CNN
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Ethel Kennedy, the widow of former US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and a longtime human rights activist, died Thursday, her household stated. She was 96.
Former Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy III introduced the information of his grandmother’s passing on X. Ethel Kennedy was hospitalized after struggling a stroke final week.
“Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the former congressman wrote in a post. “She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saoirse; and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie.”
Marrying into one of the United States’ most influential political households, Kennedy supported her husband by means of his profitable Senate marketing campaign and later by means of his 1968 presidential run, which ended along with his assassination months into the marketing campaign.
Her husband was tragically gunned down at a Los Angeles lodge simply after profitable California’s Democratic main. The assault, which got here 5 years after Robert F. Kennedy’s brother, former President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed, left 5 others wounded and rattled a nation that had already been shaken from a number of assassinations; civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed roughly two months earlier than. Photographs of the taking pictures aftermath present Ethel Kennedy, leaning over her husband together with her fingers over his chest as he bled onto the ground. She was three months pregnant together with her youngest daughter, Rory, at the time.
In the many years following her husband’s dying, Ethel Kennedy emerged as an environmental and human rights activist in her personal proper, founding the nonprofit group Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights to champion the causes her late husband pushed for.
Her activism took her throughout the nation and round the world, from marching with Cesar Chavez in help of the Farm Workers motion to confronting Kenyan dictator Daniel Arap Moi together with her daughter, Kerry, by her side in 1989. She obtained the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Barack Obama in 2014. Her activism continued nicely into the final many years of her life. In 2018, Kennedy joined a hunger strike to protest the then-Trump administration’s separation of households at the US-Mexico border.
“Generations of Americans did not toil and sacrifice to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” she stated in a assertion at the time.
Most lately, Ethel Kennedy’s household was caught in political strife, when her oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ran for president in 2024, initially as a Democrat and later as an impartial. Members of the staunchly Democratic household shunned his marketing campaign, calling it “dangerous” and noting their frustration, unhappiness. RFK Jr. suspended his marketing campaign in August and endorsed former President Donald Trump.
Born to a giant household in Chicago in 1928, Ethel Kennedy grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She met Robert F. Kennedy in 1945 by means of his sister, Jean Kennedy, on a ski journey. The couple married in 1950 and had 11 kids.
Ethel Kennedy’s life, like that of many of her relations, was marked by a collection of tragedies. Her father, George Skakel, a rich coal magnate, and mom, Ann Skakel, had been killed in an airplane accident in 1955. Her brother died in a plane crash in 1966. Her son David died in 1984 from an unintentional drug overdose, and one other son Michael died in a snowboarding accident in 1997. Her granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an unintentional overdose in 2019, and one other granddaughter, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, drowned together with her 8-year outdated son in a canoe accident in 2020.
This story has been up to date with further data.
CNN’s Paul LeBlanc and Tom Foreman contributed to this report.
