Ethel Kennedy, Human Rights Advocate, Political Matriach, Dies at 96

Ethel Kennedy, who embraced athletics, advocacy and public service with equal enthusiasm, died Thursday at the age of 96.

Despite enduring several personal tragedies, most notably the assassination of her husband Robert while campaigning for U.S. president in 1968, she worked tirelessly to support the underrepresented throughout her lifetime.

Months after losing her husband, who had just won the California Democratic primary, Kennedy strove to carry on his legacy by founding the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, and became a political force in her own right. Six months later, she gave birth to their 11th child, Rory. While millions might consider being a mother of 11 a full-time job, the seemingly tireless Kennedy tackled her days and years with vigor.

The RFK Human Rights Foundation confirmed her passing Thursday with an online tribute celebrating her life. The cause and location of her death were not immediately known. A representative at the foundation deferred comment to a family spokesperson, who didn’t respond Thursday afternoon. Earlier this week, one of Kennedy’s grandsons had posted that she had suffered a stroke on Oct. 3 and had been taken to a hospital in recent days.

Known to be a nonstop person, Kennedy’s fortitude and matriarch position in an American political family belied her personal suffering. She lost her parents in a private plane crash in 1955, and her brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy Jr., the former president, was assassinated in 1963 — nearly five years prior to her husband’s assassination. Kennedy also lost two of her sons: David died from an accidental drug overdose and Michael died in a skiing accident during a 1997 family trip.

In addition to starting what was initially the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Centre, which bestows human rights and journalism awards, she also co-chaired the Coalition of Gun Control and was involved with other human rights organizations.

Born Ethel Skakel in Chicago, her father George was a self-made coal magnate, who started out earning $8 a week as a railroad clerk before starting a small coal and [petroleum] coke business. That later was diversified into the privately owned enterprise, the Great Lakes Coal & Coke Co., which became the Great Lakes Carbon Corp.

As a youngster, she relocated to tony Greenwich, Conn., where she attended Greenwich Academy and later the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx. As a student at what was then known as the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, she was introduced to Jean Kennedy, who quickly became a close friend and later a roommate. At the age of 17 during a 1945 ski trip at Mount Tremblant in Quebec, she met Robert F. Kennedy, who was dating her sister Patricia at that time. The following year she campaigned for his brother John’s Congressional run and wrote her college thesis on his book, “Why England Slept.”

She and Robert Kennedy wed in 1950 and later relocated to Washington D.C. when he joined the U. S. Department of Justice. The couple purchased Hickory Hill in McLean, Va., from Kennedy’s brother John and his wife Jacqueline in 1956. With 13 bedrooms and 13 bathrooms, that 6-acre property would become a hive of activity for Ethel and Robert Kennedy’s 11 children and their numerous animals. After serving as the attorney general during his brother’s administration, Robert Kennedy later was elected to the U.S. Senate for the state of New York. As a presidential candidate after winning the California Democratic primary in 1968, he was assassinated in 1968. Six months later was when his widow gave birth to Rory.

Even in middle age, Kennedy was known to be mischievous, passionately physical and an eternally young woman, who did multiple athletic activities a day including bouncing on a trampoline, running races on the beach, waterskiing and playing touch football, and she would still be up for dancing at night. In the 1960s and early 1970s, WWD interviewed Kennedy and joined her on the campaign trail a few times. Her verve was a recurring theme.

Reviewing “Ethel: The Story of Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy,” an unapproved biography by Lester David in 1971, WWD noted how as a teenager she once ducked into an Irish rider’s stall at a Madison Square Garden horse show and painted his mount Kelly green with vegetable dye. After realizing that she had enough demerits to be sequestered at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, she threw the demerit book into the incinerator. Decades later as the mother of 11, she stole a horse that was “in terrible condition,” and vowed that she would break the law again to save a horse’s life — despite having faced an arraignment and trial.

The author David wrote of how Kennedy had taken the torch from Robert [“Bobby”] and seized upon her opportunity to be of service to mankind, whereas Jackie Kennedy, “no longer a national heroine,” had chosen to become a jet-setter on top of the social pyramid.

David also claimed that Robert’s constant companionship with his brother John’s bereaved widow Jackie was “perhaps the only thing from which Bobby excluded Ethel.” That led to one of the few causes for Ethel becoming “irked with her husband,” according to David’s book “Ethel.” Like her contemporaries, she was known to drop into the “Lausanne-born Mrs. Norman Pauls’ Saint Aubin shop” seeking European copies.

Their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Va. was a rotating roster of secretaries of state, film stars and celebrities along with snakes, ponies, horses, hamsters, homing pigeons, ducks, geese, cockatoos and a huge turtle. When WWD referenced Kenndy in 1961, she was described as “quite a quick-change artist,” having switches outfits three times within a few hours one day.

In 1969, WWD featured a front-page photo of Kennedy watching the North American Alpine Championship with the professional mountain climber and friend Jim Whittaker, who had hoisted one of her 11 children up on his shoulder for a better view. Kennedy was in Waterville Valley, N.H. for a week to watch a ski championship that honored her late husband Robert. Whittaker had climbed Mount Kennedy in 1965 with him.

During a campaign stop in Indiana in 1968 when a TV cameraman’s battery unexpectedly caught fire and then his shirt did, too, Kennedy rushed to him to beat out the flames with her bare hands. Kennedy then continued shaking hands with some of the 500 women, who turned out that night. And that was after “a near-disastrous first day of campaigning, due to poor planning, missed connections and the disenchanted press.”

Frank to the bone, when a doctor at the Methodist Children’s Hospital told Kennedy on a 1968 campaign stop, “I don’t know if you know, but 10 percent of the children in the United States have learning disabilities,” Kennedy quipped, “I know 10 that do,” which was an apparent reference to her large brood.

During her husband’s presidential run, Kennedy told WWD about having Sammy Davis Jr. pitching in to get out the vote. She also clued in WWD about being amused by the funny things that people said to her such as “Gee, you sure look like your pictures, Jackie [Kennedy]!” Ethel Kennedy was less rosy, however, about all the voters, who told her they had seen her on “The Mike Douglas Show.” She told WWD, “If anybody says that again, so help me…”

After being greeted with her name in lights and a crowd of 500 at the King Crowns Inn in Kokomo, Ind., Kennedy first dashed into the grill for a cheeseburger and a Heineken. “I just can’t go on without a little energy,” she explained. Later while her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined the troops, she ran upstairs to brush her teeth and freshen up before the reception. With her help, her husband’s presidential bid became interactive for voters at home. Flagging an upcoming televised TV coffee hour with her husband and her mother-in-law Rose Kennedy, she told some fans in Indiana, “Ask your friends in for coffee, turn on your sets and join us.” And the crowds agreed to do so, according to WWD in 1968.

When someone foisted a microphone into her hand, Kennedy explained her reluctance with candor. “This is my first day speaking so I confess that I’m a little hesitant. In 1960, Bobby sent me to Kentucky, Utah, California, Oregon, Virginia…and we didn’t win a single one of those states,” as reported by WWD in 1968.

Making one of her early appearances for her husband, Kennedy commented about how the worst thing about the campaign trail was “seeing the strain it puts on him. But the pleasure is seeing him and how the crowds react to him.” Praising his qualities of character, courage and conviction, she described him as “creative, intelligent, imaginative and someone who sees problems as they are.”

But she also understood why people call him ruthless. “It’s his single-mindedness. He has some enormous persistence in pursuing justice, you know, like in the case of Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the powerful Teamsters union.” (In 1957, as the lead counsel for the Senate select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, Robert F. Kennedy led the investigation and a series of public hearings into corruption in the trade union movement.)

Decades later she was said to have used that same pluck to drop a suggestion into J. Edgar Hoover’s personal suggestion box — “Parker for F.B.I. director.” That was after Hoover had adamantly opposed her husband, and one of his diehard supporters, William Parker, who was then Los Angeles Police Department’s chief.

The 5-foot, 4-inch tall political wife wore a size 9 dress, loved iced tea, cottage cheese, hot dogs and chef’s salads, and frequently attended early morning Catholic masses even on the campaign trail. Not inclined to talk fashion, as was once the topic of most interviews with candidates’ wives, Kennedy favored wrinkle-free and repeat choices like an Ungaro lime green dress and jacket from Bonwit Teller. Dresses with coats were her preferred combination, but label-consciousness was not her thing. “I bought a variety of designers,” she told WWD in 1968. [It became known that she wore designs by Richard Tam, Dominick Avellino and Pierre Cardin.]

In 1973 to drum up interest in the Robert F. Kennedy Pro-Celebrity Tennis Tournament, which was being held in Forest Hills, Kennedy played tennis against actor Dustin Hoffman in a makeshift court that had been set up in the plaza outside of the Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan. Sportscaster Howard Cosell told the 200 spectators that Hoffman’s game “is much stronger since he left Anne Bancroft,” an apparent reference to “The Graduate.”

Ellen Sweeney, a former Celanese executive who met Kennedy in 1992, recalled Thursday how she had dropped by the company’s New York City offices unexpectedly in 2000. After Kennedy said she was “starving,” the pair helped themselves — for her — to the steak that had just been prepared for the board members’ luncheon. “Ethel sat on the couch in my office enjoying the feast. One by one, the board members from many places all over the world would pass by my office, see her and look puzzled. One called me out into the hall and asked if the woman was an Ethel Kennedy imposter,” Sweeney said, “She got such a kick out of it. Finally she said to one person, ‘I’m Ethel Kennedy and I’m SO hungry.’ We would laugh and laugh. She loved being mischievous. She was alway fun. Not sure that anyone ever realized it was actually Ethel.”

Kennedy is survived by her daughters Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy Hill, Mary Kerry Kennedy and Rory Kennedy Bailey, and her sons Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Christopher George Kennedy, Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy and Douglas Harriman Kennedy, as well as multiple grandchildren.