Ethel Kennedy: ‘Rah-Rah Girl’ Turned Political Matriarch | Opinion

As a college intern on Capitol Hill during the nation’s Bicentennial, every day seemed historic as I worked for my senator and caught a virulent case of Potomac Fever. One day I ran into Elizabeth Taylor, exiting the Senate chamber on the arm of her then-husband, Sen. John Warner of Virginia; another time I encountered former Vice President Hubert Humphrey on the Capitol subway; and later that summer I spied Ben Bradlee (former Newsweek bureau chief and later played by Jason Robards in the role of executive editor for The Washington Post in All the President’s Men), and Carl Bernstein as I toured the Post’s news room.
But no doubt my most lasting memory of that magical 1976 summer was meeting Ethel Kennedy when I attended a picnic she hosted at her famous estate, Hickory Hill, in McLean Virginia. Hearing of her passing this week, I flashed back to that memorable day nearly 50 years ago.
Ethel, widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was a bundle of energy at age 48, even after bearing 11 children. I watched her apply the iconic Kennedy competitiveness on her tennis court, chat with columnist Art Buchwald and her husband’s press secretary Frank Mankiewicz on the patio, and let her youngest children race around the pool and yard, followed by a pack of pet canines. I had visions of Camelot’s apotheosis with touch football games on the lawn and parties where JFK’s advisor Arthur Schlesinger ended up fully clothed in the pool.
Ethel kindly welcomed me as I told her of my admiration for her and her family. As a University of Virginia grad student a decade later, I would spot Ethel and brother-in-law Sen. Edward Kennedy (surrogate father to her brood) on campus when they came to see her sons Robert Jr. and Michael graduate from the same law school their father and uncle Teddy had attended.
By the time the 50th anniversary of her husband’s death was commemorated in 2018, Ethel used a wheelchair, but I found her speaking animatedly with the guests at the Irish ambassador’s house.
In the intervening years, I had worked with her eldest child, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Robert Jr., a controversial presidential candidate; and their sister Kerry, director of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a center founded by their mother. Kathleen and Kerry were joys to collaborate with; RFK Jr. less so. He had taken too seriously an adage he said his mother had imparted to him: “If you’re obeying all the rules, you’re missing all the fun!” No wonder sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy called Bobby’s sisters and Ethel, so different from her sophisticated persona,”the rah-rah girls.”
Their cheerleading joie de vivre, was a definite plus when campaigning with Robert Kennedy for Senate in 1964 and president four years later. Yet, as with Jackie, the joy turned to tragedy. Who could forget Ethel, pregnant with their 11th child, bending over RFK as he lay dying from an assassin’s bullet on the pantry floor of LA’s Ambassador Hotel or shouting for the crowd to stand back and give him air. Or replicating her sister-in-law’s stoicism that Jackie had displayed after President Kennedy’s assassination. As mother-in-law Rose Kennedy grimly noted, “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years. Who could believe that such a thing could happen to the same family. If I had read it in fiction, I would have said it was incredible.”
By coincidence, in 2023 I returned to Hickory Hill, which Ethel had sold and decamped to the family compound on Cape Cod, to attend a dinner hosted by its current owner who has completely remodeled the home and estate after years of the Kennedys’ rambunctious residency.
Ethel, a devout Catholic who received daily communion, fervently believed that the departed are reunited with loved ones in Heaven. Here’s hoping she is organizing a lively game of touch football with Bobby and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren whose premature losses Ethel endured as the last and perhaps toughest matriarch of the Kennedys’ Camelot generation.
Dr. Barbara A. Perry, a Kennedy biographer, is the J. Wilson Newman Professor and Co-Chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at UVA’s Miller Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.