Ethel Kennedy – The Tragic Fate of Her 11 Children – HT
There is a photograph taken at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate in Mlan, Virginia, sometime in the early 1960s. Ethel Kennedy is standing on the lawn surrounded by children, some hers, some neighbor kids, some cousins who wandered over from another part of the property. She is laughing. The house behind her is enormous and slightly chaotic looking, the way houses are when they are genuinely lived in rather than maintained as showpieces.
She had 11 children. 11 with Robert Kennedy, who was shot dead in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles in June 1968, leaving her pregnant with their last child and widowed at 40 years old. She never remarried. She raised those children through the grief, through the family curse that people started talking about in hushed tones before she was even middle-aged, through decade after decade of loss that would have broken most people long before the halfway point.
What happened to those 11 children is one of the most remarkable and most painful stories in American family history. And it begins before any of them were born in the specific world that made all of them who they were. The world they were born into. To understand the lives of Ethel Kennedy’s children, you need to understand what kind of environment they were raised in because the environment was not incidental to what happened. It was central to it.
Ethel Skarkle was born on April 11th, 1928 in Chicago. into a family that had money in the way that old American money families have it abundantly and with the particular confidence that comes from never having seriously worried about it. Her father, George Skakel, had built a successful industrial company.
The family was Catholic, large, boisterous, and not particularly given to caution or restraint. Ethel grew up in a household where physical daring was admired, where noise and activity were the normal registers of daily life, and where vulnerability was not really a language anyone spoke. She met Robert Kennedy at a ski lodge in Canada in 1945 when she was 17 and he was 19.
She had gone to visit her college roommate, Jean Kennedy, Robert’s sister. The friendship with John was genuine, but the connection with Robert was immediate and considerable. They were alike in ways that mattered. Both Catholic, both from large families, organized around strong patriarchs, both naturally competitive, both possessed of an intensity that people noticed immediately upon meeting them.
They married on June 17th, 1950. He was 24, she was 22. They moved into a life that was from the beginning defined by the Kennedy Political Project, the organized familywide effort to advance John Kennedy’s career first and Roberts later, which meant that the household was not simply a private domestic space, but a kind of operational hub for one of the most ambitious political enterprises in American history.
Hickory Hill, which they purchased from John and Jackie Kennedy in 1956, became the physical center of their lives. The house was large by any standard, a white Georgian mansion with ample grounds for the children, for the animals that seemed to multiply constantly, for the touch football games that were practically mandatory in Kennedy family culture, and for the entertaining that was a constant feature of Robert Kennedy’s professional and social world.
The children came steadily and quickly. Kathleen was born in 1951, Joseph II in 1952, Robert Jr. in 1954, David in 1955, Mary Kourtney in 1956, Michael in 1958, Mary Kerry in 1959, Christopher in 1963, Matthew in 1965, Douglas in 1967. Rory was born on December 12th, 1968, 6 months after her father was killed. 11 children born across 17 years into a household that was simultaneously a family home and a center of American political power.
A household where the standards were high and the supervision, given the scale of everything, was not always adequate to the number and energy of the children in it. Robert Kennedy was by all accounts a genuinely devoted father. Someone who prioritized his children’s lives in ways that his professional schedule did not always easily accommodate.
He coached their sports teams. He took them camping and hiking in the mountains. He engaged with them seriously, asking them about their ideas and their lives rather than simply being a distant authority figure. He was present when he could be in ways that men of his standing and ambition were not always present. People who observed him with his children described someone who lit up in their company in a way that was different from the public intensity he brought to his professional world.
But he was also away constantly. the demands of his career as attorney general during his brother’s presidency, as senator from New York beginning in 1965, and then as presidential candidate in 1968, took him away from Hickory Hill for stretches that were long enough to matter in the daily life of 11 children. And Ethel, who was the constant in the household, managed those 11 children with a combination of genuine love and the particular brand of Kennedy toughness that did not always distinguish between strength and the
suppression of vulnerability. The household at Hickory Hill was by any measure extraordinary. There were horses, there were dogs, and a rotating cast of other animals, seals, a bear at one point, birds of various kinds, that reflected Ethel’s genuine enthusiasm for the natural world, and her rather loose relationship with the concept of appropriate domestic pets.
There were constant guests, journalists, politicians, artists, athletes, and thinkers who were drawn to the Kennedy Orbit and who made Hickory Hill across the late 1950s and the 1960s one of the most intellectually and socially lively private homes in America. The children grew up with access to extraordinary people, extraordinary conversations, and the constant stimulation of a household that was always full and always moving.
What the household was less equipped to provide, given its size and its speed, and its relentless forward motion, was the kind of quiet attention to individual difficulty that some of the children would eventually need. The Kennedy way of managing difficulty was to push through it, to compete, to channel energy outward rather than sitting with anything painful long enough to examine it carefully.
That approach produced remarkable resilience in some of the 11. In others, it left things unressed that might have benefited enormously from being addressed. When Robert was killed in June 1968, the children ranged in age from 16-year-old Kathleen down to the child Ethel was still carrying. The older ones were old enough to understand exactly what had happened.
The younger ones understood that something enormous and terrible had occurred without having the vocabulary to process it. And the youngest of all would grow up knowing her father only through photographs and the stories other people told about him. What followed the next five decades of this family’s life is a story that accumulates its losses one by one until the weight of them becomes almost impossible to hold.
David, the one lost in the hotel. Of all the Kennedy children, David Anthony Kennedy may have had the hardest time finding his footing in the world, and the reasons for it trace directly to the night his father died. David was 12 years old on June 5th, 1968. He was watching his father’s victory speech on television in a hotel room in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy was shot.
He saw it happen on the screen in front of him. or rather he saw the moment of the shooting captured by the television cameras and broadcast live which is almost the same thing and for a 12-year-old boy was something worse than almost anything else a child could experience. The particular horror of watching a parent die on a television screen alone in a hotel room without another adult present to absorb any of what was happening is not something that is easy to describe.
and it is not something that goes away. Those who study trauma have a great deal to say about the specific ways in which witnessing violence to a loved one shapes a person’s subsequent development, their relationship with safety, their capacity for trust. David Kennedy never had the chance to work through any of that in the structured, supported way that the understanding of those experiences now suggests is necessary.
He was never quite the same afterward. The people who knew him in the years that followed describe a young man who carried that night with him in a way that visibly shaped his behavior, his choices, and his relationship with the world. He struggled in school. He struggled socially. He had difficulties that in a family that did not easily make space for visible struggle were not always adequately addressed.
By his late teens and early 20s, David had developed a serious dependence on drugs. This was not simply a phase or a youthful indiscretion. It was a genuine and sustained struggle that went on across years through treatments and relapses and the particular difficulty of trying to recover from something serious while being a Kennedy in the full public glare of what that name meant.
There was an incident in Harlem in 1979 that became part of the public record and that added to the accumulating narrative of Kennedy family difficulty. David was mugged and seriously beaten, an incident connected to the circumstances of his addiction that resulted in coverage the family found deeply painful. He was hospitalized.
He recovered physically, but the underlying problem did not resolve. He received treatment at various points in rehabilitation facilities that represented genuine attempts to address what was happening. He tried. by the accounts of people who loved him. He was genuinely trying to find a way through. But the combination of the trauma he carried from his father’s death, the specific world he had grown up in, and the difficulty of finding adequate support within the particular culture of his family made it harder than it might
otherwise have been. The Kennedy culture of toughness, of pushing forward, of not dwelling, was not a culture that easily accommodated the kind of sustained, careful, inward attention that recovery from serious trauma requires. David Kennedy died on April 25th, 1984 in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 28 years old.
He was found in his hotel room at the Brazilian Court Hotel. The cause of death was an accidental overdose, a combination of drugs that included cocaine and prescription medications. He was the first of Ethel’s children to die. He was also, by a particular and cruel coincidence, the same age as his uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. would have been, which meant that the loss registered in a way that connected it to the broader pattern of Kennedy losses that had been accumulating since 1963.
Ethel Kennedy buried her fourth child in 1984. She had eight more to worry about, and some of what came next would be almost as painful in its own way as losing David. Michael Tragedy on the slope. Michael Le Moine. Kennedy was the sixth of Ethel’s 11 children born on February 27th, 1958. By the accounts of people who knew him, he was one of the more admired members of his generation of Kennedys.
Hardworking, genuinely committed to public service, someone who had put real effort into building something meaningful rather than simply trading on the family name. He had worked in his father’s 1968 presidential campaign as a child, and the experience had left him with a genuine engagement with politics and public life.
He worked for Citizens Energy, the nonprofit organization founded by his brother Joe, and was involved in various community and advocacy projects that reflected a seriousness about his civic role. But his personal life in the mid 1990s became the subject of a public controversy that was both damaging and deeply complicated.
Reports emerged that Michael had been involved with the family’s teenage babysitter, a relationship that had begun when she was underage. The allegations were reported extensively in the press. And though the young woman involved declined to cooperate with a legal investigation, the reputational damage to Michael was severe.
The scrutiny added to what was already a complicated period in his personal life, which included the breakdown of his marriage to Victoria Gford, the daughter of football player and sports cer. Michael Kennedy died on December 31st, 1997 in Aspen, Colorado. He was 39 years old. He was killed in a skiing accident. He struck a tree while playing a game of ski football with family members.
A game in which participants threw a ball to each other while skiing down the slope. He was not wearing a helmet. The impact killed him. The scene was chaotic and devastating in the way that sudden unexpected death in the middle of a moment of ordinary fun always is. The family had been celebrating the holiday, and the afternoon ended in grief so sudden that there was no adjustment period, no warning, no possibility of preparation.
He died at the very end of a year that had already been defined by his public difficulties. His death was sudden, accidental, and arrived without warning on the last day of the year. A final devastating note to a story that had already been hard. Ethel buried her sixth child on January 3rd, 1998. She had now lost two children in their 20s and 30s.
The family that had always defined itself through resilience and forward motion was accumulating losses that could not simply be absorbed and moved past. But even these losses did not prepare anyone for what came later. For the children who survived the most dramatic events and still found themselves struggling in ways that were quieter and harder to see. Robert Jr.
, the son who carried the most. Robert Francis Kennedy. Junior was born on January 17th, 1954, the third of Ethel’s 11 children. He grew up in the full intensity of the Kennedy household. competitive, demanding, shaped by the expectations that came with the name. He was, by the accounts of people who knew him young, a complicated child, bright, energetic, and drawn to the natural world in ways that were genuine and that persisted throughout his adult life.
He developed a drug dependency in his late teens and early 20s, something he has spoken about publicly and with considerable cander in later years. He was arrested in 1983 at the Rapid City Regional Airport in South Dakota in possession of heroin. He was 29 years old. He pleaded guilty to a drug charge and was sentenced to community service rather than prison time.
He performed his community service working with the Hudson River environmental advocacy organization Riverkeeper, a connection that became the foundation of his subsequent career as an environmental lawyer and activist. His transformation from that 1983 arrest into one of the most prominent environmental advocates of his generation is genuinely one of the more remarkable personal reinventions in American public life.
He became the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, helped win significant legal battles against polluters along the Hudson River and established himself as a serious and effective voice for environmental causes across decades of work. He has been married multiple times and his personal life has been complicated in ways that have occasionally made headlines.
His first wife, Emily Black, divorced him in 1994. His second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, struggled with mental health challenges across the years of their marriage. She and Robert had four children together, and the marriage was deeply troubled before it ended in 2012. Mary Richardson Kennedy died on May 16th, 2012 at the couple’s home in Bedford, New York. She was 52 years old.
Her death came as a result of her own actions during a period of severe personal difficulty that those close to her had been aware of and worried about. She left behind four children. Robert Junior had been publicly estranged from Mary at the time of her death. The circumstances of her loss were painful and public in ways that the family found deeply difficult.
He has spoken about the period in terms that reflect genuine grief. However complicated the relationship had been in its final years, his more recent public profile, shaped by the vaccine hesitancy advocacy that became his most prominent work in the late 2000s and the presidential run he mounted in 2024 before eventually withdrawing and endorsing Donald Trump has made him one of the most controversial members of his generation of the family.
His siblings have at various points publicly distanced themselves from his positions on vaccines and other public health matters which is itself an unusual thing to witness in a family that has historically presented a united public front. He remains in his early 70s a person of genuine complexity, someone who built something real from a very difficult beginning, who has carried significant personal losses of his own, and who continues to generate the kind of strong opinions that have always characterized the Kennedys at their most visible. Joseph II, the heir
who fell from grace. Joseph Patrick Kennedy II was born on September 24th, 1952, the second of Ethel’s children and the oldest son. The position of oldest Kennedy son carries a weight that is almost architectural in the family’s structure. It is a role that has never been filled without difficulty across two generations, and Joe II was not the exception.
He was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts in 1986 and served six terms, a substantial congressional career by any measure. He was an effective legislator in the areas he cared about, and he founded Citizens Energy, the nonprofit that provided discounted heating oil to lowincome households and that employed his brother Michael.
He was genuinely interested in the practical mechanisms of helping people who had less and his congressional record reflected that interest. But his personal life generated significant public controversy in the 1990s. He sought an enulment of his first marriage to Sheila Ral with whom he had twin sons.
In the Catholic tradition, an anulment is a church declaration that a valid marriage never existed, which for Sheila Ral, who had been married to him for 12 years and raised children with him, was both practically and spiritually unacceptable. She contested the enulment and wrote a book about the experience, a detailed, candid account of what it was like to be on the receiving end of the process and of the Kennedy family’s use of it that became a significant public document.
The enulment controversy contributed along with other factors to Joe’s decision not to seek the governorship of Massachusetts in 1998, a race he had been widely expected to enter and likely to win. He effectively stepped back from elected politics at that point, a withdrawal that surprised many observers who had seen him as the most likely Kennedy of his generation to reach major office.
He continued to lead citizens energy and to engage in advocacy work, but the trajectory that had seemed to be leading toward the family’s next major political achievement turned in a different direction. He has lived since then a life that is quieter than his early career suggested, and has watched his siblings and cousins navigate their own paths with varying degrees of public success and difficulty.
Kathleen the eldest and what she carried. Kathleen Hartington Kennedy, born July 4th, 1951, was the first of Ethel’s 11 children, and the one who, in many respects, set the tone for how the next generation would navigate the combination of extraordinary privilege and extraordinary expectation that the Kennedy name carried.
She was 16 when her father was killed. Old enough to understand everything. Young enough to have had the normal landmarks of a teenage life suddenly reorganized around a family tragedy that would never fully recede into the background. She attended Radcliffe College, then the women’s college associated with Harvard, and moved into a career that blended public service with her genuine interest in social justice.
She was the left tenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. A substantial achievement in its own right and one she earned on the strength of her own record rather than simply the force of her name. She ran for governor of Maryland in 2002 and lost, ending her formal electoral career. She has been married since 1974 to David Townsend and has four children.
Her life has been compared to those of many of her siblings notably stable, which is worth saying plainly because stability in this family has sometimes been the exception rather than the rule. She has been across decades a consistent presence in the public advocacy and memory work associated with her father’s name. speaking at events, participating in the work of the Robert F.
Kennedy Foundation, and keeping alive a particular vision of what the Kennedy political tradition stood for at its best. That has been in its own way a form of work, the maintenance of a legacy that could easily drift into sentiment if it were not actively tended. The eldest of the 11 children is still alive, still active, still doing the work.
The same cannot be said for all of them. And the losses she has watched accumulate across her siblings lives are part of the story she carries everywhere she goes. The ones who persisted. Courtney, Kerry, Christopher, Matthew, and Douglas. Of the 11 Kennedy children, five of them, Mary Kourtney, Mary Kerry, Christopher, Matthew, and Douglas, have lived lives that are quieter than those of their more prominent siblings, and that have been marked less by public controversy than by the private work of building sustainable existences in the long shadow of everything their family
name carries. Mary Kourtney Kennedy, born September 9th, 1956, married the Irish activist Paul Hill, one of the Guildford four, the group wrongly convicted of the 1974 Guildford pub bombings in England and imprisoned for 15 years before their convictions were overturned. The marriage was a statement in itself, a connection between the Kennedy tradition of civil rights advocacy and the Irish political struggle that the family had always felt emotionally connected to.
The marriage ended in divorce and Courtney has subsequently maintained a relatively private life. Mary Kerry Kennedy, born September 8th, 1959, became a human rights activist and founded Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the organization that carries forward her father’s advocacy work in the most direct institutional sense.
She has written books, spoken internationally, and sustained a public profile that is defined by the work rather than by personal drama. Her marriage to Andrew Cuomo, who would become governor of New York, ended in a difficult public divorce in 2003, which generated considerable press coverage given his political prominence.
She was arrested in 2012 in connection with a driving incident in which she was later found not guilty. She has continued her human rights work through all of it. Christopher George Kennedy, born July 4th, 1963, has been involved in business and in Illinois civic life. He served on the University of Illinois Board of Trustees and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois in 2018.
He has been, along with Joe II, one of the Kennedy children of his generation who sought elected office, though without reaching it. Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, born January 11th, 1965, has maintained the lowest public profile of all 11 children. A private life that, given everything the family has been through, might represent a form of wisdom as much as anything else.
Douglas Haramman Kennedy, born March 24th, 1967, has had a career in journalism and television, working for Fox News for many years, which placed him in an unusual position given his family’s political associations. He was involved in a reported incident at a New York hospital in 2012 involving a dispute with nurses over the handling of his newborn son which resulted in a brief and unpleasant period of press coverage.
He has continued his journalism career. These five represent the quieter middle of the family’s story. the children who have navigated the weight of the Kennedy name without either the highest profile achievements or the most devastating losses. Their presence in the story matters precisely because they are still present, still living, still building whatever they are building in a family that has lost so much.
Rory, born into absence. Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy was born on December 12th, 1968. six months after her father was killed. She is the youngest of Ethel’s 11 children and the only one who never met her father, who was born into a household already shaped entirely by his absence. Growing up as the youngest child in this particular family in the years after 1968 meant growing up in a household that was managing grief at a scale and a consistency that most families never encounter.
The older siblings had their own processing to do, their own losses and adjustments that took up space in the emotional economy of Hickory Hill. The family’s public life continued. The Kennedy name was still one of the most prominent in American politics, still generating its own obligations and exposures. And Rory was navigating all of this from the beginning without the anchor of a memory of her father that the older children had.
She became a documentary filmmaker. A choice that in retrospect has a particular logic to it. The documentary form is one of witness of finding and preserving stories that would otherwise be lost or misunderstood. She has made films about a wide range of subjects including Ganaan midwiffery, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
subjects that reflect a genuine engagement with the world beyond her own family’s story. She also made a documentary about her own family called Ethel, released in 2012, which offered an unusually intimate look at her mother and the family’s history. The film was personal in a way that required a particular kind of courage.
Rory was putting her own family’s most difficult stories on screen where anyone could see them in a form that allowed for no simplification or mythologizing. It was the act of someone who had decided that honesty about where she came from mattered more than the comfortable version. Her marriage to Mark Bailey in 1999 has been by all available accounts stable and sustaining.
She has children of her own and she has built a professional life that reflects genuine accomplishment rather than simply the capital of a famous name. She is in some respects the most quietly remarkable of the 11, the child who came into the world with the greatest disadvantage, who never had the father that all the others had at least some portion of, and who built something solid and meaningful from that beginning. Ethel at the center.
Through all of this, the deaths, the controversies, the legal troubles, the public difficulties, the private ones that never made the papers, Ethel Kennedy has been the constant. She has now outlived two of her 11 children. She was born in 1928 and is one of the oldest living members of the extended Kennedy family.
She has watched her grandchildren grow up and in some cases watched her greatg grandandchildren arrive. She has watched the country her husband gave his life trying to improve go through transformations he never got to see. She has remained at Hickory Hill the house where she raised all those children where Robert Kennedy’s presence is still somehow visible in the way the rooms are organized the photographs on the walls.
the particular spirit of organized chaos that has always defined the place. There have been moments across the decades when people close to Ethel have spoken about her resilience in ways that carry an undertone of bewilderment as though they are describing something they have witnessed but cannot entirely account for.
She lost her parents in a plane crash in 1955. She lost Robert’s older brother, President John Kennedy, in 1963. She lost Robert himself in 1968. She lost David in 1984 and Michael in 1997. She has watched her extended Kennedy family absorb loss after loss across decades, the death of John Kennedy Jr. in 1999, the various other tragedies and difficulties that have accumulated around the name.
and she has kept going, kept being Ethel with a consistency that people who know her describe as genuine rather than performed. People who have known Ethel Kennedy across the decades describe someone whose faith has been the organizing principle of everything. Not faith in the abstract, but the specific and active faith of a person who has needed it to be real and has found somehow that it is. She attends mass regularly.
She prays. She has maintained across decades of loss that would have extinguished the faith of many people a relationship with her religion that has never appeared to be performed or peruncter. It is simply there as it has always been as the ground she stands on when everything else is uncertain. She has also maintained her characteristic humor, the quick, sometimes sharp wit that has always been part of who she is.
People who visit her describe someone who is still in her 90s capable of making the room laugh, of deflecting sentiment with a well-timed observation, of being present in a conversation with full attention and genuine interest rather than the distracted distance that sometimes comes with age. She is not, by the accounts of those who know her, a woman who dwells.
She is someone who keeps moving, not because the grief is not real, but because she has simply decided somewhere along the way that motion is what she does. She celebrated her 90th birthday in 2018, surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and an extended Kennedy family that continues to grow even as it has experienced its losses.
The photographs from that gathering look like photographs from all the other Kennedy gatherings across the decades. crowded, energetic, slightly chaotic, full of people who are clearly used to being around each other, and who bring to every occasion the particular compressed energy of a very large family that has been through a great deal together.
The woman at the center of all of it has never stopped being Ethel. That is perhaps the most remarkable thing of all, what 11 lives look like from the outside. Looking at the 11 children of Ethel and Robert Kennedy from a distance, what you see is not a story that resolves into a single narrative. It is 11 separate stories shaped by shared origins and a shared name and a shared loss.
Each going in its own direction across the decades. Two of the 11, David and Michael, died young from an accidental overdose and a skiing accident, respectively. The losses were devastating in their different ways, and they came in addition to all the other Kennedy losses of the 20th century that had already accumulated around the family before David was even born.
The death of their father when most of them were still children, the assassination of their uncle, the president, 5 years before that, the longer shadow of older family losses. All of this was the backdrop against which 11 individual lives were being lived. The others have lived lives that range from the public and prominent.
Joe II in Congress, Kathleen as Latutenant Governor, Kerry in human rights advocacy, Robert Jr. in environmental law, Rory in documentary filmmaking to the quietly private building careers and families and lives that generate less coverage but no less meaning. What connects all 11 of them is what they were born into.
the specific combination of privilege and exposure and expectation that comes with the Kennedy name amplified by the fact that their father was one of the most significant political figures of the 20th century and was killed when most of them were still children. That is not a background that produces ordinary lives. It produces lives that are shaped at every turn by forces larger than the individuals navigating them.
Some of those forces have been genuinely supportive. The access, the education, the social capital, the sense of purpose that comes with feeling part of something historically significant. Others have been genuinely harmful, the scrutiny, the expectations, the particular difficulty of building a private identity when a public one has been assigned to you before you were old enough to have any say in the matter.
Ethel Kennedy has watched all of this from Hickory Hill. The losses and the achievements, the public struggles and the private ones. The grandchildren who have their grandfather’s eyes or their mother’s laugh or some combination of qualities that appear in photographs as the continuation of something that began long before they were born.
She has given in various contexts over the years her thoughts on what it has meant to raise 11 children in the particular circumstances she raised them in. What comes through consistently is not self-pity or bitterness. Those are not registers she operates in, but something more like gratitude complicated and genuine for the life she has had and the family she has been part of.
Even with everything it has cost, the cost has been real. Two children buried, a husband shot dead at 42. Decades of watching her family be scrutinized, celebrated, criticized, mourned, and mythologized by a public that has always had strong feelings about the Kennedys. All of it absorbed and carried year after year by a woman who simply refused to stop.
There is something extraordinary in that refusal. Not superhuman. She has never pretended to be above the ordinary requirements of grief and loss, but persistent in the way that certain kinds of love are persistent, outlasting every reason it might have had to give way. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.