Ethel Kennedy, Passionate Supporter of the Family Legacy, Dies at 96

But if Mrs. Kennedy’s life was robust, it was also, like the larger story of the Kennedy clan, punctuated by tragedy. In her late 20s, she lost her parents in a plane crash. Eleven years later, another plane crash took the life of a brother; soon after that, the brother’s wife choked to death. There were her husband’s and brother-in-law’s assassinations, of course, and two of her sons, David and Michael, later died young.

Leaning hard on her Roman Catholic faith, Mrs. Kennedy was often the one who strove to make sense of terrible things.

After her brother-in-law Senator Edward M. Kennedy had a car accident in 1969 in Chappaquiddick, Mass., in which Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy, drowned, Mrs. Kennedy wrote a letter to the Kopechne family. Mrs. Kennedy said she was sure their daughter was “happy on the golden streets of heaven.” The Kopechnes read and reread the letter, trying to understand it, Susan Sheehan wrote in The New York Times Magazine.

After George C. Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was shot in 1972, Mrs. Kennedy visited him in the hospital, arriving on crutches while recovering from a skiing accident.

And after her husband’s murder, she publicly lived out the family maxim: “Kennedys don’t cry.”

On the plane that carried her husband’s body to New York from Los Angeles, Mrs. Kennedy walked the aisle making sure everyone had a blanket or pillow. On the long train ride to Washington for the burial, she spoke to many of the 1,100 passengers and waved to thousands of onlookers along the route from a window next to the coffin. One passenger was Coretta Scott King, whose own husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated only two months earlier.