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

She never remarried after the assassination of her husband, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and she devoted herself to working on behalf of the causes he had championed.

Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a popular and vital force in the Kennedy political dynasty, died on Thursday. She was 96.

Her grandson Joseph P. Kennedy III announced the death on the social media site X, giving the cause as complications of a stroke she had last week. He did not say where she died.

Her death came a little more than six weeks after her third eldest child, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ended his long-shot independent presidential campaign and endorsed former President Donald J. Trump in his bid for re-election.

Mr. Kennedy’s decision to support the Republican nominee and his earlier choice to challenge Mr. Trump’s Democratic rivals, initially President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, caused a painful breach in the Kennedy family, compelling some of his many siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews — heirs to a staunchly Democratic lineage — to speak out in dismay and anger and originally endorse Mr. Biden, a friend of the family, over Mr. Kennedy.

Mrs. Kennedy’s passion for politics was so consuming that she was often said to be “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” Displaying energy and humor, she campaigned tirelessly for her husband and other Kennedys, much of the time while pregnant.

Her 11th and last child was born after her husband’s assassination in 1968 in Los Angeles, as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Mrs. Kennedy never remarried, and her subsequent life was devoted to rearing her children, keeping alive the memory of her husband and working on behalf of the causes he had championed.

Her display of grace and resilience after his murder recalled the equally brave face shown less than five years earlier by her sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Yet the two Kennedy wives, though frequently compared, were mostly studies in contrasts. Where Jackie was regal and seemingly removed from the political fray, Ethel was competitive and dived into the thick of it. Where Jackie was glamorous, Ethel was athletic.

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.)

Mrs. Kennedy persuaded Harry Belafonte to teach guests the twist, a popular dance at the time, and Robert Frost to preside over a poetry contest. (“His were slightly better than the rest,” she said.)

In “Robert Kennedy and His Times” (1978), Mr. Schlesinger wrote that André Malraux, the French author, intellectual and statesman, took it all in and observed, “This house is ‘hellzapopping.’”

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 of condolence to the Kopechne family.

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.

“I don’t see how she has been able to go through this awful experience with so much dignity,” Mrs. King said on the train.

Mrs. Kennedy never had a formal career; her devotion to her husband, their children and his political ambitions was full time. When he was chief counsel for the Senate rackets committee in the 1950s, she attended almost every hearing. She knew the names of journalists’ wives and children and asked about them; when they wrote something she considered unfair, which often seemed to be anything critical, she complained.

“Ethel does not forgive easily,” Frank Mankiewicz, her husband’s former press secretary, said in an interview in 1998.

When her husband wrestled with the idea of running for the Senate from New York in 1964, Mrs. Kennedy pressed him to do so. She told The Daily News that he was being held back only by the worry that his candidacy would divide the Democratic Party. He did run, and he won.

Chicago-Born

Ethel Skakel was born on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of George and Ann (Brannack) Skakel. Her mother was a former teacher who became involved in civic, charitable and religious affairs. Her father started his career as a railway clerk earning $8 a week, then became a coal salesman. He soon found partners and started his own company to sell the coal residue discarded by large mines. He did the same with waste coke from oil refineries, turning another long-ignored product into a form of carbon used by the growing aluminum industry.

Mr. Skakel came out on top in a roller-coaster business career, losing three fortunes along the way but ultimately becoming very rich. Robert Kennedy called him a “tough, moral, self-made man.”

The Skakels rivaled the Kennedys of Massachusetts in wealth. They moved to the East Coast in 1934, when Ethel was 5, because more and more of Mr. Skakel’s business was there. After staying in rented mansions in Monmouth Beach, N.J., and Larchmont and Rye, N.Y., the family settled in Greenwich, Conn., in 1936.

Though Mr. Skakel remained a Protestant, the children were brought up in his wife’s Catholic religion. Their family resembled the Kennedys — not only in size, but also in exuberance. Ethel’s brothers swung from the trees of their estate like Tarzan and shot air rifles at boys who came to see her.

In “The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family” (1994), Laurence Leamer wrote that the Skakels “appeared like the Kennedys blown up to cartoonlike size.”

Mr. Skakel persuaded his wife to educate their daughters at the Greenwich Academy, a private, nondenominational school. Ethel participated in drama and on weekends earned a reputation as an excellent equestrian.

On entering the 11th grade, she transferred to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a five-day-a-week boarding school then in the Bronx (and now in Manhattan). She graduated in 1945.

She next entered Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, which was also run by the Sacred Heart nuns and which was then in Manhattan (it is now in Purchase, N.Y.). Her roommate was Jean Kennedy, Robert’s younger sister. Ethel was formally introduced to Robert Kennedy during a ski weekend at Mont Tremblant in Quebec. Her sister Patricia Skakel was dating him at the time.

Ethel also met Robert’s brother John on that ski trip, and she quickly developed a crush on him. But John was not romantically interested in Ethel, and she began dating Robert after he and her sister had ended their relationship.

Ethel studied Greek, Latin and the classics and wrote her senior thesis on “Why England Slept,” a book by John Kennedy published in 1940 while he was still in college. (She got an A.) Her school yearbook said of her, “Her face is at one moment a picture of utter guilelessness and at the next alive with mischief.”

A famous practical joke came after she and a friend had been snubbed by a member of the Irish equestrian team at the International Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. They sneaked into the stables and painted his horse green.

Ethel seriously considered becoming a nun, but after her graduation in 1949 she accepted Mr. Kennedy’s proposal. They were married at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich on June 17, 1950. She was 22. At the reception, all the bridesmaids were thrown into a pool.

The Boston Globe called the wedding “the prettiest of the year” and noted that the marriage “unites two large fortunes.” The couple honeymooned in Hawaii before settling in Charlottesville, Va., where Mr. Kennedy attended the University of Virginia School of Law.

On July 4, 1951, Mrs. Kennedy gave birth to Kathleen, her first child. She sent a dozen roses to her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, and would again after the birth of each of her children. Some articles and books claimed that she had set out to have more children than Rose Kennedy. Whether the claim was true or not, she did, with 11, surpassing Rose, who had had nine.

The family moved into Hickory Hill in 1956, when Mr. Kennedy worked as a counsel for Senate Democrats. He had bought it from his brother John, who was then a United States senator from Massachusetts. (John Kennedy bought it in 1955 from the widow of Robert H. Jackson, the United States Supreme Court justice, after Mr. Jackson’s death the year before.) Jacqueline Kennedy had planned to raise a family on the estate but had soured on the place after experiencing a stillbirth.

A Taste for Politics

Ethel Kennedy threw herself into her brother-in-law’s campaigns. In 1952, she campaigned late into the evening in Fall River, Mass., for his successful Senate bid, then returned to Boston to give birth before dawn. In the 1960 presidential campaign, she flew everywhere with other Kennedy women on what were called “flying teas,” suppressing a terror of flying that she had developed after family members died in crashes.

During the Kennedy administration, Mrs. Kennedy was named homemaker of the year by the Home Fashion League of Washington. The title came as a shock to friends who knew of her almost complete lack of interest in household chores; she had a dozen or so servants at Hickory Hill. Once, when the family went on a camping trip in rugged Olympic National Park in Washington State, they took along guides, a 40-foot mess tent and portable lavatories.

Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan B. Sirhan just after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died in a hospital at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, his wife at his side.

During his campaign, Mr. Kennedy had been distraught by the news that his son David, 12, had been picked up by the police for throwing rocks at motorists. He told reporters that if he lost the race he would spend more time with his family. “I’ll go home and raise the next generation of Kennedys,” he said.

But Mrs. Kennedy had to do it herself. At first, it was hard to control her rambunctious brood. Later there were divorces, drug arrests and sex scandals — all in the public eye. (A young nephew, Michael Skakel, would be found guilty in 2002 of killing Martha Moxley, a 15-year-old neighbor in Greenwich, in 1975. In a saga that spanned four decades, his conviction was vacated in 2013, reinstated in 2016 and vacated again in 2018.)

There were the deaths of two sons: David died of a drug overdose in 1984, and Michael was killed in 1997 when he crashed into a tree while playing ball with family members as he skied down a slope on Aspen Mountain in Colorado. And a granddaughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died at 22 after an apparent overdose at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., in 2019.

But most of her children found success — in politics, business, filmmaking, environmental advocacy and other fields. Robert Jr., an environmental lawyer, announced his presidential bid, initially for the Democratic nomination, in April 2023 and was later condemned, including by members of his family, for suggesting that the coronavirus had been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. (Abandoning his try for the nomination, he announced his independent run that October.)

In addition to him and her grandson Joseph, Mrs. Kennedy is survived by four daughters, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Courtney Kennedy Hill; Kerry Kennedy, a human rights advocate and the author of “Speak Truth to Power,” who was previously married to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York; and Rory Kennedy, the youngest child, a documentary filmmaker; four other sons, Joseph P. Kennedy II, a former U.S. representative from Massachusetts; Christopher, the chairman of Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises Inc.; Max, an author and a founder of an urban ecology program in Boston; and Douglas, a Fox News Channel correspondent; and dozens of other grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In October 2012, HBO presented “Ethel,” a documentary that Rory Kennedy made about her mother’s life, in which Mrs. Kennedy gave her first interviews in more than 20 years. “Introspection, I hate it!” she said.

Though she never remarried, Mrs. Kennedy was occasionally seen in the company of men, including Hugh L. Carey, the former governor of New York. But she denied that these were romantic relationships. “How could I possibly do that with Bobby looking down from heaven?” she said in an interview with People magazine in 1991. “That would be adultery.”

In 2021, in a rare public statement, Mrs. Kennedy voiced her opposition to releasing Mr. Sirhan from prison after he had been recommended for parole by a California parole committee.

“Our family and our country suffered an unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man,” she wrote. “We believe in the gentleness that spared his life, but in taming his act of violence, he should not have the opportunity to terrorize again.”

Parole was denied then and again this year, in August.

Mrs. Kennedy carried on her husband’s efforts to promote social justice. Two weeks after his death, she sent a telegram to Coretta Scott King supporting the Poor People’s March on Washington. Mrs. King read it to the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mrs. Kennedy also lent her name and support to the United Farm Workers union and founded the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center, now known as Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a nonprofit that gives awards in human rights and for books and journalism. She ran a tennis tournament to support human rights and devoted time to democracy in Kenya, conservation, gun control and aid for the mentally disabled.

Her humanitarianism had long been imbued in her. The day after her husband was killed, she said, “We’re placed on the earth and somehow given a sense of responsibility to give life and love and help to others.”