Ethel Kennedy Was Much Nastier Than You Thought

In December 1945, at a family ski trip to Mont Tremblant, Quebec, 17-year-old Ethel Skakel watched Robert Kennedy pay attention to someone else.

Her older sister, Patricia — prettier by most contemporary accounts, calmer by all of them — had his interest, and would keep it for roughly two years.

Ethel spent that stretch making herself impossible to overlook in every room she entered, and easy to overlook as anything more than the little sister.

Only when Bobby and Pat drifted apart did he turn to her. She came from real money and considerably less order than the Kennedys.

Her father, George Skakel, built Great Lakes Carbon into one of the largest privately held companies in America after starting as a railroad clerk, and raised seven children in a 31-room Greenwich, Connecticut manor with, by most accounts, minimal supervision — a household marked by heavy drinking and general chaos.

Her mother was a devout Catholic who instilled two unbending rules in her daughters: faith wasn’t up for discussion, and neither was anything embarrassing that happened at home.

Those rules governed the rest of Ethel’s life. Before Bobby ever proposed, Ethel had effectively studied the Kennedy family.

In 1946, still hoping to be noticed, she volunteered on Jack Kennedy’s first congressional campaign, going door to door in Boston for a family she hadn’t yet joined.

At Manhattanville College, she wrote her senior thesis on Jack’s book Why England Slept. They became engaged in February 1950 and married that June at St. Mary’s Church in Greenwich, in a wedding the Boston Globe described bluntly as the union of two large fortunes — an event that, according to several biographers, previewed the next four decades with real precision: disciplined and politically choreographed on the Kennedy side, chaotic on the Skakel side, with Ethel’s brothers reportedly turning the reception into a drunken spectacle that embarrassed the bride.

From the early 1950s onward, Ethel oriented her entire life toward the Kennedys and largely away from her own family.

She had eleven children between 1951 and 1968 — roughly one every eighteen months — while managing Hickory Hill, the thirteen-bedroom Virginia estate she and Bobby purchased from Jack and Jackie following Jackie’s stillbirth in the mid-1950s.

The household became a genuine media phenomenon: horses, dogs, a menagerie that reportedly once included a sea lion, cabinet officials debating philosophy on the lawn, and the frequently retold story of historian Arthur Schlesinger fully clothed in the swimming pool.

Ethel was cast publicly as the opposite of Jackie — unpretentious, fertile, endlessly energetic — while Bobby, occupied for years by the Senate’s McClellan hearings, the 1960 campaign, and then the Justice Department, was rarely actually home.

Loss struck her own family repeatedly and almost never entered her public story. Her parents died in a plane crash in October 1955.

Her brother George died in a similar crash eleven years later. She absorbed each loss privately, a pattern consistent with the family rule that difficult things simply weren’t discussed outside the house.

By 1968, according to biographer Evan Thomas, Ethel wasn’t merely supportive of Bobby’s presidential run against a sitting president of his own party — she was among the most consistent voices pushing him toward it.

She campaigned visibly pregnant that spring, and for a few months, by most accounts, the marriage genuinely resembled the unified partnership the public myth had always claimed.

It lasted eleven weeks. On June 4, 1968, hours after pulling their twelve-year-old son David from a dangerous undertow at Malibu, Bobby won the California primary.

Minutes after his victory speech, walking through a service corridor at the Ambassador Hotel, he was shot.

Ethel, three months pregnant, was steps behind him. Upstairs in the same hotel, David watched the shooting live on television, alone.

Bobby died the following day. Six months later, Ethel gave birth to their eleventh child, a daughter, whose father had been dead for half a year.

What followed diverged from what America expected. Rather than retreating from public life, Ethel helped establish what became Robert F.

Kennedy Human Rights, positioning herself as the permanent keeper of his causes and remaining a visible public figure for decades.

Privately, according to her sons’ later interviews with biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, the assassination became essentially unspeakable inside the family — grief went underground the same way it always had in the Skakel household.

Two of her sons died young: David of a drug overdose in 1984 at 28, and Michael in a skiing accident in 1997.

Ethel buried both, along with her parents, a brother, and her husband, with the same public composure and private silence that defined her entire life.

She never remarried across fifty-six years of widowhood, telling People magazine in 1991 that doing so would amount to adultery, given that Bobby was watching from heaven.

It’s a line that can be read as pure devotion, or as the final form of a bargain struck decades earlier — she had traded her own identity for the Kennedy name, and widowhood was the one office that name still conferred.

Less widely known: after the assassination, the National Archives allowed Ethel — not the federal government — to retain control of her husband’s papers.

For more than four decades, extensive material covering Robert Kennedy’s years at the center of American power remained under family authority at the JFK Presidential Library, with historians required to request access individually.

Writers the family trusted, like Schlesinger, were granted material relatively easily; others waited years or worked without it.

Substantial public releases didn’t begin until around 2012. That control extended to softer representations of her story as well — the 2012 documentary Ethel, made by her daughter Rory (born after the assassination) with Ethel’s full cooperation, is widely considered the definitive filmed account of her life, and in it, when the conversation turns to June 1968, the then-83-year-old Ethel simply declines to discuss it on camera, in her own daughter’s film.

The refusal made the final cut. In November 2014, President Obama placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck in a televised East Room ceremony.

She died in Boston in October 2024 at 96, eulogized by three presidents. The woman most remembered for a single moment of visible devastation on a hotel floor spent the following five decades doing something considerably less passive: deciding, with real and lasting authority, exactly which version of that marriage — and that assassination, and that family — the rest of the world would ever be allowed to see.