Ethel Kennedy, I remember you
Wife, mother, widowed from the assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, she had also been sister-in-law of John F. Kennedy, the assassinated president. Ethel Skakel Kennedy’s passing triggered a rush of personal memories where she enabled me to gain unique access to the private retreat of her late husband’s repository of works by Aeschylus and Sophocles, memories, and political impulses. It is known that Bobby agonized whether to carry the Camelot torch and brace for looming danger.
Scions of American political nobility, fame, wealth, power, connections at the highest levels, some of the Kennedy men left a trail of unsavory crumbs leading back to the patriarch. Amidst unspeakable privilege, there were scandals tainting (some say dooming) the carefully crafted handsome image of the perfect political family. The most recent stumbling, Bobby Jr’s. Once a respected environmental lawyer, he bumbled his race to the presidency, which tailspun with outlandish ideas and behaviors. He stained the Kennedy name. He thereby ignited his clan’s ire against him when he switched sides to the Republican Party, openly endorsing Donald Trump’s corrupt presidential campaign. The clan hunkered down. His siblings saved face by stifling Bobby Jr’s betrayal through op-ed pieces in major newspapers.
The Kennedys have also been haunted by a long rosary of tragedies stunning the world, triggering worldwide sympathy.
Ethel, probably one of the most discreet and unknown members of the Kennedy family, protectively private, pursued social causes and programs in the name of her husband’s stunted humanist vision. She launched the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
Service… that was the energy and the calling that touched me in my early teens when I briefly met Bobby Kennedy in Chile during a trip he made to South America. The media buzz announcing his arrival and the power of his persona contributed to inspiring me to study international politics, which decades later landed me at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. While I was a student there, I met several of Bobby’s kids: Christopher, Max, and a younger Douglas, and my few exchanged hellos when seeing little Rory.
Before Georgetown, living in Los Angeles, I had visited the site where Bobby Kennedy was shot, the very spot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I went there with my younger brother Max (now a medical doctor for the poor in California). We knelt on that kitchen floor and prayed for his soul and for the future of the world Bobby had envisioned.
Years later, once a student at Georgetown (1981-1984), I was invited to go to the Kennedy country house on Hickory Hill, Virginia, where I would tutor Max, one of Bobby and Ethel’s youngest children, in Spanish. Those tutorials became a friendship and we would ride in the family Cadillac, license plate “Kennedy,” on Georgetown roads, cobblestone streets, laughing and chatting and yelling our youthful joy, listening to the radio music on winter days, the convertible’s top always down even when drizzling, crossing spaces like the Key Bridge over the Potomac.
His energy radiated, floating in that heady atmosphere. I was fully aware of what a privilege it was to be in the man’s sanctuary of thought
It was at Hickory Hill where one day in the fall of 1982 I was asked to wait for my lesson with Max in their father’s study. I found myself alone in the late senator’s thinking cave. Photographs of national figures were displayed. Notes in his own handwriting were still strewn on the desk, after all those years, possibly left untouched. His energy radiated, floating in that heady atmosphere. I was fully aware of what a privilege it was to be in the man’s sanctuary of thought. I was there alone communing with his private universe. I could ask for no higher honor to be inducted from that lofty setting to pursue public service.
Rory, now a celebrated independent documentary filmmaker, was a little girl at the time and I would see her with her older siblings. Ethel was pregnant with her, their 11th child, when her father was assassinated. Decades later after not staying in touch, I ran into her in Hollywood, where I lived, at the premiere of one of her documentary films on human rights attempting to heal the damage done by US foreign policy. She spotted me in the audience and exclaimed, “Hey, Bill, nice to see you again!”
We met once more in Los Angeles for the premier of “Ethel,” her film about her mother.
I must return to the 1980s. I was attending the first event of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall when Senator Ted Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy launched the event. Bobby’s bronze bust was center stage. It now appears in the Oval Office at the White House, behind every president of the United States when addressing the nation.
One can only imagine what multigenerational trauma their family reunions relived… my respects and tenderness go to each and all of them if only my arms could embrace them.
Ethel conquered enormous emotional obstacles after suffering wrenching personal losses and her clan’s varying shades of moral crises. She not only attempted to implement her deceased husband’s vision of social justice, but became a leading light in her own right, culminating with President Barack Obama’s Medal of Honor. She has passed away at a time when we might be on the edge of a third world war and horrific upheavals worldwide. It is hoped that a few of Bobby and Ethel’s children and relatives will engage with these challenges, continue to embrace humanitarian service and thereby honor the lofty legacy associated with the much beloved Kennedy name.
William Alexander Yankes, PhD, Latin American dictatorship literature, University of California, Irvine. He is the author of “Chile: un Cautiverio feliz?: estudio critico del manuscrito del siglo XVII Cautiverio feliz de Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan” (Ocho Libros Editores, 2013), a journalist and filmmaker, and resides on an island in Greece with his wife Katherine.
