Earlier today, members of the Kennedy family announced that the matriarch of the family, Ethel Kennedy, 96, had died. She had suffered a stroke last week.
She outlived her husband, RFK, by 56 years, after he was assassinated in L.A.'s now defunct and demolished Ambassador Hotel by killer Sirhan Sirhan. Fortunately, he has never gotten out of prison, and he will likely die there. RFK's murder came less than five years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
Ethel was pregnant then with her eleventh child, who would become Rory Kennedy. Ethel, like her sister-in-law Jackie Kennedy at the JFK funeral, showed much strength and dignity during the train trip and the final burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
Despite the bullshit tabloid claims about RFK, which originally came from political enemies back when he ran for the U.S. Senate seat in New York, he and Ethel had a real partnership not unlike Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. She was his rock, really the center of his life. She was always with him on the campaign trail, seemed to enjoy meeting people along the way. When he died, she never remarried because, to paraphrase what she said, why would she because he was just the best and nobody else could ever come close. Those weren't her exact words, but that was the gist of it. She had been linked to the likes of singer Andy Williams after he and Claudine Longet split and then divorced, but apparently it was a close friendship and nothing more.
Ethel had other tragedies to deal with, even before RFK's death, with both of her parents having died in a plane crash, then after his death losing two sons years ago (David and Michael), and the deaths other family members, but she remained a pivotal member of the family. She kept her husband's memory alive as did most of the surviving children, who worked hard to preserve their dad's and uncles' commitment to public service with one notable exception, and I am not naming names. They didn't disgrace the family name with conspiracy theories, eating roadkill, suffering from brain worms, throwing dead bear cubs in Central Park, or, worse of all, supporting the insane Agent Orange from Mar-a-Lago for president. Again, I won't name names.
Having seen Ethel in interviews, she seemed to be a down-to-earth woman without any phoniness whatsoever. She appeared to be a great person.
More than the White House, where Jacqueline Kennedy infused new elegance, Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 19th-century estate in McLean, Va., known as Hickory Hill, epitomized the vigor of the Kennedy administration and its theme of a New Frontier. While Robert, the president’s younger brother, was the attorney general and later a Democratic senator from New York, Ethel was a den mother, ringmaster, chief practical joker and seasoned political pro at Hickory Hill.
The place was a beehive, where Washington kingmakers, Hollywood stars, Nobel Prize winners and neighborhood children swarmed — not to mention a bustling menagerie that once included a sea lion in the swimming pool.
Arriving through the apple-red front door, guests were quickly caught up in the activity of the moment: an intellectual seminar arranged by the historian and presidential adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., or maybe one of the celebrated, hypercompetitive Kennedy touch football games. (During one game, the writer George Plimpton said, Mrs. Kennedy bit him on the ankle.)
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