Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert Kennedy and family matriarch, dies at 96

Mrs. Kennedy, the scion of a wealthy Catholic family and mother of 11 children, was a steadying presence in the tragedy-scarred Kennedy family and in the life of her husband, who served as U.S. attorney general and as a Democratic senator from New York. In recent months, she watched as many in the Kennedy clan spoke out against her son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after he dropped his presidential bid as an independent and pledged support to Republican Donald Trump.

Lively, high-spirited and a longtime fixture in Washington’s social and political circles, Mrs. Kennedy was often seen as a common-touch counterpart to her sister-in-law and onetime first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Mrs. Kennedy campaigned eagerly and often for her husband and other members of the family, but she came into sharper focus for many Americans in 1968, when her husband sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

Robert Kennedy had just won the California primary and delivered his victory speech when, shortly after midnight on June 5, he was shot and fatally wounded in Los Angeles. It was two months after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and less than five years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s older brother, in Dallas.

From that moment on, Mrs. Kennedy, who was three months pregnant with the couple’s 11th child, made it her life’s mission to keep the message of her martyred husband alive.

“I will bring up the children the way he would have wanted,” she told Time magazine in 1969. “He has already established the pattern. They all understand that they have a special obligation. They’ve been given so much; they must try to give that again.”

Mrs. Kennedy won the nation’s sympathy, and she was named “America’s most admired woman” in a Gallup poll. Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.) described her in 1969 as “the greatest of the Kennedys, male or female.”

She continued to live for many years at Hickory Hill, the family home in McLean, Va., and at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., raising her family with the help of household staff. She never remarried.

Except for periodic visits to her husband’s grave, Mrs. Kennedy kept her grief hidden. She sought to keep her husband’s ideals alive by founding what is now called Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a nonprofit organization that promotes human rights projects around the world and awards annual prizes to journalists and authors.

Mrs. Kennedy came to Washington in the early 1950s, when her husband worked as a lawyer for Senate committees and her brother-in-law John was a Democratic representative, and later a senator, from Massachusetts. In 1956, Robert and Ethel Kennedy traded homes with “Jack and Jackie,” as they called the future president and first lady, and moved their growing family from Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood to Hickory Hill.

Mrs. Kennedy was deeply invested in her Catholic faith and attended Mass almost every morning. She was also fun-loving — a school yearbook described her as “alive with mischief” — and presided over sometimes raucous gatherings at Hickory Hill, particularly after John Kennedy became president in 1961 and Robert Kennedy was named attorney general.

Mrs. Kennedy pushed White House adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and several fully clothed members of the Cabinet into the pool before the president put a stop to the pranks.

As a birthday gift to his wife one year, Bobby Kennedy (as he was often called) arranged for dancer and film star Gene Kelly to appear, wrapped in a pink bow, at the house, where he waltzed Mrs. Kennedy around the floor. Society columnist Betty Beale dubbed Mrs. Kennedy “Washington’s No. 1 hostess.”

“It would be easy to make Washington social life a full-time job,” Mrs. Kennedy once said.

Pets had free run of the house, and the family menagerie included horses, goats, chickens, cats, turtles, a hawk, an armadillo, as many as 19 dogs, a coati-mundi (a long-tailed South American relative of the raccoon) and even a seal. Guests sometimes complained about finding dog droppings under the dining room table.

In 1963, Mrs. Kennedy saw a starving horse tied up near her home and had it taken to Hickory Hill. The horse died five days later. The owner, who was convicted of cruelty to animals, later sued Mrs. Kennedy for $30,000 for taking the horse. In court, Mrs. Kennedy called the emaciated horse the “saddest sight I ever saw in my life,” and animal welfare specialists testified on her behalf. A jury found in her favor.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, a stricken Robert Kennedy withdrew into himself, questioning his faith and his purpose in life. Mrs. Kennedy was widely credited with pulling her husband through what she later would call “six months of just blackness.”

In his book “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” Schlesinger wrote that Mrs. Kennedy “was a flop at cooking and sewing, detested cleaning and spent money carelessly.”

But he added that the marriage “was the best thing that could have happened” to Robert Kennedy. “She awakened his sympathy and his humor and brought him out emotionally,” Schlesinger declared. “He never had to prove himself to her. Ethel gave him unquestioning confidence, unquenchable admiration, unstinted love.”

In 1964, Robert Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. During her husband’s career on Capitol Hill, Mrs. Kennedy often brought the children to public hearings.

When Robert Kennedy was deciding whether to enter the 1968 presidential race as a challenger to the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, many in his inner circle urged him not to run, including his younger brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Mrs. Kennedy was almost alone in urging her husband to enter the race. At a meeting at Hickory Hill that included several presidential advisers to John F. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy and her children unfurled a “Kennedy for President” banner from a window. She put on a recording of “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” from the musical “Man of La Mancha,” and the song was often featured in the subsequent campaign.

After Sen. Eugene McCarthy (Minn.) gave Johnson a scare in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy in March 1968. Two weeks later, Johnson gave a nationally televised speech on the Vietnam War that ended with the announcement that he would not seek reelection.

Mrs. Kennedy often appeared with her husband at rallies as his campaign gained momentum. Robert Kennedy was a front-runner for the nomination after winning the California primary.

Leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles through a back entrance near the kitchen, he was shot three times in the head. A 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan, was apprehended at the scene.

When Mrs. Kennedy reached her husband’s side, he was still conscious and was able to say a few words. She knelt beside him, stroking his head and frantically telling bystanders, “Give him air, give him air!”

Robert Kennedy died the next day at age 42.

Mrs. Kennedy planned her husband’s funeral in New York, then accompanied his body to Washington aboard a train. She went from car to car, shaking hands with or hugging every family friend, political associate and reporter on the train. Only then did she return to her husband’s casket and break down in tears.

When one of her daughters, filmmaker Rory Kennedy, asked her about the assassination in a 2012 HBO documentary, “Ethel,” Mrs. Kennedy said only, “Let’s talk about something else.”

Rory Kennedy, who was born in December 1968, was the 11th and last of the Kennedy children. (She was also the fifth to be delivered by Caesarean section.)

“There are so many times in my life,” Rory said to her sister Courtney Kennedy Hill in the documentary, “where people have said, ‘I want to introduce Robert Kennedy’s daughter. …’”

“Oh, it makes me so mad!” Courtney replied. “What about the one who delivered us and carried us for nine months and then has been with us the last 40 years?”

Ethel Skakel was born April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children. Her father, once a low-level railroad worker, founded a coal company and became very wealthy. Her mother managed the home.

Mrs. Kennedy was 5 when her family moved to a 16-acre estate in Greenwich, Conn. She attended Catholic schools and, like many members of her family, was feisty and nonconformist.

At Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, then a women’s school in Manhattan, her roommate was Jean Kennedy, the eighth of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy’s nine children.

In 1945, 17-year-old Ethel Skakel joined Jean Kennedy and other members of the Kennedy family, including Bobby, on a ski vacation in Quebec. She challenged him to a race down the mountain and later said she had fallen in love at first sight. Bobby Kennedy, who was three years older and a student at Harvard, was not immediately smitten and dated Ethel’s older sister instead.

In college, Ethel read the Racing Form each morning, saying in her daughter’s documentary, “If only my tests had been on the racehorses instead of history, I would have gotten an A-plus.”

She and Jean Kennedy were often cited in the college’s demerit book for disciplinary infractions, such as chewing gum and “disorder in the tea room.”

“We wanted to go to the Harvard-Yale game,” Mrs. Kennedy said in the documentary, “but if you had racked up a certain amount of demerits, you were campused. So we took the demerit book and threw it down the incinerator — and went to the Harvard-Yale game.”

She graduated from Manhattanville (now a coeducational college in Purchase, N.Y.) in 1949. By then, her sister had married another man, and Robert Kennedy was in law school at the University of Virginia. Ethel and Robert Kennedy were married in 1950.

Mrs. Kennedy, who grew up in a Republican family, worked on John Kennedy’s congressional and presidential campaigns and seemed at ease in public appearances.

While Robert Kennedy was serving as attorney general, Mrs. Kennedy sometimes took her children to the FBI building to watch shooting practice. Her husband often clashed with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, prompting Mrs. Kennedy to drop a signed note into a suggestion box: “Get a new director.”

At home, Mrs. Kennedy took part in the family’s backyard football games and was fiercely competitive at tennis, swimming, equestrian events and other activities. She required her children to attend church every Sunday, and the family often read Bible verses and poetry together at night.

Each year, on Robert Kennedy’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, Mrs. Kennedy returned to his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

She sought to imbue her children with her husband’s sense of public duty, sending them off to work summers with civil rights organizations and humanitarian groups in poor countries overseas.

Her oldest child, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, served as lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003 and later ran unsuccessfully for governor. Her oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy II, was a six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became an environmental activist but later was sharply criticized by family members for espousing unfounded anti-vaccination theories. He briefly sought the 2024 Democratic nomination for president, then campaigned as an independent before dropping out and throwing his support behind Trump.

He and a brother, Douglas, also supported the release on parole of Sirhan Sirhan, against the wishes of most other family members — including Mrs. Kennedy. In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected a parole board’s recommendation that Sirhan be released.

Through the years, Mrs. Kennedy experienced as much personal loss as any member of the Kennedy clan. In 1955, her parents were killed in an airplane crash. One of her brothers died in a plane crash a decade later.

Several of her children had problems with substance abuse, including David Kennedy, who died of a drug overdose in 1984 at 28. Another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident at 39 in 1997, shortly after he was alleged to have had an affair with a teenage babysitter.

In 1999, her nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. was killed, along with his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister while flying in a private airplane to the wedding of Rory Kennedy. Another nephew, Michael Skakel, spent more than a decade in prison for killing a 15-year-old neighbor in Connecticut in the 1970s. The conviction was overturned in 2018. A granddaughter, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, and a great-grandson died in a canoeing accident in the Chesapeake Bay in 2020. Another granddaughter, 22-year-old Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died of a drug overdose in 2019.

Survivors include nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren.

After her children were grown, Mrs. Kennedy traveled the world, from Albania to Haiti to Namibia, to carry the message of human rights. She marched in demonstrations for workers’ rights well into her 80s, co-chaired the Coalition on Gun Control and helped lead projects aimed at restoring impoverished neighborhoods in New York City. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama in 2014.

Mrs. Kennedy left Hickory Hill in 2010, after the estate was sold, and lived her final years in Hyannis Port. After the death in 1995 of Rose Kennedy, her husband’s mother, Mrs. Kennedy began to assume the role of family matriarch and keeper of the Kennedy flame. She struck up an unlikely friendship with pop star Taylor Swift, who briefly dated one of her grandsons. Swift wrote the song “Starlight” loosely based on how Ethel and Bobby Kennedy first met.

“All this introspection — I hate it,” Mrs. Kennedy said in her daughter Rory’s 2012 documentary.

“Why should I have to answer all these questions?” Mrs. Kennedy asked.

“Well, we’re making a documentary about you,” Rory said.

Vincent P. Bzdek contributed to this report.