A great lady died yesterday.
Ethel Kennedy was 96 years old and outlived her husband by 58 years. She outlived some of her children and some of her grandchildren and lived to be the matriarch of a great political family.
She should have been a First Lady, and indeed she might have been if her husband, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, hadn’t been murdered in Los Angeles after winning the 1968 California primary. Bobby’s older brother John once said that no political assassination ever changed history, but when Sirhan Sirhan killed the younger Kennedy, that might have been an exception.
Imagine the 1968 election as another Kennedy-Nixon contest. Imagine Kennedy winning and ending the Vietnam War in 1969. Imagine no Watergate scandal.
All that is just speculation, of course. What is true is that in that same year, JFK’s widow Jacqueline shocked America by marrying Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Whether it was connected or not, Ethel Kennedy said that same year that she would never remarry and she never did.
She raised her and Bobby’s 11 children, including one who was born six months after he died.
She did what she could to continue his efforts in human rights and civil rights and she saw several of her children elected to public office. She continued to live at their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Va., until 2010, when she sold it and moved to her house in the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass.
I never knew until today that Hickory Hill was originally owned by John Kennedy or that he and Bobby swapped houses, with JFK moving to his younger brother’s Georgetown house and RFK moving to McLean.
The year 1972 was not one of my most memorable, but there is one memory that stands out. I was volunteering in the evenings for the McGovern campaign, and I had the opportunity to purchase tickets to a fundraiser to be held at Hickory Hill.
The event featured John Denver singing a few songs along with Bill and Taffy Danoff, who four years later would become (in)famous for the No. 1 hit “Afternoon Delight.” I didn’t get to go inside the house, but it was still fascinating to see where Bobby Kennedy had lived and where his widow and children still lived.
I don’t recall if Ethel was there that night, but I have certainly thought about her in recent years. Imagine loving someone and having 11 children with them. Then imagine living more than 56 years without them.
I don’t know what happens after death, if there’s a meeting in the clouds like Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour in “Somewhere in Time.” But if there is, if Bobby and Ethel meet again in the afterlife, I hope he will thank her.
After all, she kept the faith.