JFK’s Brother’s Marriage With Ethel Skakel Was Far Worse Than Anyone Knew

Ethel Skakel was born April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of George Skakel Sr., who built Great Lakes Carbon into one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

By 1936, the family lived in a 31-room manor in Greenwich, Connecticut. She came from real wealth of her own before she ever married into the Kennedys.

She met Robert Kennedy on a family ski trip to Quebec in 1945, when she was 17 — though at the time, he was involved with her older sister, Patricia.

That relationship ended, and Robert and Ethel began seeing each other; they married on June 17, 1950, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenwich.

What followed was eleven children in seventeen years, born roughly every eighteen months without interruption: Kathleen (1951), Joseph (1952), Robert Jr.

(1954), David (1955), Courtney (1956), Michael (1958), Kerry (1959), Christopher (1963), Max (1965), Douglas (1967), and Rory, born in December 1968, six months after her father’s assassination.

In 1956, the family purchased Hickory Hill, a thirteen-bedroom Virginia estate, from Robert’s brother John and sister-in-law Jacqueline.

By the accounts of biographer C. David Heymann and others, it quickly became the actual social center of Kennedy-era Washington — home to enormous, frequently unannounced gatherings that Ethel managed largely on her own.

Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach recalled Robert calling at the last minute to say he was bringing ten or twenty people for lunch, adding plainly, “I don’t know how Ethel tolerated it, frankly.”

Loss arrived early and repeatedly. In October 1955, both of Ethel’s parents died when their private plane crashed near Union City, Oklahoma; she had four children under five at the time, with a fifth on the way.

In January 1966, her brother George Jr. Died in a separate plane crash — three members of her immediate family lost to aviation accidents within roughly a decade, none of which appears to have visibly slowed the pace of her household or public responsibilities.

November 22, 1963, changed the family in a different way. Robert Kennedy learned of his brother’s assassination by phone at Hickory Hill and, by multiple documented accounts, fell into a prolonged, visible depression — described by biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

And others as a man stooped by grief, often silent, spending long periods staring out windows or walking alone in the Virginia woods.

Schlesinger’s 1978 biography credits Ethel specifically with providing the “reassurance and security” that helped bring Robert back from that period, describing her support as unquestioning and unstinted — while she continued running a large household with young children throughout.

By 1968, Robert Kennedy was running for president. Ethel, three months pregnant, campaigned actively alongside him, including through the chaotic weeks following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April.

On the night of June 4, after winning the California primary, Robert Kennedy addressed supporters at the Ambassador Hotel with Ethel beside him on stage.

Minutes later, walking through the hotel’s kitchen pantry, he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan. Ethel was not present in the pantry itself but reached him quickly; contemporaneous photographs show her kneeling beside him on the floor, composed, asking the crowd to step back and give him air.

He died the following morning at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan. What followed diverged sharply from a typical mourning period.

Within weeks, Ethel founded what became the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, an institution still operating today.

She never remarried — her Catholic faith, by her own repeated public statements, made that impossible for her — and she remained at Hickory Hill, raising all eleven children, for another 41 years before selling the property in 2009.

The decades that followed brought a succession of family losses that Ethel absorbed publicly, without documented complaint.

Her son David, who reportedly watched his father’s shooting alone on hotel television as a twelve-year-old, struggled with addiction for years and died of an overdose in a Palm Beach hotel room in April 1984, at 28.

Her son Michael died in a skiing accident in Aspen on New Year’s Eve, 1997, at 39.

Her granddaughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died of an apparent drug overdose at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port in August 2019, at 22.

In spring 2020, her granddaughter Maeve Kennedy McKean and Maeve’s eight-year-old son, Gideon, drowned while canoeing off Chesapeake Bay; both bodies were later recovered.

Separately, her nephew Michael Skakel — son of her late brother George — was convicted in 2002 of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, a case that kept the Skakel family name tied to a homicide trial for nearly two decades before his conviction was vacated in 2018 and charges were ultimately dropped in 2020.

In 2012, Ethel’s daughter Rory — the child born after the assassination who never knew her father — directed a documentary called Ethel, which premiered at Sundance and was later acquired by HBO.

Ethel agreed to be interviewed on camera by her own daughter about a life few people would have found easy to narrate, describing Robert Kennedy as the love of her life.

Asked around that time how she’d endured everything she had, she offered a characteristically simple answer: she’d tried to live in the moment, she said, and she’d been blessed with faith.

President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2014, recognizing decades of work in human rights, environmental advocacy, and poverty reduction — work she had built and sustained from Hickory Hill for nearly half a century, largely without a partner to share it.

Ethel Kennedy died on October 10, 2024, in Boston, at 96, surrounded by her surviving children.

She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside Robert F. Kennedy. Her son, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., wrote publicly afterward that she had spoken with real longing about that reunion for every one of the fifty-six years she outlived him.

What the documented record shows, across all of it — the marriage, the losses, the decades of public work that followed — is a life defined less by any single tragedy than by an extraordinary, sustained capacity to keep functioning through one after another, without ever, as far as the public record shows, publicly asking for anything in return.