Ethel Skakel Kennedy, the widow of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, died on Thursday after suffering a stroke last week. She was 96 years old.
The news was confirmed on X by her grandson, Joe Kennedy III, a former congressman from Massachusetts now serving as the U.S. special envoy to Ireland.
"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," the post said.
Mrs. Kennedy was born in Chicago in 1928 to a wealthy Catholic family and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 17 years old when she met Mr. Kennedy, who was dating her sister at the time. They married in 1950, just a few years before his brother John F. Kennedy entered electoral politics.
Mrs. Kennedy was an energetic advocate for the family and in particular her husband, who served as Attorney General in his brother's administration, then as a U.S. Senator and then, at her urging, challenged then-incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson and other rivals for the Democratic nomination in 1968. Johnson dropped out in March of that year, and Mr. Kennedy was on the cusp of victory in June when Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed him in a Los Angeles hotel.
In the funerary events that ensued, Mrs. Kennedy gamely planned ceremonies and received well-wishers in the public eye, showing unabated grief only in private. That set the pattern for the rest of a life punctuated by visits to her husband's grave, but otherwise largely absent of comments over Mr. Kennedy's death — except, notably, her opposition to granting Sirhan Sirhan parole in 2023.
Mrs. Kennedy received a flood of goodwill from a sympathetic nation, which named her "America's most admired woman" in a Gallup poll that year.
Four months after the assassination, Mrs. Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, which commemorates her husband's memory and supports human rights programs around the world. In October of that year, she gave birth to her 11th and last child, Rory.
More tragedies and shocks followed — her son David died of a drug overdose in 1984, and another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident in 1997. Rory's wedding in 1999 was shaken by the news that Mrs. Kennedy's nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn died in a plane crash en route to the event. Another nephew, Michael Skakel, was imprisoned for more than a decade for killing a 15-year-old neighbor in the 1970s. The conviction was overturned in 2018.
In addition to her work with the human rights center, Mrs. Kennedy co-chaired the Coalition of Gun Control, marched in labor demonstrations and led projects that helped restore neighborhoods stricken with poverty. She also continued to be a fixture in Washington's social and diplomatic circles. In 2014, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
"Ethel has been a force for change in her quiet, unflashy, unstoppable way," Obama said at the ceremony. "As her family will tell you – and they basically occupy this half of the room – you don’t mess with Ethel."
