Ethel Kennedy, the matriarch of one of the greatest American political families in American history, held an important position in Palm Beach history and society.
Kennedy, the widow of the late Democratic senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, died Thursday, October 10, of complications from a recent stroke. She was 96.
Kennedy, like so many others in the Kennedy family, spent a significant amount of time in Palm Beach.
The first Kennedy to buy a home in Palm Beach was patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who in 1933 purchased a 1920s oceanfront mansion at 1095 N. Ocean Blvd. Several others, including Ethel Kennedy, followed suit.
She rented an oceanfront home at 1356 N. Ocean Blvd for many years. in Palm Beach. Built in 1966, the house has four bedrooms and 3,847 square feet of living space.
“Ethel loves the house,” Outback Steakhouse co-founder Tim Gannon told The Palm Beach Post in 2018. “It’s like a little palace with chandeliers and high ceilings.”
Gannon hosted Kennedy’s 90th birthday party that year, with a guest list that included many friends and family, along with current President Joe Biden and his wife Jill, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Kennedy visited local businesses, including the Prep Shop and Lullabye Shop on Worth Avenue, owned by the late Jesse and Helene Newman. In an article from the Daily News archives, Jesse Newman recalls, “She only bought button-down Oxford shirts and chino pants. She bought them by the car because she had about five boys.”
She attended grand openings, fundraisers and galas. Kennedy was photographed in 2019 while checking out the inventory at the Pierce-Archer art framing store on South County Road. She shopped quietly at markets around the city, wearing tennis white and occasionally flying under the radar.
“I had the opportunity to meet Ethel 30 years ago when I moved next door to her in Hyannis Port, where we formed an instant friendship,” says insurance executive Mark Freitas of Palm Beach, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
“Over the years, I have witnessed firsthand her deep faith and great love for family, friends and country. She will forever be remembered for her warm personality, great sense of humor, kind spirit and unwavering loyalty. Today we have lost a true national treasure. “
“What a wonderful friend Ethel Kennedy was to me and my wonderful husband Brian,” said Eileen Burns, whose late husband was a trustee of the Kennedy Family Foundation.
“I remember the Christmas party singing ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ at the top of their lungs, and the Valentines being slightly outside of central casting. She had a great sense of humor and a great love for her family and friends. May she rest in peace peace in the arms of our Lord and be reunited with her husband.”
Kennedy was interested in the so-called “JFK Bunker,” a Cold War bomb shelter on Peanut Island that was built by the U.S. Navy in 1961 for President John F. Kennedy if he needed protection during a visit to Palm Beach.
In 2012, she toured with her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and several grandchildren through the bunker, The Palm Beach Post reported at the time. She told the bunker’s manager that her family had “always known the bunker was here” but had never been there, The Post reported.
“It sounds funny now, but living like this was the norm. We expected to have fallout shelters,” she reportedly told the manager of her experiences during the Cold War.
Ethel Kennedy was a parishioner at St. Edward Catholic Church, where she regularly attended Mass and which also served as her polling place.
She became a member of the Kennedy family when she married Bobby Kennedy
Ethel Skakel became Kennedy in 1950 when she married Robert F. Kennedy, who would later become U.S. Attorney General in the administration of his brother, former President John F. Kennedy, and later a U.S. Senator from New York.
Robert F. Kennedy died in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968, after being shot by an assassin following a campaign event in Los Angeles.
Asked in a 2014 NBC interview what had inspired her, Kennedy said: “First, Bobby and his life, and of course Jack.”
Yet their deaths were not the only tragedies in her life. Ethel Kennedy’s parents died in a plane crash in 1955, and she lost a brother in a plane crash in 1966.
Kennedy’s son David died of a drug overdose in Palm Beach in 1984, her son Michael died in a skiing accident in 1997, and granddaughter Saorse died of an accidental drug overdose at the Kennedy family estate in 2019 at the age of 22 in Hyannis Port.
Her son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ran for president earlier this year but has since withdrawn from the race and endorsed former President Donald Trump, also a Palm Beach resident.
In 2016, Ethel Kennedy joined hundreds of others in a peaceful march through Palm Beach with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to draw attention to working conditions and wages for farmworkers. She took part in a wheelchair, accompanied by family members.
Lucas Benitez, a farmworker leader and co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said Kennedy was a human rights giant who supported the organization in its early days, when few people knew about or supported the group’s work.
“When we marched to Taco Bell in Washington, D.C., in 2004, Mrs. Kennedy was there. When we fasted outside Publix headquarters in 2014, Mrs. Kennedy was there,” Benitez said. “And when we marched through Palm Beach in both 2016 and 2022, Mrs. Kennedy was there. Every step of our journey, Ethel Kennedy was there.”
Her solidarity proved crucial to the group’s success, he said.
“When she learned of our anti-slavery efforts and selected CIW to receive the 2003 RFK Human Rights Award – International Human Rights Award, she helped bring us from obscurity in rural Immokalee to the halls of the U.S. Senate , where she spoke truth to power. allowing our voice to be heard around the world,” said Benitez.
Survivors include her nine children, 34 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and many nieces and nephews.
Palm Beach Daily News columnist Shannon Donnelly and USA Today contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Ethel Kennedy: Human rights advocate, former Palm Beach resident dies
