Ethel Kennedy, widow of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy who stoically raised their 11 children alone

The large family’s life was ‘organised bedlam’, with 16 dogs, a sea lion named Sandy, exotic reptiles in the basement and a miniature horse

Ethel Kennedy, who has died aged 96, was a human rights campaigner and the widow of Senator Robert F Kennedy, who was assassinated while running for nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1968; the enduring image many Americans had of her was as a black-veiled woman kneeling in grief by her husband’s grave, clutching a rosary.
It was not the first tragedy she had endured, and nor would it be the last. In 1955 she had buried both her parents, killed in a plane crash. A decade later, she buried her brother, George, also killed in a plane, and just months after that his widow after she accidentally choked to death. After Bobby Kennedy’s death she lost two children, David from a drug overdose in 1984 and Michael in a New Year’s Eve skiing accident in 1997.
Like other members of the clan, too, she weathered scandal. In 1973, her son Joe Jr had a Jeep accident in which a female passenger was paralysed. Another son, Robert Jr, was once arrested for heroin possession. Before his death her son Michael had courted scandal over an affair with a babysitter which had allegedly begun when the girl was 14. One nephew spent more than a decade in prison after being convicted of murdering a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley, but his conviction was recently overturned.
Ethel Kennedy was sustained by her deep religious faith, however, and the fiercely competitive instincts which had qualified her perfectly for membership of the Kennedy clan in the first place.
The sixth of seven children, she was born Ethel Skakel in Chicago on April 11 1928 to a wealthy family who moved to Connecticut when she was a young child.
Her father George, who had begun his career as an $8-a-week railway clerk, had made his money in coal. After noticing that larger mines often discarded their coal residue, he agreed to pay five cents a ton for the material, which burned almost as well as the real stuff. When strikes shut down the mining industry, he sold off his stockpiles at an enormous profit. He then he did the same thing with waste coke from oil refineries. His Great Lakes Carbon Corp became one of the top 500 privately held companies in the country.
Like the Kennedys, the Skakel family seemed to be infected with a near-compulsive recklessness. But as Laurence Leamer observed in his book on the Kennedys: “Where the young Kennedys’ friends found something inspiring and enviable in the intrepid, adventurous young scions, the Skakels’ friends often found the Skakel family scary.”
Ethel’s feral brothers swung her from ropes off a second-floor balcony and sprayed her boyfriends with pellets from air rifles. Ethel herself, though she considered becoming a nun, spent her teenage years playing practical jokes such as painting the horse of a young man who had snubbed her bright green.
Various Skakels dated various Kennedys and Ethel met Bobby on a skiing trip in Canada. “He was standing in front of an open fireplace,” she recalled. “I walked in the door and turned and saw him, and I thought, ‘Whoa.’ ”
They married in 1950 and eventually settled at Hickory Hill, a sprawling white Georgian mansion in McLean, Virginia, which they had bought off Robert’s brother Jack, as Robert embarked on a political career.
Their life together was once described as “organised bedlam”, full of children and animals, including 16 dogs at the same time, a sea lion named Sandy who lived in the family swimming pool, exotic reptiles that lived in the basement and a miniature horse that arrived one Christmas morning in a baby’s playpen. Ethel was pregnant for an astonishing 99 months of her life, giving birth to her 11th child, her daughter Rory, six months after her husband was killed.
Although Ethel never enjoyed the glamour of her more high-profile sister-in-law, Jackie, her devotion to her husband helped him to build his confidence: “Everything came so naturally to Jack,” she recalled. “Bobby always had to struggle for it, for everything. And he always thought it was because he was at the bottom of the heap growing up.”
It was often said that Ethel hoped to “out-Kennedy” her mother-in-law, the family matriarch Rose, who, after all, had only produced nine children. In a 1968 Gallup poll she was named the most admired woman in America. Rose finished second.
A keen athlete, Ethel was once described as running family activities like an Olympic boot camp. When they went skiing, they would head out to the mountain early in the day and stay until the lifts closed. In summer she would play several ferocious rounds of tennis in the morning, then take the children out sailing every day at 12.30, cramming up to 15 people into the family’s 26ft sailing boat.
Her son Chris recalled being forced, aged 14, to play tennis, with two younger brothers, against George Plimpton, a journalist, amateur athlete and accomplished tennis player, in 100F midday heat: “At that point in our lives we all hated tennis. We got through the first set and he said, ‘Let’s play another,’ and we all burst out crying.”
He also recalled a sailing trip in rough seas when Sammy Davis Jr was so scared that he went down below, but Ethel, who always played skipper, refused to go back to shore unless he agreed to sing The Candy Man to the children – “which for a while he refused to do until he realised his life was in the balance. His crying wife convinced him to belt one out for the crowd.”
On another trip, a dean at Brown University who could not swim fell overboard. One of the Kennedy children dived in and dragged him back to the boat but, as he was rather large, it needed several hands to haul him aboard. Before that could happen, Ethel Kennedy said: “Can my children have on-campus housing?”
In his 1978 book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr called the Kennedy mansion “the most spirited social center in Washington” in the 1960s. “It was hard to resist the raffish, unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable Kennedy parties,” he wrote.
Hickory Hill was a magnet for the famous and powerful, sometimes at their own risk. Amy Carter, President Carter’s daughter, was once nearly trampled by an elephant at one of Ethel’s pet shows. On another occasion the Kennedy children rigged up a zipwire from the top of Hickory Hill to the swimming pool and charged guests 25 cents to take the daring ride; one taker was the future president George HW Bush. Jackie Kennedy was later reported to have refused to allow her children Caroline and John to visit because their cousins were too wild.
“Hickory Hill! They ought to call that place Horror Hill,” Paul Nass, a cook who lasted less than a day at the estate, told The Washington Post. “They should raise pigs out there, they eat so many BLTs.”
When JFK appointed his brother as attorney general his sister-in-law quickly emerged as one of the more colourful members of the extended Kennedy clan. At one point Ethel was charged with horse theft – then a hanging offence in Virginia – after she rescued a neighbour’s maltreated horses. She was acquitted.
There were frequent reports about her speeding offences and she also made headlines when she crashed her motor scooter while visiting Vatican City. JFK had to ask her to tone down her parties after press reports of a soirée where all the members of his cabinet were thrown into the swimming pool.
Ethel indulged her children’s youthful interest in politics, though she never pushed any of them towards a political career. Her daughter Rory recalled how, after she and her brother Douglas saw televised coverage of arrests being made at Washington anti-apartheid protests, they had told their mother they wanted to get arrested in front of the South African embassy. “Mummy, without missing a beat, said, ‘Great, let’s go down there right now.’ She took us down and we got arrested, and she couldn’t have been prouder.”
Ethel Kennedy, trim, smiling, tanned in sleeveless shifts, was always at her husband’s side during campaigns, Congressional hearings and civil rights marches, often with several children in tow, and was credited for bringing him out of his emotional shell. She was his chief comforter when JFK was assassinated and Bobby went through “six months of blackness”.
When her husband was gunned down while delivering a victory speech at the California primary in Los Angeles in 1968, Ethel Kennedy was three months pregnant. She could never discuss his death, explaining in Ethel (2012), her daughter Rory’s documentary, that she coped by getting on with her life and looking after their children, sustained by her strong Roman Catholic faith. “When we lost Bobby, I would wake up in the morning and think, ‘He’s OK. He’s in heaven, and he’s with Jack, and a lot of my brothers and sisters, and my parents.’ So it made it very easy to get through the day thinking he was OK.”
She never considered remarrying. “How could I possibly do that with Bobby looking down from heaven?” she told People magazine in 1991. “That would be adultery.” In 2003 she sold Hickory Hill and moved to her home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts.
Ethel Kennedy raised money for numerous charities later founded the Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, though she never liked being asked to share her feelings about the social causes she supported. “All this introspection,” she told her daughter. “I hate it.”
She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2014.
Ethel Kennedy is survived by nine of her 11 children; Robert F Kennedy Jr campaigned in the 2024 US presidential election, initially for the Democratic nomination, then as an independent candidate, before withdrawing and endorsing Donald Trump.
Ethel Kennedy, born April 11 1928, died October 10 2024