and lively” home, counted—among other animals roaming the property—a pack of dogs, two horses, four ponies, 15 pigeons, 22 goldfish, 40 rabbits, and a sea lion named Sandy (who was eventually banished to the National Zoological Park after he shoved 8-year-old Kathleen Kennedy in the pool).
Bobby’s political career, meanwhile, was beginning to pick up steam. Five years after moving into Hickory Hill, he was named Attorney General of the United States. By 1965, he was a U.S. senator; by 1968, a presidential contender.
Ethel threw herself into each of her husband’s campaigns, genuinely seeming to relish her role as a political spouse. She had attended most every one of his Senate hearings, often with a handful of small children in tow. Though she was “terrified of airplanes,” Time noted in 1968, “she went with him almost everywhere.”
To those around her, she was a born hostess, preternaturally talented at rubbing elbows. “At fundraisers, she instinctively noticed the few people who were undecided and would go up to them and charm them,” Kathleen told a magazine in 1987. “Without question, she is the best campaigner I've ever seen.”
All of that ended abruptly a few minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968, when a young gunman named Sirhan Sirhan approached Sen. Kennedy as he and his entourage were winding their way through the guts of the Ambassador Hotel. Opening fire with a pistol, Sirhan hit the senator three times. Bobby Kennedy would die nearly 26 hours later.
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Ethel Kennedy never remarried, and would struggle whenever she tried to talk about her husband’s murder for the rest of her life. In 2012’s Ethel, a documentary directed by Rory Kennedy, the family matriarch looks strained when asked point-blank about the subject.
“Talk about something else,” she requests, looking away.
“She doesn’t reflect back on these moments in the way that we might imagine, or do ourselves,” Rory told Vogue around the time. “She kind of forges ahead and moves on.”
She expected her children to do the same. Kennedy ran a tight ship as a single mother, albeit one with a full staff at home (necessary, given that a signature recipe of hers reportedly involved frying bananas in Vaseline). She cross-examined her children on current events and history every night around the dinner table. And though she taught them to play football, swim, and ride horses, Kennedy’s parenting style was markedly tough-love. “There wasn’t a lot of tolerance for feeling like a victim,” Rory explained in another interview, “or feeling sorry for yourself.”
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It was a disposition that would serve her well in weathering personal tragedies yet to come. David, her and Robert’s fourth child, would die in 1984 from a drug overdose—as would Saoirse, Ethel’s 22-year-old granddaughter, in 2019. In 1997, Michael, the sixth Kennedy kid, died after he hit a tree while tossing a football around on skis with other members of the family.
After the deaths of two more family members in a 2020 canoe accident, a close friend told People that the losses seemed “never-ending” and “unimaginable” for the 92-year-old Ethel.
“I suspect when she’s at mass and alone in a pew that she allows herself a tear,” former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo speculated to People magazine after Michael’s death. “But she won’t allow herself a tear with you. She doesn’t make her problem your problem.”
Cuomo, whose son Andrew was then halfway through a 15-year marriage to Kerry Kennedy, said it was “probably harder” in the Kennedy matriarch’s life “than anyone else’s to find the evidence that God is good. Yet she believes it.”
Just four months after Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in 1968, Ethel helped found a non-profit foundation in his name to carry on his work and legacy. But she wasn’t among the crowd who gathered in a “nippy” autumn wind, as a New York Times reporter put it, on her back lawn to announce the organization’s birth. Seven months pregnant with Rory, her and Robert’s eleventh child, Kennedy was on bedrest a few hundred feet away.
After giving birth, Kennedy threw herself into human rights and environmental justice advocacy—and didn’t stop for the next half-century.
On behalf of what would eventually become Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Ethel raised millions of dollars. She marched with Cesar Chavez and John Lewis; visited a group of Native Americans occupying Alcatraz Island; and trekked all over the world, from Mexico to Albania to Nairobi, to present activists, journalists, and political leaders with awards.
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Her activist spirit had always been infectious. In 1984, 15-year-old Rory and 17-year-old Douglas told her they wanted to get arrested at an anti-apartheid protest outside a South African embassy. Kennedy offered to drive them down to the rally, where they were handcuffed and stuffed in the back of a police car. “I looked up at my mother and I tell you,” Rory later recalled, “I don’t think she has ever been prouder.”
In 2014, Kennedy was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. The then-president remarked that it was through her roles as “a wife, a mother, and grandmother” that she had “been able to make her mark on history.”
“As her family will tell you—and they basically occupy this half of the room,” he added, “you don’t mess with Ethel.”
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Nobody gets a free ride... So, you know, have your wits about you, and dig in, and do what you can. Because it might not last.
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That was never more clear than late last year when her husband’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, was finally granted parole. Underneath a short, typed statement protesting the August decision, Kennedy scrawled a sharp warning by hand: “He should not be paroled.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom evidently agreed, as he reversed the decision and denied Sirhan’s parole in January. Ethel and six of her nine surviving children released a joint statement expressing their relief.
“Because of how entwined into popular culture this murder has become, amplified by the regularity of the inmate’s attempts to be freed, our family has been forced to watch our husband and father be killed thousands of times,” the family said. “The pain of reliving his last moments, over and over again, is simply unbearable.”
“Nobody gets a free ride,” she told Rory in 2012. “... So, you know, have your wits about you, and dig in, and do what you can. Because it might not last.”
Ethel Kennedy is survived by nine children and nearly three dozen grandchildren.
