Ethel Kennedy, who died on October 10, 2024, in Boston at the age of 96, carried a weight of personal loss that few American public figures have ever endured. She lost both parents in a plane crash, witnessed her brother-in-law’s assassination, was present when her own husband was shot, and later buried two of her children. She raised 11 children largely alone and never remarried. Born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, she was the sixth of seven children in a wealthy industrial family.
Her father, George Skakel, had built a fortune through Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. The family eventually settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a 31-room estate. Ethel was raised in a devout Catholic household, a faith that shaped her daily life until her death. In 1945, while studying at Manhattanville College in New York, she became close friends with Jean Kennedy.
Through Jean, Ethel was introduced to her brother, Robert F. Kennedy. At the time, Bobby was dating Ethel’s older sister, but that relationship ended, and Bobby and Ethel became a couple. They married on June 17, 1950, in Greenwich in a ceremony attended by more than a thousand guests.
Over the next 17 years, the couple had 11 children. They purchased Hickory Hill, a 13-bedroom estate in McLean, Virginia, which became one of Washington’s most famous social addresses. Ethel was known for her energetic, welcoming style, and the house was constantly full of politicians, journalists, and friends. In 1955, tragedy struck when both of Ethel’s parents were killed in a plane crash near Union City, Oklahoma.
She was 27 and had just given birth to her fourth child. She continued forward, as she would throughout her life. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Bobby Kennedy was at Hickory Hill when he learned the news.
Ethel watched him absorb the shock. The assassination changed him profoundly. In the years that followed, Bobby devoted himself to public service and eventually ran for the U. S.
Senate from New York, with Ethel at his side. By 1968, with the country deeply divided over the Vietnam War and civil rights, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ethel, then pregnant with their 11th child, was his strongest advocate for entering the race. She campaigned with him throughout the primary season with characteristic warmth and energy.
On June 4, 1968, Bobby won the California primary. Shortly after midnight on June 5, he was shot in the kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Ethel was in the corridor when the shots rang out. Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was arrested at the scene.
Bobby died the following day at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 42 years old. Ethel was 39 and three months pregnant. She made a public statement after his death.
She would not remarry, and she would devote her life to carrying forward his work. She kept that commitment for the remaining 56 years of her life. Her daughter Rory was born in December 1968, six months after her father’s death. Ethel returned to Hickory Hill with 10 children and one yet to be born.
She continued to run the household and raise the children largely alone. Ted Kennedy acted as a paternal figure to the children, and family friend Andy Williams escorted Ethel to events in the years after Bobby’s death. Williams maintained that their relationship was platonic. She founded the Robert F.
Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights in 1968 and supported the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Project in Brooklyn. She took up the causes her husband had championed and made them her own. The losses, however, kept coming. Her son David, who was 12 when he watched his father’s shooting on television in a hotel room, struggled with addiction for years.
He died on April 25, 1984, from an accidental overdose at the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 28 years old. Her son Michael died on New Year’s Eve 1997 in Aspen, Colorado, after striking a tree while skiing. He was 39, the same age his father had been when he was killed.
Ethel had now buried two of her children. In July 1999, on the eve of her daughter Rory’s wedding on Cape Cod, John F. Kennedy Jr. died when his small plane went down into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard.
His wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren also died. The wedding proceeded, but the joy of the day was shadowed by that loss. In 2019, Ethel’s granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an accidental overdose at the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. She was 22 years old.
Throughout it all, Ethel Kennedy kept going. She attended mass every morning for her entire adult life. She said her faith was what held her together and that she expected to see the people she had lost again. She outlived most of her generation, including Jackie Kennedy, who died in 1994, and Ted Kennedy, who died in 2009.
In 2014, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She co-chaired the Coalition for Gun Control, traveled to Eastern Europe in 1992 to donate medical equipment, went to Kenya in 1997 to support democratic reform, and stood with protesters against human rights abuses in Tibet. Ethel Kennedy suffered a stroke the week before her death and died on October 10, 2024. She left behind nine living children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren.
Her funeral was held at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts, with a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D. C. Presidents Biden, Obama, and Clinton delivered eulogies.
At her memorial service, President Biden said she had a “spine of steel and a heart of gold” and that her example taught him how to channel grief into service. Her family said they were comforted knowing she was reunited with the love of her life, her son David, her son Michael, and her granddaughter Saoirse. Those who knew her longest described her as both the most resilient and the most loving person they had ever encountered, and said that for her, the two were the same thing.