June 8th, 1968. A plane is somewhere between Los Angeles and New York. On board, the body of Robert F. Kennedy, his widow, and two women who had flown to California to be with her. Jacqueline Kennedy, who had watched her own husband die 5 years earlier, sat in that cabin. Coretta Scott King, whose husband had been killed 2 months before Robert Kennedy’s, sat in that cabin.
A WGBH radio broadcast covering the aftermath put all three of them into a single sentence. Three assassination widows. A cabin laden not only with grief. Within 48 hours of her husband’s death, Ethel Kennedy had already been categorized not by any single decree, by a country that needed the story to have a shape it recognized.
The men were the martyrs. The women they left behind were the mourners. Their function in the national narrative was grief. The story had been written before they could write it themselves. She was 40 years old. She was pregnant with her 11th child. She had 10 children at home.
The oldest 16, the youngest not yet two. She would land, return to Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia, and figure out how to survive the next 56 years. She died on October 10th, 2024 at the age of 96. Obituary after obituary led with the same sentence. She had been a widow longer than most people are married. Ethel Kennedy wasn’t just left a widow.
She was left 11 children, a national tragedy, and a family myth that couldn’t be allowed to crack. The question that rarely gets asked is what it cost her to carry all of it, and who she was before the country decided. Before she was Ethel Kennedy, she was Ethel Skakel. The distinction matters more than most accounts acknowledge.
She was born on April 11th, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, the sixth of seven children. The family settled in Greenwich, Connecticut in a 31-room mansion on Lake Avenue. Her father, George Skakel Sr., had started his professional life as an $8-a-week railroad clerk before co-founding Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, a company that made him spectacularly wealthy by the time his children were in school.
Her mother, Ann Brannack Skakel, Big Ann to the family, was described by those who knew her as a genuine force. Strong-willed, devoutly Catholic, the kind of woman who set a household’s moral temperature and held it there. Certain words were never spoken under her roof. Her children inherited her energy.
The family’s losses preceded the Kennedy association by years, and that context changes how you read everything that came later. In October 1953, just 3 years after Ethel’s wedding, a light plane carrying her father and mother went down near Union City, Oklahoma. All four occupants were killed. Ethel was 25 years old, already the mother of young children.
She lost both parents to a plane crash more than a decade before she lost her husband to a bullet. Then, in September 1966, less than 2 years before the Ambassador Hotel, her brother George Skakel Jr. died in an airplane accident in Idaho at the age of 44. Three major losses to plane crashes, all before 1968. Her eldest daughter, Kathleen, would address this chain of loss directly in the 2012 documentary Ethel, noting simply, “Your mom deals with death.
” Her parents were killed in a plane crash. The grief ran through Ethel Skakel’s life before the Kennedy name did. She had been practicing loss before the country started watching. That context shifts the common reading of her behavior in the hours after the shooting. A priest who administered last rites at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles described her as “very, very calm” 30 minutes after Robert Kennedy was shot, seated beside her unconscious husband in the emergency room.
He said the seriousness of the wounds didn’t seem to have reached her yet. That reading, calm as not yet understanding, misses something. Ethel Kennedy had already buried her parents. She knew exactly what she was looking at. At Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in Purchase, New York, where she enrolled in September 1945, Ethel Skakel was someone who occupied a room fully.
Her alma mater described her as “a spirited young woman from Greenwich.” Her son, Robert Jr., wrote after her death that she filled her days with tiny acts of disobedience, and that she neither studied nor read in any conventional academic sense. She also wrote her senior thesis on JFK’s book Why England Slept and had already volunteered for his 1946 congressional campaign while still enrolled.
Both things can be true of the same person. Kinetic and intelligent. Disobedient and politically engaged. She wasn’t passive about the Kennedys. She ran toward them. George Plimpton claimed she bit him on the ankle during a touch football game. That story has circulated for decades, probably because it’s so precisely right as a portrait.
A woman for whom competing meant something. For whom the idea of watching from the sideline was insufficient. For whom physical engagement was simply preferable to polite distance from the action. She met Robert Kennedy in December 1945 at Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec, a skiing trip organized by his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, who was Ethel’s classmate at Manhattanville and her conduit to the family.
Robert initially dated Ethel’s older sister, Patricia, before turning his attention to Ethel. They were engaged in February 1950 and married on June 17th of that year at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Boston Globe reported that the marriage “unites two large fortunes.” That sentence contained more information than it seemed to.
Both families were Catholic, both were ambitious, and the Skakel wealth was independent. Ethel didn’t arrive at the Kennedy table empty-handed. She brought her own resources, her own family’s money, and her own personality. Biographer Evan Thomas, in what is considered the most authoritative single account of RFK’s life, described Ethel as Robert’s most consistent advocate for entering the 1968 presidential race.
Ted Kennedy had urged his brother to wait until 1972. Ethel pushed him to run. She pressed a man toward a race that ended in his murder, and that advocacy is routinely absorbed into the general texture of the Kennedy story, rather than examined as a fact about Ethel’s own political judgment. She wasn’t an audience.
She was a participant. What Ethel Skakel married into wasn’t simply a family. It was an ongoing political operation with a mythology in progress and an infrastructure of women doing unacknowledged work to maintain it. Robert and Ethel bought Hickory Hill in 1956 from John and Jacqueline Kennedy, a 13-bedroom 13-bathroom Georgian estate on 6 acres in McLean, Virginia.
Through the 1960s, it became the functional social center of the Kennedy world, the place where political power and cultural celebrity overlapped in a way the White House itself couldn’t always manage. The guest lists preserved in the Arthur M. Schlesinger personal papers at the JFK Library are specific.
Robert McNamara, John Glenn, Rachel Carson, Laurence Olivier, Gene Kelly, Harry Belafonte. Ethel hosted. Ethel organized. Ethel was, for much of that decade, simultaneously pregnant. A Kennedy wives biographer put the physical reality plainly. Soon after their wedding, Ethel was pregnant, as she would be almost constantly for the next 18 years.
11 pregnancies between 1951 and 1968. 17 years. She was on the 1968 campaign trail in Indiana and Nebraska with nine of her 10 children in tow, appearing at events while carrying the 11th. Campaign scheduling records from May 1968 at the JFK Library document the logistics. She was a surrogate for a husband ahead of her on the circuit, a mother of 10 managing a household that was also a national campaign machine, and she was doing all of this while visibly pregnant and under constant press scrutiny. In 1962, President Kennedy assigned Robert and Ethel to conduct a 28-day goodwill trip through 14 countries. The assignment was described as “informal.” Host governments treated them as stand-ins for the president and the first lady. A 1978 academic paper published in
Presidential Studies Quarterly documented the formal invisibility of this kind of labor across presidential families. In the previous half century, the only people formally acknowledged as having political functions within the administrations of their presidential relatives were Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy himself.
Wives were structurally invisible in any official accounting. They appeared at everything and were credited in the record for nothing. Time magazine made the expectation explicit in an October 1974 feature on the ordeals of political wives. At a 1974 campaign event, Joan Kennedy sat beside her husband as he made an announcement and Time described her as demonstrating the rigid control expected of political wives in America, especially Kennedy wives.
Clear-eyed, hands folded, all but immobile. That sentence was written about Joan. It could just as accurately have been written about Ethel at any point in the previous 20 years. The California Democratic primary was June 4th, 1968. Robert Kennedy won it decisively. Shortly after midnight, he delivered his victory speech in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there. Gave the peace sign and stepped off the stage. The kitchen passageway was a shortcut to the press conference. It wasn’t where the security plan had placed him. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan fired eight shots from a .22 long rifle caliber revolver. The fatal bullet entered behind Robert Kennedy’s right ear at approximately 1-in range. He fell.
Busboy Juan Romero, who had shaken his hand moments before, knelt beside him on the concrete floor and pressed the crucifix from his confirmation into the senator’s hand. Hold on to this. Hold on and it’ll be all right. Ethel had been on stage during the speech but became separated from Robert as the crowd moved him toward the kitchen.
She reached him in the passageway after he had fallen. A bodyguard helped her down from the stage. She was pregnant. Photographers Richard Drew and Bill Eppridge were both in that kitchen passageway. They have exchanged photographs over the years that show, from two different angles, the same image. Ethel Kennedy begging them not to take pictures of her wounded husband.
The photographs she was trying to stop were taken. They ran in newspapers around the world. Robert Kennedy died on June 6th, 1968 at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 42 years old. Ethel was widowed at 40. Within hours of his death, she returned to Hickory Hill. Not eventually, hours after. She went home to the children.
The New York Times published a profile on June 7th headlined Survivor of Family Tragedies, Ethel Skakel Kennedy. That headline wasn’t malicious. It was something more insidious, efficient. It categorized her before her husband’s body was interred. It told readers who she was and what her life meant, a life defined by enduring losses before she had any opportunity to define it herself.
The story of what Ethel Kennedy was arrived pre-written. On June 8th, the funeral. Jackie Kennedy and Coretta Scott King had flown to Los Angeles to be with Ethel after the shooting. They flew home with her and with the body. The WGBH broadcast described the scene plainly. Three assassination widows. A cabin laden not only with grief.
Academic analysis of 1960s news magazine coverage documented the taxonomy that press and public culture applied. The Kennedy and King men were the martyrs. The women left behind, Jackie, Ethel, Coretta, were the mourners. Their function was to absorb the grief and hold the story together. Jackie Kennedy had a path out of that taxonomy.
She married Aristotle Onassis in October 1968, 4 months after Robert’s funeral. The press was merciless, but she left. She chose something for herself, imperfect, complicated, widely condemned, and she recalibrated the terms of her public existence on her own. Ethel didn’t leave. She publicly stated she would never remarry, that she wanted to focus on furthering his work and legacy.
She was 40 years old. She would live another 56 years. Every one of them would carry his name first. The 11th child arrived on December 12th, 1968 at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. 6 months after the Ambassador Hotel. Ethel named her Rory after the last high king of Ireland, Rory O’Connor, who ruled in the 12th century.
Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy was born into a household already reshaped by death. The youngest grandchild of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy, the child who would never meet her father. One week after Rory’s birth, December 19th, 1968, Ethel brought her to the hospital’s entrance for the press. Ted Kennedy stood beside her.
The photographs from that morning exist in archives. A woman with a newborn baby and cameras pointed at her, performing the continuation of the Kennedy story 1 week after giving birth to a fatherless child. Rory Kennedy became a documentary filmmaker. In 2012, she directed an HBO film simply called Ethel.
90 minutes built from five days of interviews conducted at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port and approximately 100 hours of archival footage, photographs, and home movies. Politico, writing at the time of the film’s release, noted it was the first extensive interview Ethel Kennedy had given in more than 20 years.
Ethel agreed to participate reluctantly. Her first response on camera was preserved in the film’s opening. Why should I have to answer all these questions? Rory replied, uh well, we’re making a documentary about you. Ethel laughed and eventually answered. That initial resistance wasn’t false modesty.
Ethel Kennedy had been a documented subject for six decades by then. She had appeared at every event the family required, given every interview the legacy demanded, been photographed at every memorial and anniversary where a Kennedy widow was expected to be present. Her first instinct when her youngest daughter asked her to speak in her own voice was to question the necessity.
She had been a subject her entire adult life. She was skeptical that speaking now would change what the record contained about her. Rory has described the experience of conducting the interviews. Sitting with a parent and asking every question she had ever wanted to ask. The intensity she describes wasn’t just about access.
It was about the strangeness of getting access at all. A mother who had spent 50 years in public handing her daughter something she hadn’t given reporters in two decades. In her adult life, Rory has written about her father’s absence with a specificity that nothing could soften. He never tossed her in the air, never taught her to ride a bicycle, never dropped her off at her freshman dorm, never walked her down the aisle.
She wrote those words in a New York Times guest essay in 2021 opposing the parole of her father’s killer. She was describing what it meant to be born 6 months after an assassination, to inherit a loss you couldn’t have witnessed and never stop living inside. At the time of Robert Kennedy’s death, Ethel had 10 children at home ranging in age from 16 to 1.
Kathleen, born July 4th, 1951, 16. Joseph, born September 24th, 1952, 15. Robert Jr., born January 17th, 1954, 14. David, born June 15th, 1955, 12. Courtney, born September 9th, 1956, 11. Michael, born February 27th, 1958, 10. Kerry, born September 8th, 1959, 8. Christopher, born July 4th, 1963, 4. Matthew, born January 11th, 1965, 3.
Douglas, born March 24th, 1967, 1. And Rory, not yet born. 10 children ages 1 through 16. A 13-bedroom house in McLean, Virginia. No husband, no father. A country watching. PBS Frontline described RFK Jr.’s upbringing at Hickory Hill as involving a chaotic household surrounded by cousins, animals, privilege, and grief.
All four elements were real and simultaneous, and none of them cancels out the others. The Skakel family wealth was independent of the Kennedy fortune. Ethel wasn’t financially destitute. A household employee named Ina Bernard worked with her for 44 years, a single relationship, four decades of continuity, the kind of specific fact that tells you something about how a household actually functions, rather than how it gets described in shorthand.
The extended Kennedy family provided structure. The Hyannis Port summers gave the children a predictable rhythm. But resources don’t make grief manageable. They make it survivable. There’s a difference. What the record shows about the household after 1968 isn’t chaos as tabloid spectacle, it’s the specific texture of 11 children growing up under sustained and unusual pressure.
Children who were famous from birth, who carried their father’s death as a public inheritance alongside a private one, who were raised by a woman simultaneously grieving and performing composure for a national audience. Ethel kept records of her children’s medical histories. She organized their schooling and their summers. She maintained the Catholic practice that had always structured the family’s days.
She did all of this while appearing on schedule at the events the Kennedy enterprise required her to appear at. The internal family code, articulated most clearly by Rory, was in our family, there was no tolerance for being a victim. That is a remarkable statement about a family the country defined primarily through its victimhood.
It suggests the internal culture moved in direct opposition to the public narrative. Inside Hickory Hill, the requirement was forward motion. Whether Ethel chose that code or was shaped into it over years of necessity, she lived by it for 56 years. It likely saved her. It also, possibly, cost her something that doesn’t have a clean name.
Ethel outlived two of her sons. David Kennedy died in 1984 of a drug overdose. He was 28 years old, 12 when his father was shot. Michael Kennedy was killed on December 31st, 1997, in a skiing accident in Aspen. He was 39. Rory was with him when he fell and attempted to resuscitate him. He didn’t survive his injuries.
Two of the 10 children who were at home when their father was killed didn’t make it to middle age. Any accounting of Ethel Kennedy’s widowhood that does not include David and Michael is incomplete. Those deaths are part of what she carried. So is the fact that she kept going. Jerry Oppenheimer’s 1994 unauthorized biography, The Other Mrs.
Kennedy, made claims about her parenting that the family disputed. Kirkus Reviews described the book as journalism that mistakes an avalanche of minutia for the thoughtful examination of a life. The authorized accounts, drawing on family cooperation, present a different picture. The honest reading of the available record supports neither the saint nor the scandal version.
It supports a woman managing something enormous with resources, but without her husband, in the middle of a grief she was required to make publicly legible at the same time she was privately living it. The Kennedy family didn’t invent the practice of using women as the emotional and logistical infrastructure of political ambition.
They practiced it at scale and with unusual visibility because the public life they inhabited was vast enough that the women’s performances were nationally observed. Rose Kennedy, the matriarch, was described by a biographer as a steadfast believer that a woman’s role in marriage was subordinate to her husband’s ambitions.
That template moved down through the generation. Pat Kennedy Lawford, Jean Kennedy Smith, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Ethel, and Joan Bennett Kennedy all functioned as anchors for Kennedy political events, present, supportive, publicly self-effacing in the way that word once carried real weight. The 1978 Presidential Studies Quarterly analysis of presidential family political functions documented the formal invisibility of this labor.
In the previous half century, the only people formally acknowledged as having political functions within presidential administrations were Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy himself. The wives who organized the tea parties, traveled the campaign circuits, managed the households, bore the children, and appeared smiling at a thousand events were structurally invisible in any official accounting.
Among the Kennedy women, one achieved a named public role that existed outside the wife and mother framework. Jean Kennedy Smith, appointed by President Clinton as US Ambassador to Ireland in 1993. Jean went to Dublin. She had an official title and a specific diplomatic function. Her appointment came through the Kennedy name and Ted Kennedy’s Senate influence, not independently.
But she arrived, and she had a job that was hers. That’s worth acknowledging as a counterexample within a pattern that otherwise ran consistently in one direction. Ethel’s post-1968 role in the dynasty’s continuity was specific and documented. She controlled the archival legacy. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
‘s authorized biography of Robert Kennedy, the most comprehensive single account of his political life, acknowledged her great generosity in permitting unrestricted access to the papers of Robert F. Kennedy. She decided what the historical record would contain about her husband. That is a form of power.
It’s also power exercised in the service of someone else’s story. Her own papers, a Concordia University thesis on the construction of RFK’s legacy noted, weren’t yet available to researchers. She kept those close. Hickory Hill itself became a Kennedy landmark maintained by her continued presence.
She remained there as her primary residence for the rest of her life, living in the house where the Kennedy administration’s social life had centered, keeping the address meaningful by occupying it. The house didn’t become a museum. It remained a home. That maintenance was also labor, also continuity, also the performance of an inheritance she didn’t choose.
By 1991, more than two decades after the assassination, a reporter sought Ethel Kennedy out, ostensibly to ask about her own story. The framing still ran through the widowhood lens. Ethel remained the access point. She was still the widow-shaped door through which the world reached the man she had buried.
The contrast with Joan Bennett Kennedy illuminates the structure without flattering anyone on either side of it. Joan married Ted Kennedy in November 1958 at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville, New York. She was genuinely talented, a trained classical pianist who performed publicly with major orchestras and received standing ovations.
A woman who had wanted early on to do the role well. What the marriage required exceeded what she could indefinitely sustain. Ted Kennedy’s infidelities weren’t discreet. Joan turned increasingly to alcohol. She said so herself in her own words. I didn’t know why I was drinking too much. At times, I drank to feel less inhibited, to relax at parties.
The Time magazine feature from October 1974 captured the moment Ted Kennedy announced he wasn’t running for the presidency in 1976. Joan sat beside him, demonstrating the rigid control expected of political wives in America, especially Kennedy wives, stayed calm and clear-eyed. Her gaze focused on a point near her husband, her hands folded demurely in her lap.
Her control began to give way at the edges as the announcement was made. She blinked back tears. A friend watching 500 miles away reportedly said they could feel her relief through the television screen. Joan and Ted separated in 1978 and divorced in 1982. Her later life involved repeated public difficulties connected to her alcoholism, a pattern documented in court records and public accounts.
She is a woman the Kennedy story largely set aside. The comparison between Joan and Ethel isn’t about moral worth. It documents two different outcomes for the same structural pressure. Joan showed what the performance of being a Kennedy wife cost. Ethel sustained the performance, and the cost stayed invisible inside the sustained composure, which may be the more difficult thing to understand.
What is documented about Ethel Kennedy’s actual work, not her widow status, not her appearances on behalf of the dynasty, but her own built contributions, begins in 1968. She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization the same year her husband was killed. She didn’t wait for a period of appropriate mourning to conclude.
Whatever the first months of 1968 required of her, she was also building an institution. That organization has operated for more than five decades. Her daughter Kerry Kennedy became its president. In 2001, Ethel visited activists imprisoned in Mexico and presented a human rights award on behalf of the Sierra Club in March 2016 at the age of 87.
She marched near the Palm Beach home of Wendy’s chairman Nelson Peltz as part of a farm workers campaign demanding better wages for tomato pickers. Not symbolically. She marched. In 2021, at the age of 93, she received an honorary doctorate from Manhattanville, the college she had graduated from in 1949. Her daughter Kerry delivered the commencement address.
In 2014, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her dedication to advancing social justice, human rights, environmental protection, and poverty reduction. WWD’s obituary, published after her death in October 2024, led with these words. Ethel Kennedy, human rights advocate, political matriarch, dies at 96.
The human rights advocate came first, not widow, not matriarch. The work she built. That ordering is small, but it’s a record of something real. She was described in death by something she did rather than something she lost. The 2012 documentary gave her something rarer still.
Her own voice on record speaking about her own life for the first time in more than 20 years. Rory described the film’s perspective as intentionally partial. I’m not pretending to make the definitive objective film about Ethel Kennedy. I’m telling the story about my mother through the lens of a daughter. The limitation was acknowledged.
Within it, Ethel was allowed to be a person with a point of view. In September 2024, weeks before her death, Kerry Kennedy wrote, “My mother was famous for being the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, but she was so much more.” In 2024, 56 years after the assassination, a Kennedy daughter still felt the need to assert the gap between what her mother was known for and what her mother actually was.
Still felt the distance between the label and the person. Ethel Kennedy suffered a stroke on October 3rd, 2024. She died on October 10th, surrounded by nine of her surviving children. Her funeral was held at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts. A memorial service at the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C.
brought Presidents Biden, Obama, and Clinton to the altar to deliver eulogies. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery alongside Robert Kennedy. The eulogies, by and large, were about the Kennedy legacy. She survived things that would have destroyed different architecture. Two parents killed in a plane crash before she turned 30.
A brother killed in a plane crash 13 years later. A sister-in-law’s husband assassinated on national television. Then her own husband in a kitchen in Los Angeles while she was pregnant and the cameras were already running. Two sons dead before she turned 80. 56 years as the repository of a national mythology that needed her to remain recognizable and in place.
She built an organization. She marched for farm workers at 87. She raised 11 children, 10 of them fatherless from the moment of that shot in the Ambassador Hotel. And one of them born into a household that had already been reshaped by death. She let her youngest daughter make a film about her only because the daughter refused to stop asking.
Her first response was, “Why should she have to answer all these questions?” That resistance is the most honest thing in the record. Not the composure at the hospital, not the medals, not the decades of appropriate public presence at Kennedy events, Kennedy memorials, Kennedy campaigns. The initial refusal to be examined is a woman who understood, at some level, what examination had cost her.
The continuous obligation to make her grief legible, to demonstrate that the myth was intact, to be the thing America needed rather than the person she was. She was Ethel Skakel before she was any of that. A woman who bit George Plimpton on the ankle during a touch football game. A woman who wrote her thesis about her future brother-in-law’s book and volunteered for his congressional campaign at 19 years old.
A woman who pushed her own husband to run for president when his brother was telling him to wait. A woman who, after decades of being a public subject, looked at her daughter’s camera and asked why she should have to answer the questions. Joan Kennedy broke under the pressure of the role and was eventually left alone with the breaking.
Jackie Kennedy found an exit and was punished for taking it. Ethel Kennedy did neither. She stayed. She endured. She built things. She outlived almost everyone. She was buried beside the man whose name she would carry forever. The name that opened every introduction, every obituary, every conversation about who she was.
The tragedy wasn’t only what Ethel Kennedy lost. It was what everyone expected her to carry afterward. Subscribe for more stories like this.
