Ethel Kennedy, the last representative of the golden era of the Kennedys as the only dynasty in the United States, died this Thursday at the age of 96, as announced by her grandson, Joseph Kennedy III, through a publication on social networks. Defender of human rights, she was a confessed Catholic who managed to overcome the assassination of her husband, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968 and the premature death of two of her 11 children thanks to the faith and Irish strength of the clan of which she was a part. .
“We announce with our hearts full of love the death of our incredible grandmother, Ethel Kennedy, due to complications related to the stroke she suffered last week,” the grandson reported on the social network X (formerly Twitter). “At all times, Ethel’s story was the story of the United States,” President Joe Biden has glossed her figure.
Ethel Kennedy sought to continue her husband’s work by founding the human rights center that bears his name. Companion of the attorney general during his frustrated political career—always in the Democratic ranks, the family’s political brand from which his son Robert F. Kennedy renounced when he ran for the White House as an independent, and later supported Donald Trump’s candidacy— , also accompanied his last minutes as he lay in the kitchen of a hotel, mortally wounded by a gunman’s bullet. After the assassination of her brother, President John F. Kennedy, five years earlier, the Kennedy curse spread with a stain of blood, but Ethel Kennedy, “matriarch of optimism and moral courage, emblem of resistance and service” in In Biden’s words, it was “a spine of steel” both for the family and for millions of Americans, hypnotically identified with the power and drama of the family.
Following the “shocking death” of Robert F. Kennedy, Biden’s statement added, “Ethel showed our entire nation a path forward, turning pain into purpose and continuing her march toward civil rights and social justice, the end of poverty at home and the achievement of peace abroad.” When Biden lost his first wife and young daughter in an accident four years later, he remembers how Ethel Kennedy became a support point for him and his two orphaned children. “He taught us to channel pain in the service of a greater good.”
Biden’s words, while true, omit a fundamental fact: like the Kennedys, Ethel Skakel—her maiden name—came from a family that was not only Catholic, but wealthy, a privileged environment in which it was easy for her to meet 1945 to Bobby through Jean, his future sister-in-law and classmate at an exclusive university in New York, during a ski trip. Kennedy was dating Ethel’s sister at the time, but in 1950 he ended up marrying her. The young wife fit well into the Kennedy clan because she came from the same backgrounds, although her family was Republican.
From their Hickory Hill mansion on the outskirts of Washington, a true annex of Camelot—the name given to President John F. Kennedy’s Administration—Robert and Ethel became a quiet center of power, with parties attended by politicians, but also celebrities from social life and the world of entertainment, from Judy Garland to the Beatle John Lennon or Harry Belafonte. “Hickory Hill was the liveliest social center in Washington,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger in Robert Kennedy and his times. “It was very difficult to resist their parties.”
The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 marked a turning point in the family and precipitated his brother’s political career, and ultimately his sad end. Robert resigned as attorney general nine months after the assassination to run for a Senate seat in New York. In 1968 he decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, but on June 5 of that year, when his entourage was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after celebrating his victory in the crucial Democratic primaries, a young Jordanian-Palestinian shot the candidate, in alleged revenge for Kennedy’s support for Israel. Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer, remains in prison.
Ethel was pregnant with her eleventh child and ran through the crowd to reach his side and, like a madonna, cradle Robert’s lifeless body on the hotel kitchen floor. Kneeling next to him, she comforted him in a low voice as she tried to scare away the photographers from the scene. The agony lasted almost a day, until the early hours of June 6, when the Democratic presidential candidate died. Witnesses at the vigil said Ethel Kennedy never lost her composure, even in pain. It was not the only blow of his life: in addition to the death of his parents in a plane crash in 1955 and that of a brother in an accident 11 years later, there were the losses of his son David, who died of an overdose in 1984, and Michael , in a ski accident in 1997, the ones that weakened her the most. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had drug problems and was arrested for heroin possession, and his granddaughter Saoirse — an Irish name, so as not to lose family tradition — succumbed in 2019 to an apparent overdose.
It was the B side of the Kennedys, the trail of blood and pain that seems to accompany the family like a perpetual shadow. A legend also forged through violent deaths: in 2002, Ethel Kennedy’s nephew, Michael Skakel, was convicted of the murder of a 15-year-old girl almost three decades earlier. The case became fodder for a series of television documentaries in that genre so popular in the United States, that of true crime.
Ethel endorsed many of the causes defended by her late husband, including environmental protection. Among the most notable projects he encouraged were the cleanup of the Anascostia River bank in Washington and the restoration of the New York neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. For these and other merits, Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, the country’s highest decoration.
“He is an emblem of enduring faith and enduring hope, even in the midst of unimaginable loss and pain,” Obama said at the award ceremony. “As her family will tell you (…) you don’t play with Ethel,” he joked, alluding to her strong character. Asked that same year in an interview on NBC who or what had inspired her social and philanthropic work, the answer was clear: “First Bobby [su marido] and his life and, of course, Jack,” the name by which his brother-in-law, President Kennedy, was known. Rory, her youngest daughter, portrayed her in a documentary in 2012. When reviewing the tragedies of her life, she limited herself to commenting, as a summary of existence or who knows if also as a future epitaph: “No one gets a free ride” in the life.
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