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

As a university intern on Capitol Hill throughout the nation’s Bicentennial, day-after-day appeared historic as I labored for my senator and caught a virulent case of Potomac Fever. Sooner or later I bumped into Elizabeth Taylor, exiting the Senate chamber on the arm of her then-husband, Sen. John Warner of Virginia; one other time I encountered former Vice President Hubert Humphrey on the Capitol subway; and later that summer time I spied Ben Bradlee (former Newsweek bureau chief and later performed by Jason Robards within the position of govt editor for The Washington Publish in All of the President’s Males), and Carl Bernstein as I toured the Publish‘s information room.

However little question my most lasting reminiscence of that magical 1976 summer time was assembly Ethel Kennedy after I attended a picnic she hosted at her well-known property, Hickory Hill, in McLean Virginia. Listening to of her passing this week, I flashed again to that memorable day almost 50 years in the past.

Ethel, widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was a bundle of power at age 48, even after bearing 11 youngsters. I watched her apply the long-lasting Kennedy competitiveness on her tennis court docket, chat with columnist Artwork Buchwald and her husband’s press secretary Frank Mankiewicz on the patio, and let her youngest youngsters race across the pool and yard, adopted by a pack of pet canines. I had visions of Camelot’s apotheosis with contact soccer video games on the garden and events the place JFK’s advisor Arthur Schlesinger ended up absolutely clothed within the pool.

Ethel kindly welcomed me as I advised her of my admiration for her and her household. As a College of Virginia grad pupil a decade later, I might spot Ethel and brother-in-law Sen. Edward Kennedy (surrogate father to her brood) on campus once they got here to see her sons Robert Jr. and Michael graduate from the identical regulation college their father and uncle Teddy had attended.

By the point the fiftieth anniversary of her husband’s demise was commemorated in 2018, Ethel used a wheelchair, however I discovered her talking animatedly with the company on the Irish ambassador’s home.

Within the intervening years, I had labored together with her eldest youngster, 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 middle based by their mom. Kathleen and Kerry have been joys to collaborate with; RFK Jr. much less so. He had taken too significantly an adage he mentioned his mom had imparted to him: “If you happen to’re obeying all the principles, you are lacking all of the enjoyable!” No marvel sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy referred to as Bobby’s sisters and Ethel, so completely different from her subtle persona,”the rah-rah ladies.”

Their cheerleading joie de vivre, was a particular plus when campaigning with Robert Kennedy for Senate in 1964 and president 4 years later. But, as with Jackie, the enjoyment turned to tragedy. Who might overlook Ethel, pregnant with their eleventh youngster, bending over RFK as he lay dying from an murderer’s bullet on the pantry ground of LA’s Ambassador Resort or shouting for the group to face again and provides 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 famous, “It appeared unimaginable that the identical form of catastrophe might befall our household twice in 5 years. Who might consider that such a factor might occur to the identical household. If I had learn it in fiction, I might have mentioned it was unbelievable.”

By coincidence, in 2023 I returned to Hickory Hill, which Ethel had bought and decamped to the household compound on Cape Cod, to attend a dinner hosted by its present proprietor who has utterly transformed the house and property after years of the Kennedys’ rambunctious residency.

Ethel, a religious Catholic who obtained every day communion, fervently believed that the departed are reunited with family members in Heaven. This is hoping she is organizing a vigorous recreation of contact soccer with Bobby and their youngsters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren whose untimely losses Ethel endured because the final and maybe hardest matriarch of the Kennedys’ Camelot era.

Dr. Barbara A. Perry, a Kennedy biographer, is the J. Wilson Newman Professor and Co-Chair of the Presidential Oral Historical past Program at UVA’s Miller Middle.

The views expressed on this article are the author’s personal.