Gregarious wife of Bobby Kennedy continued his fight for justice
Ethel Kennedy, the indomitable matriarch who was by her husband’s side when he was shot dead in 1968, was an integral part of the ‘Camelot’ mystique.
Ethel Kennedy, three months pregnant, was a few feet away from her husband, Robert, when he was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968. She pushed through the melee, knelt by her husband and sought to comfort him. He died the next day.
Flying home, she “moved down the aisle of the plane, propping pillows under the heads of friends, telling them not to grieve”, according to a profile written a few years later. She organised his funeral, and iconic photographs show her dressed in a black veil, bravely leading the mourners. “There was something indomitable about Ethel,” the profile noted.
There needed to be. Her life veered between exuberance and tragedy. Fun-loving, gregarious, feisty and irreverent, she was an integral part of the “Camelot” mystique that the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, created in Washington in the early 1960s.
But both her parents had died in one plane crash, and her brother in another. Her husband and her brother-in-law, the president, were both assassinated. Of her 11 children, one son died from a drug overdose, another in a skiing accident. A daughter-in-law took her own life. A nephew was convicted of murder.
Ethel Kennedy never remarried after Robert’s death and largely avoided the media, but she did not let the so-called “Kennedy curse” break her.
She vowed to continue her husband’s fight for justice and equality, and did so into her old age. As recently as 2018, when she was 90, she participated in a 24-hour hunger strike in protest at President Trump’s policy of separating migrants from their children at the Mexican border.
“Generations of Americans did not toil and sacrifice to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” she declared.
“That’s who she is,” said Ethel’s youngest child, Rory, a documentary maker who made an eponymous film about her mother in 2012.
“She doesn’t reflect back on these moments [of tragedy] in the way that we might imagine, or do ourselves. She kind of forges ahead and moves on.”
Ethel Skakel was born in Chicago in 1928, the sixth of seven children of a strong-willed Irish-American mother and a coal tycoon who had started his working life as a railway clerk earning dollars 8 a week and went on to build one of the biggest private companies in America. He was also an alcoholic.
She grew up in a family every bit as wealthy, rambunctious and devoutly Roman Catholic as the Kennedys – the one difference being that the Skakels were Republicans.
The family moved east when she was five, settling in an English-style manor house in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was educated at the all-girl Greenwich Academy, then the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx, and finally Manhattanville College where she became a close friend of Jean Kennedy, Robert’s sister, and regularly broke the rules. She was “alive with mischief”, according to her college yearbook.
She met Robert for the first time in 1945 when, aged 17, she joined a Kennedy family skiing holiday at the Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec.
“He was standing in front of a roaring fireplace in the living room,” she recalled. “Wow … pretty great,” she thought.
Robert was dating Ethel’s older sister, Patricia, at the time, but took up with Ethel when that relationship ended. She rode, sailed, played tennis, and enthusiastically embraced the Kennedy clan’s ethos of sports, rough-housing and fierce competition.
They were married at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenwich in 1950, with the Pope’s blessing. They settled in Washington, where Robert was working for the Department of Justice. Kathleen, the first of their 11 children and a future lieutenant-governor of Maryland, was born 13 months later.
In 1955 Ethel’s parents were both killed when their private plane crashed, having apparently run out of fuel, but she had plenty to distract her.
The Kennedys’ second child, Joseph, a future US congressman, had been born in 1952. Bobby Jr, who was charged with heroin possession before becoming an environmental lawyer, was born in 1954.
David, who died of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel room aged 28, was born in 1955, and Courtney in 1956. Courtney later married Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongly convicted of the Provisional IRA’s bombing of two Surrey pubs.
In 1956 the Kennedys bought Hickory Hill, a Georgian mansion set in a rolling six-acre estate in McLean, Virginia, from Robert’s brother John for $US125,000.
There they threw rollicking parties, with John Lennon, Judy Garland, Rudolph Nureyev and the like among the guests. Andre Malraux, the French novelist, once described Hickory Hill as “hellzapoppin’”.
Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, called it “the most spirited social centre in Washington”, adding: “It was hard to resist the raffish, unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable Kennedy parties.”
Ethel also enjoyed political campaigning, and actively supported John Kennedy’s congressional, Senate and presidential bids. After winning the White House in 1960 he appointed Robert attorney-general. By that stage Ethel had had two more children: Michael, a lawyer who died in a skiing accident in Colorado in 1997; and Mary, a human rights activist who was married to the future New York governor Andrew Cuomo for 15 years. Four more would follow: Christopher, a businessman, Max, a lawyer, Douglas, a journalist, and Rory, who was born six months after her father’s assassination.
In the end Ethel produced two more children than her mother-in-law, Rose, the great matriarch of the ultracompetitive Kennedy clan. John’s wife, Jackie, reportedly once described her sister-in-law as “a baby machine … wind her up and she becomes pregnant”.
Neither motherhood, nor her husband’s high office, nor his rumoured dalliance with Marilyn Monroe, curbed Ethel’s high spirits. President Kennedy had to intervene to stop his cabinet ministers being thrown in the Hickory Hill swimming pool.
Ethel once “freed” a horse from a neighbouring farm because it was being mistreated. She oversaw a menagerie of umpteen dogs, horses and a pet seal named Sandy. She received frequent speeding tickets. She was accused of buying expensive dresses, wearing them once, then returning them.
She could be difficult, too. She had a temper, and few cooks or domestic staff lasted long. She adopted a “tough love” approach to her children, demanding very high standards, and could swiftly withdraw her approval and affection.
She had a tendency to “divide the world into friend and foe” and “sometimes discarded time-honoured friendships for minor infractions”, wrote her son, Bobby Jr, who had a strained relationship with his mother.
In November 1963 Ethel picked up the phone when J Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, called to break the news that John Kennedy had been assassinated. The president’s death caused Robert “six months of blackness”, she said, but it did not put her off politics.
The following year she backed Robert’s successful bid to win a US Senate seat in New York. She would frequently appear beside him at interviews, rallies, congressional hearings and civil rights marches, often with her children in tow.
In 1968 she helped to persuade her wavering husband to challenge President Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was Robert’s “most consistent advocate of a race for the White House”, Evan Thomas, his biographer, wrote. But on June 5 that year, having just addressed supporters after winning the Democratic primary in California, he was shot by a Palestinian militant named Sirhan Sirhan.
After that Ethel’s life changed radically. She kept a much lower profile, though she enjoyed enormous public sympathy. She struggled to control her headstrong children, at least two of whom turned to drugs. She vowed never to remarry and never did, though for a while she was escorted to events by Andy Williams, the singer. She instead devoted herself to her husband’s legacy and other forms of political activism. She founded the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights. She co-chaired the Coalition of Gun Control. She appeared at protests with the marginalised and downtrodden.
Rory recalled how in 1984 she and her brother Douglas watched on television as anti-apartheid activists were being arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington. They asked to go.
“Without missing a beat, Mummy said, ‘Fantastic. Get in the car, I’ll get you down there’,” said Rory. “They arrested me and I was thrown in the car and handcuffed. I looked up at my mother and I tell you, I don’t think she has ever been prouder.”
In 2008 Ethel hosted a $US6 million fundraiser for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign at Hickory Hill. Six years later he awarded her America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for “advancing the cause of social justice, human rights, environmental protection and poverty reduction”.
In 2009 Ethel sold Hickory Hill for $US8.25 million. Thereafter she divided her time between Palm Beach, Florida, and the Kennedy clan’s Hyannis Port compound in Massachusetts.
By then she had long replaced Rose as its great matriarch and survivor. Religious and stoic to the end, she always resisted talking about her husband’s death or the other tragedies in her life.
“Everyone deals with pain at some point. Why dwell on it?” she said. “Rose Kennedy said that after a storm the birds still sing. You just get on with it.”
– Ethel Kennedy, human rights activist and Robert Kennedy’s widow, was born on April 11, 1928. She died after a stroke on October 10, 2024, aged 96.
The Times
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