HomeNEWSWORLDEthel Kennedy, social activist and wife of Robert F. Kennedy, has died

Ethel Kennedy, social activist and wife of Robert F. Kennedy, has died

Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who raised their 11 children after he was assassinated and remained devoted to social causes and the family legacy decades afterward, died Thursday, her family said. She was 96.

“With our hearts full of love, we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother,” Joe Kennedy III posted on X. “She passed away this morning from complications related to a stroke suffered last week.”

“Along with her life’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly.” the family said in a statement.

President Joe Biden called her “an American icon — a matriarch of optimism and moral courage, an emblem of endurance and service.”

“For more than 50 years, Ethel traveled, marched, boycotted and advocated for human rights around the world with her characteristic iron will and grace,” Biden said.

The Kennedy matriarch, mother of Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Max, Douglas and Rory, was one of the last remaining members of a family generation that included President John F. Kennedy. Her family said she recently enjoyed seeing many of her relatives before she became ill.

A millionaire’s daughter who married the future senator and attorney general in 1950, Ethel Kennedy had suffered more death by the age of 40 for the whole world to see than most people would in a lifetime.

She was by Robert F. Kennedy’s side when he was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after winning the California Democratic presidential primary. Her brother-in-law had been murdered in Dallas five years earlier.

Her parents were killed in a plane crash in 1955 and her brother died in a plane crash in 1966. Her son David Kennedy overdosed, her son Michael Kennedy died in a skiing accident, and her nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash . Another nephew, Michael Skakel, was convicted of murder before the Connecticut Supreme Court ultimately overturned his conviction. And in 2019, her granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an apparent overdose.

“One wonders how much this family should be expected to take on,” family friend Philip Johnson, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, told the Boston Herald after Michael Kennedy’s death.

“She was a devout Catholic and socialized daily, and we are comforted to know that she has been reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy; her children, David and Michael; her sister-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saoirse and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie. Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers,” the family said in a statement.

Ethel’s mother-in-law, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, initially wondered how she would cope with so much tragedy.

“I knew how difficult it would be for her to raise this large family without the leadership and influence that Bobby would provide,” Rose recalled in her memoir, Times to Remember. “And of course she realized that too, fully and acutely. But she didn’t back down.

Ethel Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights soon after her husband’s death and advocated for causes including gun control and human rights. She rarely talked about her husband’s murder. When her director daughter Rory brought it up in the 2012 HBO documentary Ethel, she couldn’t share her grief.

“When we lost daddy…” she began, then broke into tears and asked her youngest daughter “to talk about something else.”

Many of her offspring became famous. Daughter Kathleen became lieutenant governor of Maryland; Joseph represented Massachusetts in Congress; Courtney married Paul Hill, who was wrongly convicted of bombing the Irish Republican Army; Kerry became a human rights activist and president of the RFK Center; Christopher runs for governor of Illinois; Max was a prosecutor in Philadelphia and Douglas reported for the Fox News Channel.

Her son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also became a national figure—first as an environmental lawyer and more recently as a conspiracy theorist spreading false theories about vaccines. He ran for president as an independent after briefly challenging Biden, and his name remained on the ballot in multiple states after suspending his campaign and endorsing Donald Trump.

Ethel Kennedy has not publicly commented on her son’s actions, although several other family members have condemned him.

Decades earlier, she seemed to thrive on the growing power of her in-laws, enthusiastically supporting the 1960 campaign and throwing some of the best-attended parties of the era at their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia, including one where the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was pushed fully clothed into the pool. In the spirit of Kennedy, she was also a highly competitive tennis player.

“Petite and cheerful Ethel, who doesn’t seem like an outdoorsy type at all, considers outdoor activities so important to the children that she has arranged her busy office wife schedule so that she can personally take them on two daily outings.” The Washington Post reported in 1962.

Accompanying her husband on a goodwill tour around the world, she said it’s important for Americans to meet ordinary people abroad.

“People have a particular fondness for Americans,” she told the Post. “But the Communists were so vocal that it was a surprise to some Asians to hear America’s point of view. It’s good for Americans to travel and convey our point of view.”

She split her time between homes in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida, after Hickory Hill, which they purchased from John and Jackie Kennedy in 1957, sold in 2009 for $8.25 million.

Born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, she grew up in a 31-room English manor house in Greenwich, Connecticut, the sixth of seven children of coal magnate George and Ann Branack Skakel. She met Robert Kennedy through his sister Jean, her roommate at Manhattanville College.

The newlyweds moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he completed his final year of law school at the University of Virginia and helped broaden her worldview by introducing her to people like Ralph Bunch, the first person of color to win the Nobel Peace Prize. They decided that the safest place for him to stay during his visit was in their home.

“He was so charming and didn’t complain, but they were throwing things at our house all night. It was so unthinkable and outrageous, but you felt a little bit of what black people in our country had to go through at that time,” she said in the documentary.

Robert Kennedy became chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee in 1957, and was then appointed attorney general by his brother in 1960.

She supported his successful 1964 campaign for the US Senate in New York and his subsequent bid for the presidency. Pregnant with their 11th child when he was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan, her look of shock and horror was captured in images that remain indelible decades later.

The assassination traumatized the family, especially son David Kennedy, just 12 years old, as he watched the news in a hotel room. He never recovered, battling addiction for years before taking an overdose in 1984.

In 2021, she said Sirhan should not be released from prison, a view not shared by some other members of her family. Two years later, a California commission denied him parole.

Although Ethel Kennedy was linked to several men after her husband’s death, most notably singer Andy Williams, she never remarried.

On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she visited Indianapolis, where a monument commemorates the speech her husband gave that night in 1968, which is believed to have prevented riots in the city.

“Of all the Kennedy wives, she was the one I would admire the most,” Harry Belafonte wrote of her. “She wasn’t playing. She looked at you and immediately knew what it was about. Often in the years that followed, when Bobby was opposed to something we wanted him to do for the movement, I would take my case to Ethel. “We need to talk to him,” she would say, and she would.

In 2008, she joined her son-in-law Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy in endorsing Senator Barack Obama for president, likening him to her late husband. She later went to the Obama White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom and meet Pope Francis. Obama called her “a dear friend with a passion for justice, an irrepressible spirit and a great sense of humor.”

“She touched the lives of countless people around the world with her generosity and grace and was an emblem of enduring faith and hope, even in the face of unimaginable pain,” Obama said on social media, one of many high-profile eulogies.

Obama and former President Bill Clinton held her hands as they walked up the steps to lay a wreath at President Kennedy’s grave on the 50th anniversary of his death. Clinton remembered her Thursday as a “fierce fighter for justice and equality” who built “one of the most effective human rights organizations in the world.”

The center she founded still promotes human rights through litigation, advocacy, education and inspiration, giving annual awards to journalists, authors and others who have made significant contributions to human rights.

She was also active in the Gun Control Coalition, the Special Olympics, and the Earth Conservation Corps. And she showed up in person, participating in a 2016 demonstration in support of higher wages for Florida farmworkers and a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“She could be found anywhere human dignity was threatened, from prisons to prisons, in every corner of the map,” Clinton said. “She was fearless and tireless, a true force of nature, driven by the teachings of her faith that calls us all to serve others.”



NIRMAL NEWS – SOURCE

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