On April 11, 2018, Ethel Kennedy turned ninety. All her children and many of her grandchildren celebrated the milestone with a party a month later in Palm Beach, Florida, where she resides for about half the year (the other half being spent at her home at the Kennedy compound). As expected, during the festivities there was no shortage of robust, Kennedy-esque speeches from some of Ethel’s grown children, such as Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr. The grandchildren—more than thirty—also came forth with homemade cards and other demonstrations of great affection for “Grandma.”
Ethel’s life has been a long and incredible journey full of breathtaking highs and crushing lows, so much of it entwined with rich and important American history. She remains, even at her advanced age, a vital woman, still eager to serve. “In recent years, my mother has made more than a dozen human rights pilgrimages to deliver food and medical supplies, repatriate refugees, afflict the tyrannical, and comfort the afflicted,” Bobby Kennedy wrote in 2018. “By standing up to bigotry, corporate misbehavior, and confronting cowardly or venal public officials, whether on the left or the right, she has won freedom for prisoners of conscience all over the world.” Her daughter Kerry has noted of her mother’s most recent humanitarian efforts: “She’s gone on human rights delegations to Namibia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Haiti, Hungary, Kenya, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Poland, and South Africa.”
In June, Ethel took part in a symbolic one-day hunger strike organized by the RFK Human Rights Center protesting the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border to Mexico. Almost fifty other members of the Kennedy family participated, including Ethel’s daughter Kerry and her grandson Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy III. “Generations of Americans did not toil and sacrifice to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” she said.
“So many people in our family are involved in social justice work, and it’s always attributed to my father, which he deserves,” Kerry notes. “But the truth is he died when we were very, very young, so that really comes from my mother. Those are her values. Those are the aspects of Daddy that she chose to have us remember and think about.”
Even though Ethel remains an activist for social justice and human rights, it’s her influence over the entire Kennedy family that best defines her. She remains the head of the dynasty with more than one hundred family members. She once called Ted the “keeper of the castle,” a title that most certainly now defines her. President Barack Obama was sure to point out as much back in 2014, when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom:
… we give thanks to a person whose love for her family is matched by her devotion to her nation. To most Americans, Ethel Kennedy is known as a wife, mother, and grandma. And in many ways, it’s through these roles that she’s made her mark on history. As Bobby Kennedy’s partner in life, she shared his commitment to justice. After his death, she continued their work through the center she created in his name, celebrating activists and journalists and educating people around the world about threats to human liberty. On urgent human rights issues of our time—from juvenile justice to environmental destruction—Ethel has been a force for change in her quiet, flashy—unflashy, unstoppable way. As her family will tell you, and they basically occupy this half of the room, you don’t mess with Ethel.
That same year, Ethel went on camera, along with her son Max and many young members of the Kennedy’s fourth generation, to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Probably nothing demonstrates more how much things have changed in her world than seeing the family’s redoubtable matriarch—a woman for whom people would jump to their feet when she entered a room—raise a plastic bucket over her head and drench herself with freezing-cold water.
The day after her birthday, Ethel’s old friend Sister Pauline Joseph called to extend her congratulations. Though she’d been retired for the last twenty years, she’d stayed in touch with Ethel. She found her in an unusually contemplative mood.
Ethel noted that even though she has few of the infirmities of the aged, she does use a wheelchair from time to time. She couldn’t help but remember when Joseph and Rose Kennedy were similarly confined. Joe lived to be eighty-one, his storied life interrupted by and ultimately ended by a stroke. Rose, despite her own strokes, lived to be 104. “I’m sure that’s not for me, though,” Ethel said of Rose’s longevity. “I’ll be ready to go sooner than that.”
In a long-ranging conversation that seemed like a meditation on her life, Ethel had to admit to certain regrets. This was unusual for her; she’s definitely not a woman given to much introspection, preferring to live her life in the moment. “While I’ve accepted who I was as a mother,” Ethel told the nun, “it’s sometimes harder to accept who I wasn’t.”
She said that she still struggles with the reasons she wasn’t more equipped to handle David’s and Michael’s problems. However, she now understands how uninformed she and everyone else in the family were about the realities of addiction. She grapples with the senselessness of John’s airplane crash, too. “However, she’s comforted knowing he’s with Jack and Jackie in heaven,” said the nun. “She feels the same about David and Michael being with Bobby.”
“I do think about the girls a lot,” Ethel said. She then spoke a little about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Mary Richardson Kennedy. Both young women had come into the family with such excitement and hope for the future but then found themselves so completely disillusioned because, as Ethel aptly put it, “being a Kennedy isn’t for the faint of heart.” The one question that still haunts her about Carolyn all these years later, she said, was “Why in the world did she have to get on that plane?”
In the end, Ethel said, she now understood that almost everything that had happened to her generation of Kennedys as well as to the next one was in one way or the other intrinsically tied to the murders of Bobby and Jack. She’d spent years believing that blaming their deaths for subsequent misfortunes was a way to excuse bad behavior. Now, at ninety, she said she finally understood that “you just don’t get over something like that. People think you move on, but guess what? You don’t. Then again,” she said, “nobody gets a free ride in this world. Pain is a part of life. You can’t escape it.” She also said that not a day goes by when she doesn’t think about all Bobby and Jack missed of seeing the generation that followed their own, and even the one after that. She still prays on her knees every day for both brothers, as well as for Ted, Jackie, Eunice, Sarge, and everyone else who has passed. “Maybe they’re all sitting around in heaven agreeing that I could’ve handled a few things differently, though,” Ethel concluded.
“Permission to speak freely?” Sister Pauline Joseph asked, just as she’d always done over the years before becoming candid. Ethel said, of course. The nun began, “Please have no regrets about—” But Ethel interrupted her, saying she didn’t have any, “not a one.”
“You were a good mother, Mrs. Kennedy,” continued her friend. “You loved your children with everything you—”
Ethel cut her off again. “I know that,” she said, seeming a little annoyed. Irascible as ever, she would never change.
“She then asked how long we’ve known each other,” recalled Sister Pauline Joseph. “I had to really think about that one. ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Going on sixty years, I would imagine. Can you believe it, Mrs. Kennedy?’”
According to the nun, Ethel was quiet for a moment, maybe pondering the passing of so much shared history. “We sure have had our moments, haven’t we?” she finally asked. “And with that being the case,” she continued, “don’t you think it’s time to start calling me … Ethel? After all, we’re not getting any younger, are we?”
“That’s certainly food for thought,” said Sister Pauline Joseph, surprised. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she thought better of it: “Okay, well, goodbye for now … Mrs. Kennedy.”
Ethel had to laugh. “Yes, Sister,” she said as she hung up. “Goodbye for now.”