Kerry Kennedy has a very simple answer when asked why she decided to write a book about her mother, Ethel Kennedy. “Well, I loved her,” says the author and activist, “and I think there’s an extraordinary story to tell.”
Kennedy’s mother, born Ethel Skakel in 1928, came from a family of modest means — her father only had a sixth-grade education — that became extremely wealthy during her early childhood. When the Skakels moved to Greenwich, Conn., Kennedy says, “it was like the Beverly Hillbillies. They never fit in. And they were comfortable with that.”
In “Ethel Kennedy: The Extraordinary Life and Bold Legacy” (HarperOne), Kennedy chronicles her mother’s long life from that boisterous, if privileged, childhood through her marriage to Robert F. Kennedy, to her years in the spotlight as a political wife, to the era after her husband’s assassination in 1968, which thrust Ethel into a new role as protector of the family legacy and founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. When she died in 2024, Presidents Biden, Obama, and Clinton delivered eulogies.
Kerry Kennedy was just 8 when her father was killed. Her mother, then 40, was pregnant with her 11th child. “She didn’t pull the covers over her head. She got up, took the kids to school, ran the carpools, played monopoly with us, played football with us, helped us say our prayers,” Kennedy says.
“I think her faith informed how she walked through the world with belief in a loving and forgiving God,” says Kennedy. “She had a full connection to the almighty and a vision of heaven that was so concrete that when I was a kid, I always sat in an airplane next to the window because I believed I could see heaven in the clouds.”
The research Kennedy undertook to write her mother’s life story included a trove of letters, including several from her grandmother (and Ethel’s formidable mother-in-law) Rose Kennedy. And there was a long manuscript that Ethel herself had written, a potential memoir project that she never finished. “It was great because I got to use it throughout the book,” says Kennedy. “I really wanted people to hear my mother’s voice.”
It’s a voice she thinks today’s readers could learn a lot from. For one thing, Kennedy says, “she created a real partnership with her husband.” And even after his death, with 11 children to raise, “she became one of the most empowered women of her day. She just thought she could do anything. And we need to get rid of that voice in our heads that says you can’t.”
Kerry Kennedy will read at 6 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 19, at the Brattle Theatre.
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe’s Books section. You can reach her at kate.tuttle@globe.com