BOSTON, Mass. — Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who raised their 11 children after he was assassinated and remained committed to social causes and the family legacy for decades afterward, died Thursday, her family said. She was 96.
“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our wonderful grandmother,” Joe Kennedy III wrote on had a stroke last week.”
“In addition to a lifetime of work in social justice and human rights, our mother is survived by nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the family statement said.
President Joe Biden called her “an American icon – a matriarch of optimism and moral courage, an emblem of resilience and service.”
“For more than fifty years, Ethel traveled, marched, boycotted and stood up for human rights around the world with her signature iron will and grace,” Biden said.
The Kennedy matriarch, mother of Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Max, Douglas and Rory, was one of the last surviving members of a family generation that included President John F. Kennedy . Her family said she had enjoyed seeing many of her relatives recently before she became ill.
Ethel Kennedy, the daughter of a millionaire who married the future senator and attorney general in 1950, had suffered more deaths by the age of 40, for all the world to see, than most people would in a lifetime.
She was at Robert F. Kennedy’s side when he was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after winning the Democratic presidential primaries in California. Her brother-in-law had been murdered in Dallas less than five years earlier.
Her parents died in a plane crash in 1955, and her brother died in a plane crash in 1966. Her son David Kennedy overdosed, son Michael Kennedy died in a skiing accident, and nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash. Another cousin, Michael Skakel, was found guilty of murder before the Connecticut Supreme Court ultimately vacated his conviction. And in 2019 her granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an apparent overdose.
“It makes you wonder how much this family is expected to have to absorb,” family friend Philip Johnson, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, told the Boston Herald after Michael Kennedy’s death.
Ethel Kennedy sustained herself through faith and devotion to family.
“She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted by the knowledge that she has been reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saorise and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie. Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers,” the family statement said.
Ethel’s mother-in-law, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, initially wondered how she would deal with so much tragedy.
“I knew how difficult it would be for her to raise that large family without the leadership role and influence that Bobby would have provided,” Rose recalled in her memoir “Times to Remember.” “And of course she realized that, fully and sharply. Yet she did not give in.”
Ethel Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights shortly after her husband’s death, advocating for causes such as gun control and human rights. She rarely spoke about her husband’s murder. When her daughter, filmmaker Rory, talked about it in the 2012 HBO documentary “Ethel,” she couldn’t share her grief.
“When we lost daddy…” she began, before bursting into tears and asking her youngest daughter to “talk about something else.”
Many of her descendants became famous. Daughter Kathleen became lieutenant governor of Maryland; Joseph represented Massachusetts in Congress; Courtney married Paul Hill, who was wrongly convicted of a bomb attack in the Irish Republican Army; Kerry became a human rights activist and chairman of the RFK Center; Christopher ran for governor of Illinois; Max served as a district attorney in Philadelphia and Douglas reported for Fox News Channel.
Her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also became a national figure — first as an environmental advocate and more recently as a conspiracy theorist spreading false theories about vaccines. He ran for president as an independent after briefly challenging Biden, and his name remained on ballots in multiple states after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.
Ethel Kennedy made no public comment on her son’s actions, although several other family members denounced him.
Decades earlier, she seemed to thrive on the increasing power of her in-laws, enthusiastically supporting the 1960 campaign and hosting some of the era’s best-attended parties at their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia, including one worthy of historian Arthur M .Schlesinger Jr. was pushed into the pool fully clothed. In Kennedy’s mind, she was also a very competitive tennis player.
“Small and cheerful Ethel, who doesn’t look like an outdoors person at all, believes outdoor activities are so important for the children that she has arranged her busy cabinet lady schedule so that she can personally take them on two daily outings,” according to The Washington Post. reported in 1962.
While accompanying her husband on a goodwill tour around the world, she said it was important for Americans to meet ordinary people abroad.
“People have a distinct fondness for Americans,” she told the Post. “But the communists have been so vocal that it was a surprise to some Asians to hear the American position. It’s good for Americans to travel and get our point across.”
She split her time between homes in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida, after Hickory Hill, which they bought from John and Jackie Kennedy in 1957, sold for $8.25 million in 2009.
Born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, she grew up in a 31-room English country house in Greenwich, Connecticut, the sixth of seven children of coal magnate George and Ann Brannack Skakel. She met Robert Kennedy through his sister Jean, her roommate at Manhattanville College.
The newlyweds moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he spent his final year studying law at the University of Virginia, and helped expand her worldview by introducing her to people like Ralph Bunche, the first person of color to win the Nobel Peace Prize . They decided the safest place for him to stay during his visit was their home.
‘He was so charming and didn’t complain, but they were throwing things at our house all night. It was so unthinkable and outrageous, but you got a taste of what black people in our country had to go through at the time,” she said in the documentary.
Robert Kennedy became chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957 and was appointed attorney general by his brother in 1960.
She supported his successful 1964 campaign for the U.S. Senate in New York and his subsequent presidential bid. Pregnant with their eleventh child when he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, her look of shock and horror was captured in images that remained indelible decades later.
The murder traumatized the family, especially son David Kennedy, just 12 years old, as he watched the news in a hotel room. He never recovered and struggled with addiction for years before overdosing in 1984.
In 2021, she said Sirhan should not be released from prison, an opinion that is not shared by some others in her family. Two years later, a California panel denied him parole.
Although Ethel Kennedy was involved with several men after her husband’s death, most notably the singer Andy Williams, she never remarried.
On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. she visited Indianapolis, where a monument commemorates the speech her husband gave that evening in 1968, which was credited with preventing riots in the city.
“Of all the Kennedy women, she was the one I would ultimately admire most,” Harry Belafonte would write about her. “She wasn’t acting. She looked at you and immediately understood what you were talking about. Over the next few years, when Bobby resisted something we wanted him to do for the movement, I often took my case to Ethel. “We need to talk to him,” she said, and she did.
In 2008, she joined brother-in-law Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy in supporting Senator Barack Obama for president, comparing him to her late husband. She later went to the Obama White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom and meet Pope Francis. Obama called her “a dear friend with a passion for justice, an irrepressible spirit and a great sense of humor.”
“She touched the lives of countless people around the world with her generosity and grace, and was an emblem of enduring faith and hope even in the face of unimaginable grief,” Obama said on social media, one of several high-profile eulogies.
Obama and former President Bill Clinton held her hands as they climbed the stairs to lay a wreath at President Kennedy’s grave on the 50th anniversary of his death. Clinton remembered her Thursday as a “fierce fighter for justice and equality” who built “one of the most effective human rights organizations in the world.”
The center she founded continues to promote human rights through litigation, advocacy, education and inspiration, and awards annual prizes to journalists, authors and others who have made significant contributions to human rights.
She was also active in the Coalition of Gun Control, Special Olympics and the Earth Conservation Corps. And she showed up in person, participating in a 2016 demonstration in support of higher wages for Florida farmworkers and a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
“She was everywhere where human dignity was at stake, from picket lines to prisons, on every corner of the map,” Clinton said. “She was fearless and tireless, a true force of nature, guided by the teachings of her faith that call us all to serve others.”