Ethel Skakel Kennedy came from a wealthy family in Connecticut, but her life was marred by tragedies. The assassination of her husband was just one, according to UVA Professor Barbara Perry.
“Her parents were killed in a plane crash. Her brother was killed in a separate plane crash. She lost her son David to a drug overdose. Her son Michael – crashed into a tree," Perry says.
One granddaughter also overdosed, and a second drowned along with her young son in the Chesapeake Bay. Yet, Perry observed that Ethel Kennedy was stoic in the face of death – consoled by her faith.
“She told her mother-in-law, when Jack and Bobby died: ‘Don’t worry. Jack and Bobby are together with the other Kennedy family members’ who had already passed on.”
There were happy years in Charlottesville where Bobby attended law school.
"They entertained people like Ralph Bunch – the first Black ambassador of the United States to the U.N. They were very proud of that, and then I would see Ethel Kennedy and her brother-in-law, the Senator from Massachusetts, in the 1980’s in Charlottesville when Ethel’s two sons – first Robert Junior and then Michael – graduated from the law school," Perry recalls. "I always thought it was so poignant that not only Ethel was there for her sons but that Teddy Kennedy was a surrogate father to her 11 fatherless children."
For many years, Ethel and Bobby lived at their estate in Northern Virginia, purchased from John and Jackie Kennedy.
“They thought that was where they would be and have their large family, but Jackie had difficult pregnancies, so they sold it to Robert Kennedy.”
As an intern in Congress, Professor Perry recalls attending a picnic hosted by Ethel Kennedy at Hickory Hill.
“She was very welcoming and warm. I figured she was about 48 when I saw her, and she was out giving it all she had on the tennis court.”
Ethel Kennedy was gracious in the midst of the chaos that comes with 11 children.
“They were racing around with all these dogs, and into the pool and out of the pool, and she just – with a sense of calm but joie de vivre – went about the picnic and talked to people like Art Buchwald, who was the great columnist for the Washington Post and Frank Mankiewicz, who was Bobby’s press secretary, and this was eight years after her husband assassination, and I just thought, ‘What an amazingly strong woman!’”
Sister-in-law Jackie used to disparage Ethel and other Kennedy women who loved sports, calling them rahrah girls, but Perry says Ethel grew into a powerful force in the family.
“Ethel went from a rahrah girl to perhaps the last and strongest of the political matriarchs of the Kennedy family, and certainly she’s the last of the Camelot generation.”
The New York Times reported Ethel Kennedy’s passion for politics was so consuming that she was often said to be “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.”
After her husband’s death she would devote herself to raising the kids, keeping Bobby’s memory alive and working on behalf of the causes he had championed.