The Sad Story of Ethel Kennedy: The Widow Left Behind by History – HT
There is a photograph taken on the night of June 5th, 1968 inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In it, Ethel Kennedy is crouched over her dying husband on the kitchen floor, three months pregnant, surrounded by chaos. She is looking at him. The world is falling apart around her. And she is looking at him.
That image, that single moment tells you almost everything you need to know about the sad story of Ethel Kennedy, the widow left behind by history, a girl from Greenwich. To understand Ethel Kennedy, you have to go back to Greenwich, Connecticut in the 1930s. That’s where she grew up. Not in some modest house on a quiet street, but in a 31 room English country manor on Lake Avenue, surrounded by six siblings, a rotating cast of animals, and a family that treated life as a full contact sport.
She was born Ethel Skakel on April 11th, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, the sixth of seven children. Her father, George Skakel, had started from almost nothing. An $8 a week railroad cler who, through sheer determination, built a small coal and coke business into the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, a sprawling energy enterprise that eventually made the family extraordinarily wealthy.
Her mother, Anne Branak Skel, was a devout Catholic who passed her faith and her love of organized chaos down to every one of her children. The Skakel household was not a quiet place. It was loud, physical, and competitive in the way only large families with too much energy and too much space can be.
The family relocated east when Ethel was 5, settling into Greenwich for good by 1936. The house was enormous, the family even more so. There were horses, dogs, chickens, and any number of creatures that seemed to find their way into the scakeal orbit. The children were loud, competitive, and deeply loyal to one another.
Discipline was not exactly a house specialty. Ethel in particular was a free spirit, tomboyish, pranking, fiercely competitive, and completely unafraid of authority. She once described herself as someone who always wanted to be doing something, anything, rather than sitting still. She was not built for stillness. She attended the All Girls Greenwich Academy and then the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx, graduating in 1945.
The nuns did their best. Ethel remained thoroughly herself. That fall, she enrolled at Manhattanville College in New York, where fate arranged something that would change her life entirely. She was assigned a roommate, a girl named Jean Kennedy, daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy of Massachusetts. The two became fast friends almost immediately, drawn together by their shared Catholicism, their love of competition, and a mutual talent for getting their names written in the Demerit book, once memorably for disorder in the T-room. The Demerit book
itself eventually disappeared. It had been stolen and incinerated, and no one seemed to know exactly who was responsible. It was John who brought Ethel into the Kennedy world. And it was at a ski trip to Mont Trromblanc Resort in Quebec in December 1945 that Ethel first encountered John’s brother, Robert. She was 17 years old.
He was standing in front of a roaring fireplace, she would later recall in a 2012 documentary, and there was something about the way he commanded the room without seeming to try. She noticed him immediately. The problem was he wasn’t interested in Ethel. Not yet. He began dating her older sister, Patricia. For two years, Ethel watched from the sidelines while the man she had fallen for was in a relationship with her own sister.
She would later describe it as a black period, not in an angry way, but with the kind of rofful honesty that came naturally to her. When Robert and Patricia went their separate ways, and when Robert turned his attention toward Ethel, she had been waiting long enough. She did not hesitate. They became engaged in February 1950.
They were married on June 17th, 1950 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a Catholic ceremony attended by hundreds of guests. The Boston Globe noted that the wedding unites two large fortunes. But for Ethel, what it united was something far more personal. She had married the person she wanted, the person she had been watching since that ski lodge fireplace 5 years earlier.
She was 22 years old, and she was certain. she would be certain about him for the rest of her life. The making of a Kennedy. The early years of marriage were happy in the way that all consuming full-speed lives can be happy. Busy, purposeful, and always pointed forward. Robert finished his law degree at the University of Virginia, and the couple settled in the Washington DC area where he went to work at the Justice Department.
Children came quickly, almost reliably, year after year. Kathleen was born on July 4th, 1951. Joseph followed in 1952, Robert Junior in 1954, David in 1955. For Ethel, motherhood and political engagement were not separate things. She dove into both with the same undivided, somewhat overwhelming energy.
In 1952, she organized tea parties for Massachusetts voters to support John Kennedy’s Senate campaign, greeting strangers, making them feel like old friends, moving around a room in a way that seemed effortless, but was anything but. Without question, “She is the best campaigner I’ve ever seen,” her daughter Kathleen would say decades later.
At fundraisers, she instinctively noticed the few people who were undecided and would go up to them and charm them. It was a gift that looked like personality, but it was also a skill honed through years of watching, caring, and paying attention. In October 1955, the world shifted for Ethel in a way it had never quite shifted before.
Both of her parents, George and Anne Skakel, were killed when their private plane crashed in Union City, Oklahoma. She had four children at home and another on the way. She grieved privately as she would grieve everything by pressing forward, staying busy, refusing to let sorrow become the center of the room. The world required things.
She gave them. A year later, the Kennedys made a purchase that would define the next five decades of Ethel’s life. In 1956, Robert bought Hickory Hill, a 13-bedroom Georgian estate on 6 acres in Mlan, Virginia, from his brother John and John’s wife, Jacqueline, who had returned to Georgetown after Jackie suffered a miscarriage.
The house was enormous, slightly battered, and almost immediately transformed into something that defied easy description. Hickory Hill under Ethel Kennedy was unlike any house in Washington, and Washington has seen a lot of houses. A regular visitor once described it as a wild, informal mixture of a children’s playground, upbeat disco, and a humming political headquarters.
Animals were everywhere. Horses, dogs, chickens, geese, goats. Robert Junior collected reptiles and kept a turtle in the laundry room. At one point a sea lion took up residence in the swimming pool. There was at various times a wandering armadillo that broke up afternoon tea parties and a pet hawk that once landed directly on a politician’s wife’s wig to considerable alarm and Ethel’s barely concealed satisfaction.
The children kept coming. Courtourtney in 1956, Michael in 1958, Kerry in 1959, Christopher in 1963, and still the house ran, or something that resembled running. The estate hosted John Glenn and Arthur Schlesinger and Jean Kelly and Robert Frost. When Frost came to dinner, Ethel handed out paper and pencils to all the guests and held a poetry writing contest.
When Harry Bellfonte came, he taught the twist on the dance floor, the Hickory Hill Seminars, organized by historian Arthur Schlesinger at Robert’s request, brought scientists, philosophers, writers, and government officials together for evenings of dinner, drinks, and serious conversation. They were grilled, as one of Robert’s old law school friends put it, with a thousand1 questions.
John Glenn was asked what it felt like to be weightless while orbiting Earth. He answered. Then he was asked again from another angle. The Hickory Hill parties were something of a Washington institution. Invitations were coveted across the city’s social and political circles. The guest lists were extraordinary.
Senators, cabinet members, astronauts, artists, all mixed together in the same rooms, spilling out onto the lawns. The highlight, more often than not, was watching some impeccably dressed Washington official end up in the swimming pool, fully clothed, because that was the kind of place Ethel ran. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
got pushed in once to the obvious discomfort of Jacqueline Kennedy, who found the whole spectacle somewhat beneath the occasion. Ethel thought it was marvelous. Bobby was occasionally short with guests who dropped a pass in the legendary touch football games. Ethel, according to at least one witness, was known to bite people on the ankle when things got sufficiently competitive.
The Washington Post in 1962 offered a portrait of her life that managed to be both affectionate and slightly dazzled. Petite and peppy Ethel, who doesn’t look one bit the outdoorsy type, considers outdoor activities so important for the children that she has arranged her busy cabinet wife schedule so she can personally take them on two daily outings.
Two daily outings. 11 children eventually, a 13-bedroom house full of animals, a husband who would call from the office to announce he was bringing 20 people for lunch. Robert, meanwhile, was rising through American public life. He had served as chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee beginning in 1957, taking on organized crime with a seriousness that earned him respect and powerful enemies.
He was appointed attorney general when his brother John won the presidency in 1960. A controversial choice that drew accusations of nepotism which Robert absorbed without apparent concern. The Kennedy administration brought Ethel fully into the center of the country’s political world. She was everywhere campaigning, hosting, supporting, always moving.
Then November 22nd, 1963 arrived. Ethel was at home at Hickory Hill when the phone rang. She picked it up. The caller identified himself as J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, a man who had never called the attorney general’s home before. She handed the phone to Robert and watched his face change.
He told her the president had been shot in Dallas. John Kennedy died that day. Robert was never the same again. The grief changed him visibly. He grew more serious, more drawn, more interested in the suffering of people he might not have noticed before. He kept a worn copy of the Greek tragedians on his nightstand. He traveled to the poorest parts of America and came back different each time.
Neither in certain ways was Ethel the same, though she showed it differently. Where Robert retreated into private grief, Ethel remained outwardly steady, holding the household together, insisting on forward motion. She was not denying the loss. She simply believed with the full force of her faith that collapsing was not an option when 10 children were looking at you.
The campaign and the night, everything ended. By 1964, Robert had decided to run for the United States Senate, representing New York. He was accused of carpet bagging. He had never lived in New York. And Ethel, in her characteristically ry way, suggested the campaign slogan, “There is only so much you can do for Massachusetts.
” He won. She had been right again. The Senate years were good years in the sense that they had direction and purpose. Robert traveled to some of the poorest places in America, to the Mississippi Delta, to the hollows of Appalachia, to the migrant labor camps of California, where Caesar Chavez was organizing farm workers, and came back from each trip more altered, more certain that the country needed to reckon with things it had been looking away from.
Ethel traveled with him whenever she could. She saw what he saw. She had grown up Republican in a wealthy household that had little reason to think much about poverty. But those years changed her completely. The politics she held in the mid 1960s were entirely her own, forged by things she had witnessed firsthand. In September 1966, her brother George was killed when a light plane crashed in a canyon in central Idaho during an elk hunting trip. Grief layered on top of grief.
Douglas, their 10th child, was born the following March in 1967. And yet Ethel kept going, kept hosting, kept campaigning, kept pushing Robert toward the decision she was more convinced of than he was. It was Ethel who pushed hardest for him to enter the presidential race. His biographer, Evan Thomas, called her his most consistent advocate of a race for the White House.
She never doubted it. While Robert agonized over the decision, concerned about what it might do to the country, to the Democratic Party, to his family, Ethel organized the children. At Hickory Hill, in the midst of tense discussions about whether he should run, the older kids unfurled a banner from an upstairs window that read Kennedy for president, while the record player downstairs blasted, “The impossible dream.
” Ethel had arranged the whole thing. Robert looked up at it and the argument was effectively over. He announced his candidacy on March 16th, 1968. The campaign was 85 days long. Ethel, again pregnant, this time three months along with their 11th child, traveled with him almost everywhere, accompanied by staff who helped manage the campaign demands alongside the children, who were often present as well.
She had always been terrified of flying. She flew anyway. She was beside him at rally after rally, state after state, waving from the back of motorcades as the crowds grew and the energy built around what was beginning to feel like something real. During the Indiana primary, Robert spoke of Ethel from the podium, saying she had made such a major difference in this campaign and a major difference for me.
He meant it. She had always been his most reliable source of clarity and forward momentum, the person who believed in what they were doing when doubt crept in. On June 4th, 1968, Robert Kennedy won the California Democratic primary. The victory speech he gave to a ballroom full of supporters at the Ambassador Hotel was filled with a particular lightness, an optimism that had not always come easily during the campaign.
The crowd was electric. Ethel was standing near him as always, three months pregnant, watching. Just after midnight on June 5th, as the group made its way through the hotel’s kitchen corridor, the back route toward a waiting press gathering, a young man named Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward and fired a pistol.
Several shots were fired. Robert Kennedy was hit. He went down. Ethel, who had been walking directly beside her husband, crouched over him on the floor. She whispered to him while the chaos erupted around them. The screaming, the surging crowd, the confusion of a room that had just become a crime scene.
She stayed right there next to him, calm in the way only people with a very deep foundation can be calm. She turned to the crowd, pressing in, and pushed them back, asked them to give him air. Photographs from those moments show her face. Not empty, not gone, present, completely present. He was transported to the hospital of the good Samaritan and went into surgery.
He died the following day on June 6th, 1968 at 42 years old. Ethel Kennedy was 40 years old. She was three months pregnant. She had 10 children at home. In a single night, the history she had been living inside, the big, loud, chaotic, remarkable history of the Kennedys, of Washington, of the country’s long 1960s, handed her a weight that no one should ever have to carry alone.
The widow, the weeks after Robert’s death were a kind of extended public ceremony of grief that Ethel was expected to endure, even as she was privately devastated. The world was watching. His body lay in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of people filed past. A train then carried his casket from New York to Washington DC.
And all along the tracks, people gathered, workers, neighbors, families who had driven to the rail lines simply to stand and watch the train go by, as if presence was the only tribute left. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery near the grave of his brother John on a hillside under the stars. Ethel returned to Hickory Hill. She had 10 children and a pregnancy and a house full of animals and a staff that was doing its best.
She had money and extended family and the goodwill of nearly every powerful figure in Washington. She had none of the things that had actually made the house a home. The person who had been at the center of everything, the one who had called to say he was bringing 20 people for lunch, the one who had asked all the questions and cared about the answers.
She made a vow that she would keep for the rest of her life. She would not remarry. The vow was grounded in her Catholic faith, but it was also something more fundamental, a refusal to treat Robert as a chapter that could be closed and moved on from. He was not a chapter. He was everything that had mattered, and she was going to live in honor of that rather than in spite of it.
She retreated into Hickory Hill for much of 1968. In December of that year, she gave birth to their final child, a daughter they had already planned to name Rory. Rory Kennedy was born 6 months after her father was killed. She would grow up in a house full of photographs and stories about a man she never got to meet.
Raised by a mother who was simultaneously holding together a family and a grief that never fully lifted. a 1969 Gallup poll named Ethel Kennedy, the country’s most admired woman. She had appeared almost nowhere publicly. She had given no interviews. She had offered the world very little to go on, and still the country had made its assessment.
She was remarkable, even if it could not quite say why. Time magazine noted in its April 1969 cover story that the admiration was born of sympathy, not knowledge. The public does not know her today. Perhaps it never did. Those who did know her described something quite different. Not a fragile widow, but a woman of unusual strength.
Her grief was real and bottomless. But she processed it in the only way she knew, by continuing. By getting the children to school, by making sure dinner happened, by refusing, at least outwardly, to let sorrow become the gravitational center of the house. A time profile from that same year drew a now famous comparison to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Jackie has traced an aesthetic arc of grief, ending with a stylish whirl into another world. Ethel’s special triumph has been to maintain normaly. She has simply carried on as best she could the kind of existence that Bobby would have pursued had he lived. That normaly was not accidental. It was chosen every day against the pull of everything that had happened.
Within months of Robert’s death while still pregnant with Rory, she helped found the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. She did this in the autumn of 1968 at the low point of everything when most people would have been incapable of organizing a dinner party, let alone a nonprofit organization.
The center was dedicated to carrying forward his commitments to human rights, to social justice, to the advocacy of those the world preferred not to see. It would become one of the most respected organizations of its kind in the country, and Ethel remained connected to it for the rest of her life.
New York Senator Jacob Javitz, who had known her for years, said without pause that she was the greatest of the Kennedys, male or female. Harry Bellfonte, who had watched her from close range for a long time, wrote in his memoirs, “Of all the Kennedy women, she was the one I would end up admiring the most. She wasn’t play acting.
She looked at you and immediately got what you were about, raising the clan alone.” The 1970s at Hickory Hill were, by nearly all accounts, a three- ring circus. Ethel was raising 11 children by herself. The youngest barely a toddler, the oldest already heading into adulthood with household help, but without the person who had always been the gravitational center.
Friends who visited over those years described a household where anything could happen, where the line between the animals and the children was sometimes difficult to locate, where servants quit regularly because the disorder exceeded what any reasonable person had signed up for, and where Ethel moved through it all with a kind of frenetic, determined energy that kept the whole thing from completely unraveling.
She was not a soft mother. Those who knew the family well have said she was loving but demanding, private in her own grief, in a way that sometimes left the children to navigate theirs without much guidance. The loss of Robert had hit the boys especially hard, and in the absence of his presence, several of them struggled in serious ways.
Robert Jr. battled drug addiction for years. David Kennedy, the fourth child, who had been 13 years old and actually in the corridor of the Ambassador Hotel on the night his father was shot, carried that night with him for the rest of his life and was never able to put it down.
Ethel sent David to rehab programs repeatedly over the years, employed a live-in specialist to help manage his struggles, and did everything she could think of. None of it was enough. On April 25th, 1984, David Kennedy was found dead in a hotel room in Palm Beach, Florida, about 7 weeks before what would have been his 29th birthday.
The cause was an accidental overdose involving a combination of drugs, including cocaine. Ethel did not collapse in public. She told friends she believed David had gone to be with his father in heaven. There was a private funeral at Hickory Hill and he was buried in the family plot in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. 13 years later, on New Year’s Day 1998, tragedy arrived again.
Her son Michael, her sixth child, 39 years old, died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado on New Year’s Eve of 1997. He had been playing a skiing version of touch football with family members on the slopes when he lost control and struck a tree. He died that evening. Two sons, two decades apart. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, whose son Andrew was then married to Ethel’s daughter, Kerry, said after Michael’s death that it was probably harder in Ethel’s life than anyone else’s to find the evidence that God is good. He added, “Yet she believes it.”
He also said something that rang true to everyone who knew her. I suspect when she’s at mass and alone in a pew that she allows herself a tear, but she won’t allow herself a tear with you. She doesn’t make her problem your problem. The accumulation of loss in her life was by any measure almost incomprehensible.
By the time Michael died, she had lost her parents, two brothers, a brother-in-law president, a husband, and now two of her own children. and she had done all of it in public under the watch of a country that seemed to regard the Kennedy family as a kind of American mythology. It could never quite stop reading.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, Ethel’s friendship with singer Andy Williams attracted regular attention from gossip columns and tabloids. Williams had been close to both Robert and Ethel during the 1960s and began accompanying her to public events after Robert’s death. Speculation about the nature of their relationship followed them for years.
When Williams’s own marriage to actress Claudine Long ended in divorce, the rumors intensified. Both Williams and Ethel maintained they were close friends and nothing more. He eventually married someone else and they remained friends until his death in 2012. Other names were linked to hers over the years.
Football player Frank Gford, New York politician Hugh Kerry, but Ethel never wavered from her vow. She did not remarry. She cited her Catholic faith when pressed, but it was more than faith. It was intention, a life in service. As the children grew and the chaos at Hickory Hill slowly gave way to something quieter, Ethel Kennedy turned more fully to the public work she had started in the darkest months of 1968.
The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights became one of the most respected human rights organizations in the country. It gave annual awards to journalists, activists, and advocates who had made significant contributions to human rights causes around the world. People who had put themselves at genuine risk for principles that mattered.
It funded programs supporting rights defenders in countries where that work came with real danger. Ethel remained the founding force behind it and stayed connected to the organization’s work until the very end of her life. Her daughter Kerry became its president, carrying forward the work in her own right.
Several of Ethel’s other children also entered public life in ways that reflected what they had seen their father believe in. Kathleen served as left tenant governor of Maryland. Joseph represented Massachusetts in Congress. Christopher ran for governor of Illinois. And Max worked as a prosecutor in Philadelphia. The Kennedy tradition continued, rooted in things Ethel had insisted on, even when it would have been entirely understandable to let the whole thing go.
She threw herself into other causes as well. Migrant workers rights, Native American rights, environmental protection, gun control. She co-chared the coalition of gun control in the years following her husband’s assassination. One of the founding voices of what would become a long national debate, the Earth Conservation Corps, the Special Olympics, the Bedford Stverent Restoration Project in Brooklyn, a community development initiative Robert had cared about deeply in his final years and which she continued supporting long after his name stopped automatically opening every
door. She did not limit herself to lending her name to causes. She showed up. In April 2008, at age 80, she traveled to Indianapolis on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to honor a monument commemorating King’s death and the speech Robert had given that night in 1968. A speech that was credited with preventing riots from breaking out in that city.
In 2016 at 88, she appeared in person at a demonstration in Florida in support of higher wages for farm workers. In 2018, at 90, she participated in a hunger strike protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policies at the southern border. In 2008, she publicly endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, joining Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy in making it a family declaration, and hosted a fundraiser at Hickory Hill priced at $28,500 a plate, raising approximately $6 million in one evening.
She said Obama reminded her of Robert. That was not something she said lightly, and everyone in the room knew it. President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2014, the highest civilian honor in the country. at the White House ceremony with her children in the audience.
He said she was an emblem of enduring faith and enduring hope even in the face of unimaginable loss and unimaginable grief and that she had touched the lives of countless people around the world with her generosity and grace. She was 86 years old and she received the medal with the directness and economy of motion that had always characterized her.
No excess, no performance, just presence. In 2013, she stood between Obama and Bill Clinton at Arlington National Cemetery on the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. Each of them holding one of her hands as they climbed the steps to lay a wreath at JFK’s grave. It was a moment that had 50 years of history behind it. In 2021 at 93, she wrote to the California parole board opposing the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had been recommended for parole for the first time.
She wrote that Bobby had wanted to tame the savagess of man and make gentle the life of the world and that the person who had ended his life should not be given the opportunity to threaten others again. Six of her surviving children signed their names alongside hers. The parole recommendation was ultimately rejected by the governor.
She sold Hickory Hill in December 2009 for $8.25 $25 million, ending more than half a century of Kennedy presence on those six acres in Mlan, Virginia. In her later years, she divided her time between the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, and a home in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2012, Rory’s documentary Ethel premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
And for the first time, Ethel allowed herself to be the subject of the story. When the film brought up the night of the assassination, she started a sentence. When we lost daddy and stopped. She looked down. She asked Rory to talk about something else. Even then, 44 years later, some doors stayed mostly closed. The end.
On October 3rd, 2024, Ethel Kennedy suffered a stroke in her sleep. She was 96 years old. She was hospitalized in Boston and received care over the following week. Her grandson, Joe Kennedy III, posted on social media to let the family’s followers know what had happened, describing her as a strong woman who had lived a remarkably full life.
On October 10th, 2024, she died from complications of the stroke. Joe Kennedy III announced her passing. It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother, Ethel Kennedy. He wrote, “Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly.
She had outlived two of her 11 children. She had outlived her husband by 56 years. She had outlived the whole era she belonged to, the new frontier, the Kennedy administration, the hope and grief spiral of the 1960s. And she had kept showing up anyway, decade after decade, in rooms where she believed things could still be made better.
Her funeral was held 4 days later at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Massachusetts. On October 16th, a memorial service was held at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C. President Joe Biden delivered a eulogy. So did former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Biden, who had known her for more than 50 years, said she had a spine of steel and a heart of gold.
He said she had taught him and his own family after the loss of his wife and daughter, how to channel grief into service of something larger. Obama’s remarks were warmer and less formal, the words of a man who had known her, not just known of her. She was buried, as she had always intended. Reunited with Robert.
What history forgot. History has a tendency to organize itself around the people it can most easily explain. John Kennedy was the golden president, the handsome, witty man who seemed to represent something America wanted to believe about itself. Jquelyn Kennedy was the grieving widow turned icon, the woman who defined how to carry loss with elegance.
Robert Kennedy was the hope that died in a hotel kitchen, the candidate who might have changed everything and didn’t get the chance to try. And Ethel, Ethel was the woman standing next to him, crouched on the floor of that kitchen corridor, whispering to her dying husband while the world fell apart around her.
Three months pregnant, 10 children at home. She doesn’t fit cleanly into any of the roles history tends to assign. She was not the most glamorous of the Kennedy women. She was not the most articulate in interviews. She spent decades actively avoiding the spotlight that the rest of her family could not escape.
She chose to be the one holding things together behind the scenes rather than the one standing in front of cameras explaining what everything meant. She raised 11 children alone. She founded a human rights organization in the months before she gave birth to her last child. She buried two sons and kept going.
She buried a husband and kept going. She kept going through grief that compounded on top of grief year after year, decade after decade until the whole accumulation of it would have seemed almost biblical if you wrote it down in a list. She never remarried. She never stopped working. She never stopped showing up in rooms where she believed things could still be made better.
Even at 90 years old, even at a protest, even when it would have been completely understandable to finally stay home, she is not the easiest person to fit into a sentence. She was not, as one profile noted, during her lifetime, built for introspection. She disliked it, deflected it, moved around it.
When asked about her pain, she would change the subject or look away. She organized her life around action rather than reflection, around the next thing that needed doing rather than the things already done and already mourned. That was perhaps the only way she knew to survive it. Senator Jacob Javitz of New York said she was the greatest of the Kennedys.
Harry Bellfonte said she was the Kennedy woman he ended up admiring most. Rory Kennedy, the daughter born six months after the assassination, the one who made the documentary, said her mother’s life was one of the great untold stories. Her daughter-in-law once described the losses as never ending and unimaginable.
And yet Ethel never presented it that way to the world. She kept the weight of it private, held it close, and walked forward anyway. She lived 96 years. She was there for the new frontier and the great society and the march of civil rights and the women’s movement and the environmental movement and the turn of the century and the digital age and a country that kept changing around her while she kept working to make it a little better than it was.
She carried loss that would have broken most people in the first decade of it. And she spent the remaining years being exactly who she had decided to be. Not a widow, not a footnote, not a woman defined entirely by the night everything ended, but someone who had chosen again and again to keep going. History moved past her, as it tends to do, but she never really let it.
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